Sarajevo is a city that is captivating and haunting and many other adjectives I can’t put my finger on. My first time around, I was fascinated with the city, but not as taken with it as I was with the people I met there. This time however, I fell in love. I wouldn’t say that it feels like home, but I definitely feel at home in it. There’s a plethora of charming hole-in-the-wall cafés (my favorite thing about any city) and in certain parts I feel like I’m strolling through a medieval town. But in the middle of all that, there are glaring reminders of a horrific war. A war that anyone over the age of 20 remembers and one the locals use as a ”before and after” reference point. I haven’t succeeded in learning much about the ”during” except that it’s when smoking became a national pastime. But I did succeed in getting a better grasp of what makes this place so special. And it has little to do with the cafés and everything to do with the people sitting in the cafés.
As an American, one gets used to being verbally spat upon when traveling outside of the western world, so I usually just say I’m Swedish until I get a sense of how the person feels about the US (or until they realize my English is too good to be anything but home grown). However, when you go to Bosnia, saying that you are Swedish does not always warrant a positive reaction. Sweden played a very active role in the Balkans during and after the war, but depending on who you talk to, it’s not always remembered with generosity of spirit. Dusko Basic, a good-natured man I met back in March, works as a consultant for business and infrastructure at Novi Grad city hall, and he remarked, ”Asking Carl Bildt to fix Bosnia’s situation after the war was like assigning a 5-star Michelin chef to solve the hunger crisis in Somalia.” According to Dusko, what Bildt ended up doing in Bosnia after the war can be likened to taking Hitler out of Nazi Germany, but leaving the Nazi party to continue governing without him. When confronted with this, we Swedes tend to steer the topic of conversation to Zlatan Ibrahimovic, which usually works to lighten the mood. After all, football is almost always a happier subject of conversation than politics. But truth be told, it’s insane for an outsider to come in and create order out of that kind of chaos and expect it to work. I asked my friend Zoran what started the war, and he compared it to a marriage gone awry. The husband and wife just stopped getting along, and then the in-laws interfered which made everything worse. And then the marriage counselor tried to intervene, but how to pacify decades of resentment and hostility without a major undoing? Good luck.
It’s amazing to me how people can still talk to each other after what has happened. Sure, it’s been nearly 20 years, but if the evident lack of remodeling of the physical structures around town is any reflection of the emotional scars that people still carry around, then I deem it a miracle. But I have never experienced war and therefore have no right to speculate. It’s just something I’ve thought about. Ironically, it’s in Sarajevo that I feel most inspired about...well....everything. The people I’ve come in contact with are truly amazing individuals and stellar examples of what it is to hope.
Take Eldar Balta as one example. A medical student and project coordinator for Mozaik (www.mozaik.ba), Eldar is quickly becoming one of my favorite people. He’s smart, genuine, frank, and has a soft heart despite having survived communism, a war, and the not-so-smooth transition into a capitalistic democracy. He is now committed to bringing change to the dysfunctional aftermath that is Bosnia. He’s very honest about his frustrations with his own people, but I still perceive him to be unflinchingly optimistic about the future. He’s very proud of his city and loves to show it off. When asked why he is so fond of Sarajevo, he answers: ”It’s a city that allows for imagination. I can create my own world here. For example, the streets of Sarajevo transform into New York City during November’s annual Jazz Fest. It’s a city of paradoxes. The place that loves art and culture is the same place where people were killing each other just two decades ago.” He showed us the islamic burial grounds located in the middle of town where former president Alija Izetbegovic is buried along with hundreds, if not thousands of people who were killed in 1995. There was something eerie about walking through the white monument-like headstones and seeing the same year of death on all of them. Most of the buried were young too, in their 20’s and 30’s. It kind of brought me to a halt. But in the spirit of paradox, we later went to a quaint hole-in-the-wall café called The Goldfish to drink pivo (beer) and reminisce. It was like entering a cluttered attic that no one had touched in 150 years. Antique photos and relics covered every square inch of the place. Definitely a new favorite spot.
Zoran Puljic is another one I’ve come to admire. This man joined the Bosnian army at the age of 18, even though his father was a Serb and his mother a Croat. Two years and three wounds later, he fled to Germany (it took him three weeks to get there) where he lived for two and a half years before returning to Bosnia (via Spain). He is now the director of Mozaik, an incredible organization that funds and manages development projects around Bosnia (currently 279 of them!). He is über educated, travels all over the world on a regular basis, was awarded the Schwab Foundation’s Regional Social Entrepreneur of the Year in 2010 and is definitely the kind of person that I feel extremely lucky to have met, and even more so now that we have become friends. Hearing him talk about his work, I would never guess that he was once a scared soldier carrying a gun. He, like Eldar, speaks about the future with hope. He’s not afraid to dream big and he’s got a vision for his country that inspires me to think bigger about my own role in the world. I’m trying to persuade him to write a memoir, because his story is absolutely the kind I want to read.
Danka is a petite, brusque, chain-smoking and very lovable English teacher at the Gimnazija Dobrinja (a high school) where my students just did a week-long exchange. She never married and never had kids (she has enough at school, she says) and she too has led quite an incredible life. During the 1980’s she worked as a translator in Baghdad and remembers it as being quite a beautiful city. Not the shell-shocked place it is now. I can imagine she likens Baghdad to what Sarajevo was before the war, and the place it is now. Sarajevo was once a lovely and vibrant European city if the pictures from before WWI are telling the truth. An eclectic mix of Austro-Hungarian, Moorish and Ottoman architecture, it is a city where one can find an orthodox church, a synagogue, a catholic church and a mosque within the same neighborhood. It’s enough to walk a few blocks downtown to notice the extreme religious diversity. Before the war, people of these faiths had co-existed rather peaceably for centuries. It’s tragic what war will do to people’s faith. Jonathan Swift once said, ”We have just enough religion to make us hate, and not enough to love one another.” Zoran says that he lost a lot of faith in organized religion during the war. When people start grabbing their guns, religious rhetoric gets thrown out the window and people turn into monsters. All pretty thoughts of peace and love are forgotten. I think it’s a shame that people commit such atrocities in the name of God. I often imagine Him looking down at us and sadly shaking his head as if to say, ”You guys have totally missed the point.”
I’ve been back in Sweden for a few days now, but my head is still in Sarajevo. I was unprepared for the way it’s burrowed itself so deeply in my mind and heart. The more I see, the more I realize I don’t know anything. I don’t understand what drives us to kill each other. I don’t understand how we can recover from such moral depravity. But somehow we pick ourselves up and keep walking. The soul is resilient, but it’s also fragile. I wonder if the lack of ”cosmetic surgery” around Sarajevo isn’t so much due to lack of funding as it is an honest acknowledgement that the bullet holes on people’s hearts aren’t going away, so neither should the ones on the buildings.
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