52 Countries in 52 Weeks, Chapter 18: Bosnia and Herzegovina

In Which I Take A Bit Of A Detour From The Trip Physically, And Consider War A Little More Closely Than Before

It took me a second to realize the gravity of what the tour guide said happened to him as a child.

“Luckily, we weren’t there for long,” added Esmere, as he mentioned that Croatian forces had forced his family into a facility near Mostar, where the war between different ethnic and national forces tore Bosnia and Herzegovina apart for years in the 1990s.

The facility was a concentration camp. Esmere was three.

And then he moved to a different part of his childhood story, in a country where more than 100,000 people died over a series of battles and sieges and an ethnic cleansing during four years in the 1990s.

Bosnia and Herzegovina was not one of the original 52 countries I planned to go to on my trip.

Yet it’s one of the places that will probably stick with me the most.

Here is the main reason, after many weeks of trapeezing Europe by train, I suddenly took a flight from Paris to Sarajevo in the middle of August: when I originally planned things, I did not read the fine print about European visa laws.

You can only spend 90 days in any six-month period in what’s known the Schengen Zone — a group of mostly but not entirely EU countries — and if you exceed that, there can be fines and complications about returning.

I did a poor job researching this during my draft plans. Which meant that a month before my trip started, I needed to a) cancel a country or two in the Scheghen Zone (sorry, Switzerland), and b) find somewhere nearby that was affordable enough to fly in and out of, since I had to do it in the middle of my European leg since the end couldn’t be altered.

Bosnia and Herzegovina seemed to fit the bill, and there was a train route between the two cities I wanted to go to.

So without thinking much of it, I booked my flights and hotels and then promptly forgot about it for nine months, because when you’re making plans for an entire year you can’t really do a deep dive into too many places.

(This is one of those sentences that can sound really smug or lacking self-awareness, but it’s true! And I have an unbelievable amount of gratefulness and privilege for doing this trip! At the same time, there’s a certain amount of “we’ll figure it out when we get there” attitude you have to take when travelling for a longer period, something that I’ve appreciated more and more as this has gone on)

ANYWAY, I knew a decent amount about the decade-long wars and genocides during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and had a cursory knowledge of the Bosnian War, the bloodiest of the fights for independence.

What I didn’t anticipate was how present all that would be, three decades later.

There are lots of privileges of living in Canada, particularly if you’re a white Millennial whose parents and grandparents were born here, and one of them is never having to think about the impact of war in a direct and personal way.

You can understand it, and can have friends who have been impacted by it, but unless you actively seek it out it will remain something of an abstraction.

Before Bosnia, I had been to countries with relatively recent dictators (Chile), coups (Argentina), religious violence (Northern Ireland), and the unfathomable horrors that countries caught between Nazi Germany and the USSR had to endure.

I *think* this made me feel like I had knew what Bosnia would be like…except none of those places had a sustained war of mass casualties and concentration camps in my lifetime.

Bosnia and Herzegovina did. And the reminders are everywhere.

There’s the damaged homes and towers of course, giant dents and chipped paint in plenty of buildings, because the focus after the war was rebuilding places that had been completely destroyed, not doing cosmetic work on structures still standing.

There’s the red blotches on the pavement across Sarajevo to mark places where bombs landed during the three-year siege, a reminder that the simple act of being on the street put you at risk.

There was the sudden increase in seeing people without limbs or who walked with a permanent limp, the museums devoted to the bombings, the many pictures and statues dedicated to Tito, the dictator of Yugoslavia for 40 years remembered fondly by many today (it’s called “Yugo-nostalgia”) for the economic prosperity and comparative lack of human rights abuses.

At the same time, three decades later the service and tourism sectors have rebounded. You can have a Very European Adventure of cafes and cathedral visits and tours to natural wonders without much difficulty at all.

But you can’t really forget where you are. Eventually, you’ll stumble across a bombed building, or your tour guide will bring up being placed in a concentration camp. I was in Sarajevo during their annual film festival, and even that has a war-based context: it began with people smuggling in reels via a tunnel that ran through the UN-administered airport.

You have to be comfortable vacationing in those two worlds, just as Bosnians have to live in both of them every day.

