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Sretan Juli: Hasim’s Tour

Sretan Juli (Happy July!)... Today Sarajevo was an alpine village... crystal blue skies and air so crisp and sweet smelling that you would swear that when you threw open the windows this morning that you could hear ol' Julie Andrews singin' , "...the hills are alive..." The heat wave has passed us (temporarily, I suppose) and it was a pleasure just to walk to work this morning. I suddenly imagined what a winter sports haven this place really used to be. The few expats who have been here for many moons now have related how great the skiing was this winter (land mines be damned?).

Ah yes, the hills. Sarajevo is just one big aerobic workout. The only flat part of town is the center along the river, but shortly off the main drag, Ulica Marsala Tita (still affectionately known locally as "Sniper Alley") it is (not) straight uphill. Imagine those twisty little former cow trails that are now Boston's streets all at a 70 degree angle, whew. Sort of a Balkan San Francisco.

When one flies into Sarajevo from Vienna, Frankfurt, Berlin, or Zurich, the dramatically mountainous geography is breathtaking. The shock as the plane lands, however, is just as striking. The valley is littered with the skeletons of 20-storey apartment buildings, dead tanks and airplanes, and a oddly bare countryside. Since the Serbs had the city imprisoned, and the Russians turned off the gas (the Bosnians - those slackers - didn't pay their bills, lovely huh.), the city has suffered from severe urban deforestation. It was either burn whatever you could, or freeze to death. In fact, you can clearly tell which parts of the city and the hills were under Serb occupation because there are trees it those places. Along all the major avenues there are large brick-lined holes in the sidewalks where 100-200 year old trees were taken down for fuel.

There is still an eerie psychological residue of this fear of cold that we notice with our training participants. No matter how hot it gets, they don't want the windows in the classrooms opened. It isn't for the noise as the city is actually rather quiet for its size. A young Bosnian psychologist friend suggested to me that it was the fact that most of these people spent four years not being able to get warm. Have you ever had that bone chilling coldness when you just never thought you'd get warm - Imagine suffering this feeling for months on end. Their winters are very long here (mid-October through mid-May), and even though there is a nice summer respite it is short, and there is very little spring or fall.

One of the other many consequences of being trapped in the city for four years is the fact that as people were killed, there was nowhere to lay them to rest. Every park and soccer field within the city limits is now a cemetery. The Bosnians bury their dead in raised plots (unlike many of our own flat cemeteries) with both a head and foot stone. No epitaphs, no "RIP", just the name and dates, and frequently a picture (if the family had some money it was engraved). In a small section of old town there is a "stepped" piece of land which was once reknown as a children's park. It is now a children's cemetary. It is the most heart-wrenching yet loveliest corner of the city. These (mostly small) raised graves are covered with flowers, planted flowers, some of the most beautiful roses (apparently Bosnia had a history of exporting varieties of tea roses pre-guerre) and lilies one has ever seen, and at this time of year they are ALL in bloom. If one did not realize it was a cemetery it could be mistaken for a show garden. It was horrible to walk along row after row of these little plots, and read the dates on the head stones.

I spent all day Sunday with a Bosnian friend, Hasim, who took me on a complete tour of the city. As we walked through this place, he pointed to grade school friends (he is now 25), and little brothers and sisters of friends. I told him we could leave because I didn't want him to be caused more pain. His eyes teared a little but he smiled and said, it's ok, I am living for them. I have promised all of them that I will live for them.

To bluntly jump from the emotionally personal to the unemotionally practical, money is a bit of an annoyance here. Yes, I realize it can be quite an annoyance most anywhere but the situation here is odd. The currency of choice is the German Deutsch Mark (DM) which is actually used interchangably with the Bosnian (old Yugoslavian) dinar. Dollars are pretty useless - which, I must admit in a sort of Amerocentric way, is a real inconvenience. Hell, they loved dollars in Guatemala, Morocco, and Albania. And the DM aren't such a big problem except that the waves of foreigners coming into Sarajevo for the last year and a half have changed money in Frankfurt or London prior to arriving here, and have all been carrying 100 and 50 DM bills. The DM is about 1.7 to the dollar so we're talking about bills worth between $80-$40. When a cup of coffee costs 1.75 DM, or you want a loaf of bread for 1DM, the kiosks and little shops can't change a 100DM or even a 50DM bill. Taxis can't make change, cafes can't make change, everyone will look at you and sort of shrug.

