The Balkans: Part I: Bosnia

What a trip! I now have 10 stamps in my passport and 4 more countries under my belt! I'll start with some pictures.

On the bus from the airport to the hotel

The sight where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot

A Sarajevo Rose

Sarajevo

Hiking on the Bjelasnica Mountain

Al-Jazeera!

Visegrad

The Drina in Visegrad

 

 

 

Mostar - the unofficial capital of Herzegovina

At the Jewish museum in Sarajevo

A view of Sarajevo from part-way up one of the mountains

Can you tell I like rivers?

A little history first: our first week was based in Sarajevo, which was surrounded by the Serbs during the Bosnian War and was under siege from 1992-1995. All around the city, wherever a shell hit and a person was wounded or killed, they refilled the hole with a red clay. These are called Sarajevo Roses. The Bosnian War involved the three main ethnic groups of Bosnia: Bosniak Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats. 20 years later, the country is still struggling to recover and come to terms with the horrible atrocities that occurred all over. It's a truly terrible paradox: the country is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen and yet less than two decades ago it was ravaged by death and violence.

Our first day in Bosnia we took a hike through the mountains - my pictures don't do it justice. I'd love to live out there just for a year. It was so peaceful! The people out there live mainly by subsistence farming. There's just something very appealing about the idea of living in a small stone cottage and not having to worry about paperwork or bills or a 9-5 job. And the mountains are absolutely ideal for running! But I digress. After the hike we visited the Tunel Museum. Since Sarajevo was surrounded during the war, no people or supplies could enter or exit the city, so they built a tunnel 800m long to transport supplies and soldiers between Sarajevo and the rest of free Bosnia. Our guide asked for 4 volunteers - 2 girls, 2 guys - and have each of us lift a backpack full of cinder-blocks that was the weight of supplies that women would carry through the tunnel. The man working the gift stand said he would give a free souvenir to any girl that could carry the backpack through the section of the tunnel that was still operating (it wasn't very long - only about 2 minutes). So I obviously can not resist a challenge and the pack hadn't been too hard to lift and do a squat with, so I jumped right up. They definitely thought that I would fall in the tunnel - our guide walked backwards in front of me and they had my friend Daniel go behind me. The tunnel was only 1.6m high, so even I had to crouch a bit, but luckily I'm only 5'5'' so it wasn't too bad. They were extremely impressed when I made it without any problems. They took multiple pictures with and of me, our guide told me that I was her hero, and the gift shop man shook my hand twice and gave me two free souvenirs!

We had 3 meetings almost every day for the rest of the week; we went to the U.S. Embassy, met with a few people from NGOs, the EU Special Representative, a few journalists, went to the Al-Jazeera Balkans office, representatives of the Association of War Camp Prisoners in Visegrad, the president of the Muslim Community of Visegrad, the Court of BiH (Bosnia and Herzegovina), a rep from BIRN (Balkan Investigative Reporting Network), and an adviser at the Ministry of Civil Affairs.

I'm not even sure where to start for the rest of the week.. I think I'm still suffering from a bit of information overload. We visited Srebrenica and the cemetery/memorial center for the 8,000 Bosniaks who were massacred there. It was just astounding. I have no other word for it. 20 years later, they are still trying to identify some 1,000 of the victims, and they think there are more mass graves that they haven't even discovered yet. It's a very sobering reality. We met with a man who escaped the massacre, but lost his twin brother. They were my age at the time.

The memorial at Potocari

Srebrenica cemetery

 

After Srebrenica we drove to Visegrad. We spent the night in a hotel there, right along the River Drina, which is the most exquisite turquoise color I have ever seen! I got up at 5:30am the next morning and sat on the bridge to watch the sunrise. It was so perfect. I didn't take any pictures because I knew that there was no way to capture that moment in a photograph. The mist was rolling in along the river, not a soul was in sight, the birds were chirping and fluttering about, the water was glittering, and the sun came up peaking over the tops of the mountains. Then I ran a few miles along the river and up one of mountains. It was a pretty stellar start to my day! I also saw the sunrise in Sarajevo on our last morning there - early morning runs really are the greatest.

One very interesting thing that we kept hearing from all of the ethnic groups was that people were getting along just fine, and then suddenly there was a war and the international community was involved and everything got crazy polarized. We also heard from all sides that the truth is the only way that people can live together - everyone needs to accept the truth of what happened and stop counting numbers. But it does seem like it is hard to draw the line between remembering what happened and wallowing in the past. Both sides committed some terrible war crimes, and there are still thousands of court cases trying to prosecute those crimes, 20 years later!