Let’s talk for a second about those natural wonders, because they are very wonderous and this is getting a tad dark.

Bosnia is at both a country with a Mediterranean climate, while having a topography similar to British Columbia: elevation changes everywhere, lots of trees, and most population centres placed in little valleys next to mountains or bodies of water.         

It means there’s a large number of unique features in a relatively small space. In my week there I saw waterfalls and stunning train crossings, monasteries cut into rock faces, and all sorts of bridges and castles made more interesting by the surrounding environment.

The people are friendly. The beers cost less than two bucks. The national dish (Ćevapi) is an amazing dish that’s basically chicken tenders if they were seasoned beef and served with pita and clotted cream.

In as much as country in Europe can be a “hidden gem”, Bosnia and Herzegovina would seem to qualify.

Yet even the most interesting sight carries a contextual reminder of the war. In 1984 Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics, and with it came a bevy of athletic facilities.

That includes the bobsleigh track, which weaves around Trebević mountains for hundreds of metres, and is now mostly covered with elaborate graffiti.

And because it’s part of a vast set of hiking trails accessible by cable car, you can walk the track and enjoy the art and views, a delightful mishmash of nature and concrete high above the city.

Just don’t spend too much time thinking about why you can walk it.

Both places I stayed in Bosnia — Sarajevo and Mostar — were quite charming. Sarajevo has a large old town with an interesting mix of Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian influences, but transitions into a more modern downtown area in a fairly seamless way, which I think always helps a city.

Mostar is a bit more of a tourist trap, though it’s high bridge across the river Neretva is stunning, and it’s a good base to see a lot of the smaller villages around the country.

It’s worth a visit, particularly since Bosnia’s future is not entirely secure. The Dayton Accords that ended the war were created under NATO pressure, and gave the country independence in a tentative compromise between the warring factions. It’s highly decentralized, with just under half the area belonging to The subnational state Republika Sprska, populated mainly by Serbs who tend to be much more lukewarm towards the country, because many of them fought against Bosnian Muslims to prevent independence.

(The Yugoslav breakup was tremendously messy)    

Over the last three decades a lot of ethnic self-sorting has happened, and the leader of Sprska has aligned himself with Putin and mused about seceding because of the continued international affirmation of a genocide that happened in Sprska territory during the tail end of the war.

The overall result, according to locals I spoke with, is a weak and paralyzed government, worried about any actions that might further upset the delicate balance.

A stark visual reminder of this can be found in Mostar, in the Partisan Memorial Cemetery. It was built to honour locals who died resisting the Nazis in World War Two, and in its time was seen as an amazing modernist structure. Today, it sits empty and mostly destroyed, most recently by Neo-Nazis (allegedly) who destroyed all 700 plaques on the site two years ago, with no action taken to find the perpetrators or rebuild.

I will think of that in the months and years ahead, but I will think more of one particular place: the War Childhood Museum.

It’s a small place up a hill near Sarajevo’s old town, and the concept is both simple and tremendously powerful: children in the war donate items to the museum that meant a lot to them, along with a story that accompanies them. They’re all well lit and framed to make each exhibit feel as noteworthy as something in any museum in the world.

It started off as a small collection and has grown with the museum’s fame, with 6,000 items now in the collection, 40 on display at any one time.

When I visited, there was a jungle gym from a school, which Haris was playing on before a grenade hit it, killing four of his friends and injuring him. There was a Richard Scary cartoon dictionary, which Amila used to learn English so she could talk to UN soldiers and “maybe get a chocolate bar or some other candy.” There was a ball that Emina and her brother played with before he was killed. And dozens of other stories that brought me to tears.

Included in the displays were two stories from outside Bosnia. A sewing machine from a orphaned teenager in Ukraine, and a souvenir a from Saja, a Palestinian girl in Gaza who got it from her older sister, just before she moved to Greece for university.

“It’s been over two years since we last saw each other,” wrote Saja. “Whenever I miss her, I look at it and hold onto the hope that one day we will be reunited, even if it’s not in Gaza.”

People sometimes ask me if I’ve learned anything about the world on this trip.

And to be honest, I don’t think I’ve gained any radical new ideas.

But I feel universal sentiments more deeply.