The checkout ladies in the mini supermarkets are a throwback to the old communist days when customer service was an anachronym. Buy 14.25 DM of groceries, hand her a 20DM bill, and suffer the consequences! And if you haven't brought along your own shopping bag to put your groceries into, God help you! You either juggle the stuff home in your pocketbook or laptop case (yogurt covered keyboard anyone?) or you plead with them in a language they have no interest in hearing, for a woefully inadequate tiny plastic bag which will be thrown on top of your pile of goodies in an act of unparalleled distain. There are almost no pfennigs (german "cents") around, so change is given to you in dinars. My wallet contains a few 20DM bills, and tons of 100, 50, and 20 dinar bills all of which are in need of a LOT of tape. 1DM = 100 dinars. Except for the checkout ladies, almost any other service employee will give you as much change as (s)he can in DMs, and then apologize profusely as (s)he hands you the rest in dinars. Its so curious because it's not like anyone is going to turn away these dinars in the next place I need to spend them (ha! like the grocery store!)

As I mentioned earlier, I spent all day Sunday with Hasim (say, HAshum), on a tour of the city in his brand-new little Renault 5. His English was terrific, as is most of the English I've been exposed to, and he had been a soldier (like most all of the young men here). As I noted earlier, there is a sort of high-spirited, good natured way about everyone I've met here which continues to boggle my mind. They are almost blase about their war experiences, and speak rather freely about their situations, their family situations, and the city's situation. I got a history tour of the city that sort of followed the front line. The communication (tv, radio, newspaper) buildings were destroyed as were all the mosques, hospitals (including a strictly maternity hospital - gotta start that ethnic cleansing while they're young), schools, university buildings, museums, government buildings, anything to "eradicate" as much of the culture as possible.

The worst and most tragic of the shell damaged structures was the National Library. What a tragedy; a beautiful, arabesque building completely gutted. Granted, the structure can be rebuilt. Many of the publications, including centuries old manuscripts, cannot. Destroying books? Shades of the Third Reich? An interesting testament to the fortitude of this town is evident by the fact that the national newspaper, "Oslobedjenije" continued being printed throughout the war in the basement of the newspaper's offices which were completely destroyed above ground.

Another fascinating part of my little tour was a walk-about out near the airport when the Bosnians build an enormous and rather long tunnel. The Serbs had managed to actually take pieces of the city in odd formations so there were a few places in town where small pockets of Bosnians managed to hold off the aggression forces - these little islands of Bosnians needed to be reached so tunnels were built. This big one was from an unoccupied area out under a large stretch of occupied neighborhoods (which are still chock full of mines) to the airport. Some supplies came in but without the tunnel wouldn't have made it back to the city. You can see how badly the Serbs wanted to get that tunnel from the massive destruction above ground over it. The entrance was through the basement of a restaurant close to the airport, and we went down into it briefly, it was awful.

A brighter side of my Sunday was spent up in the hills southwest of the city up in the foothills of the Igman mountains. It was here that I drank the water at the source of Sarajevo's springs. At Vrelo Bosna ("the source of Bosnia") the stream appears to begin out of nowhere, and flows into a series of stunningly beautiful pools. This forested park, which was occupied by the Serbs, was one of the first things rebuilt after the war. Apparently, instead of starting to work on the buildings, the French IFOR troops came in and rebuilt the park, put in little bridges, paths, and of course flew in a few swans - gotta love the French. [ IFOR stood for "Implementation FORce" - implementing Dayton, currently we have SFOR troops here - "Stabilization FORce ]. The water of Sarajevo, as I've mentioned is amazing, probably because I've spent all my life equating "city water" with that heavily mineralized liquid we find in our cities' taps.

Since the source of most of Sarajevo's water was in Serb hands, water was a very cherished and rare commodity. You know, you can live without a lot, electricity, gas, etc. but not without water. Curiously enough, the only other place in the city where there was water was at the Sarajevo brewery (!) which is located well inside the city limits. I imagine a lot of friends in the US might find it somewhat interesting that one of the only large industries which kept up production during the war was the brewery. Of course, the unhappy side of this is that the waterless population was forced to walk across the city to reach the brewery, carrying as many empty containers as they could fill and lug home in one trip. Many walked a couple of miles every day, in each direction, carrying water for cooking, drinking, and bathing... and many of them were women, children, and the elderly since the men were on the lines. Lastly, the brewery, being located at the far end of town, forced people to risk being picked off by snipers.

As our tour ended, Hasim was joined by his good friend, and mine, Femil, for a cold beer in my apartment. We chatted and laughed and I suggested we stick together and go out for dinner somewhere. "Have you been to Rimski Most (the Roman Bridge)?", asked Femil. Sure, Hasim had taken me over it on the way to Igman and Vrelo Bosne. "There is a good restaurant out there." So off we went (a luxury for me to have a ride since out-of-town restaurants were inaccessible for me) and sat out on the river, under the Rimski Most Restaurant’s awnings.

Copyright © 1997 – Rachel Peterson

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