Sarajevo: A City of Contrasts

Now that we have arrived and slept off the first night of jet lag, we spent our first full day in Bosnia Herzegovina by pounding pavement through the city. As I was a little anxious, I got up a little early and had time to trek into the city center and get a quick glimpse of the city before breakfast. A river runs through the city from East to West, and as I said in an earlier post, the city is almost entirely surrounded by a tall ridge of hills that make Sarajevo something of a pit. But it also provides for some absolutely breathtaking views, as you can see below!



After breakfast, which in Bosnia consists of cold cuts, deep fried rolls that remind me beignets, scrambled eggs with cheese, and some super rich coffee that gives CCs Dark Roast a run for its money, we walked less than a mile into the old Turkish quarter of the city to meet our local guide, Dzevad.

The city of Sarajevo has been under several different occupying empires, and each has left its imprint on the city. Bosnia was a Roman province under Diocletian, then an Ottoman Turkish province for 500 years in the Middle Ages, and from about 1870-1917 it was under Austro-Hungarian rule. The two main quarters in the city center are the Turkish and the Austro-Hungarian, and you can literally feel the difference as the old cobblestones in the Eastern Turkish quarter quickly turn to smooth paved stones when it comes to the Austro-Hungarian sector.

This image is taken in the Turkish quarter. You can see the minarets of one of the mosques standing in the background. And it gives you a good idea of the way the hills surround the city.

We visited several museums in the morning. The most interesting of which was an old Ottoman Turk's house which has been entirely restored to look just as it did in the 1700's. The guy who owned this place was undoubtedly rich, as his home was enormous. He had at least 5 different rooms in which to greet guests. These rooms were elaborately decorated and surrounded by lush cushions on which the guests would sit and discuss the day's news.



Interestingly, every room had a bathroom, and each included its own heater. Another interesting observation was this pot which was supposedly used to make Turkish dishes, but looked an awful lot like it could be found at some local Cajun houses in Louisiana stirring up a heaping pot of jambalaya. Maybe the infamous Boudreaux and Thibodeaux found their way to Sarajevo and shared their culinary expertise with the Turks too :)


We visited a whole host of religious sites on this first day. Sarajevo is a true melting pot of religions. During the late Roman period, Christianity made its way to this hilly land, and in the middle ages, it schismed into Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Sarajevo has major churches from both traditions. And during the Ottoman period, Islam was introduced to the region, and many Bosnians, in fact the majority of Bosnians today, are Muslim. Besides these, the Jewish faith has its roots in the region that can be traced back to the 1500s when they were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and sought safe haven here in Bosnia.

What is so interesting about this place is that within the old Turkish quarter, you can find churches, synagogues, and mosques within earshot of each other. In fact, we experienced that first hand. At midday, when the Muslims were issuing their prayer call for their meeting at the main mosque for jamah prayers, the Serb Orthodox church was ringing its own church bells too. This image below shows one of the minarets from the central mosque and the tower of the main Serb Orthodox Church (whose roots can be traced, perhaps, back to the 5th century!). You can tell from this picture that the two buildings are literally right across the street from each other.


For lunch we stopped for a large meal at a local restaurant. Lunch is the main meal of the day here in Bosnia, and we definitely put some food away. At our guide Dzevad's suggestions, the non-vegetarians in the group ordered a meal consisting of little grilled sausages, served with a thick slab of pita bread and a large helping of butter. You pile the sausages into the pita bread procket and cover it with the butter, lettuce, tomato, and onions. After that carbo-loading feast, we walked down the street to a "kavana", or cafe, for a double shot of Bosnian espresso to keep our jet-lagged selfs moving for the rest of the afternoon.

The most powerful part of the day came in the late afternoon. We walked West through the Austro-Hungarian quarter and watched the city grow more and more modern. While the Austrians were definitely oppressing the Bosnians, they definitely did a lot to modernize the city and introduced their own distinctly Habsburg style on the city. The road down which we walked was known as Sniper Alley during the Seige of Sarajevo from 1992-1995. This refers to the time when the Serbs surrounded Sarajevo by placing artillery all along the ridge of hills that enclose the city and subjecting the citizens of Sarajevo to constant bombardment. Standing along that street, you could look North, South, East, and West, and see the tall, green hills in direct view. It's beautiful to see today, but I kept imagining how menacing those hills must have looked to Sarajevans as they saw them illuminated with bursts of gunfire and shelling on a daily basis for four and a half years.

We came to a spot in the road that had obviously been damaged and was stained with a hard, red wax. This was our first encounter with a Sarajevo Rose. As shells came hurdling into downtown Sarajevo during the siege, the damage was immense. Holes were left in the streets and in the buildings, leaving lasting reminders of what exactly was going on at the time. One day early in the war, on Sniper's Alley, a group of Sarajevans were standing in a U.N. breadline waiting to receive their daily rations. The Serbs cut out all means of communication and supply lines with the outside world, so these breadlines were the locals only hope at keeping alive. On this particular day, a shot rang out from one of the artillery cannons in the hills East of town and landed only a few feet from the breadlines, killing all of them instantly. As one eyewitness described it, one minute there were 25 human beings standing in a breadline, the next moment, there was only a greasy stain left on the pavement.


This image above is of the spot left from that shell. You'll notice the hard red wax in the shot. Sarajevans began marking the spots in their fair city in which innocents had been killed by Serb shells. This was the first of its kind, but the city eventually became littered with these symbols of the Sarajevan's suffering.

I'd read about this incident in several books, but actually being on the very ground where this tragedy happened was truly moving. I could look to the East and see the hills where the fire must have come from. I could see the alleyway into which the line proceeded on that day. And I thought, at that moment, about what it must have looked like to eyewitnesses - 25 human beings on moment, a greasy stain the next.

And then I thought about what that same incident must have looked like to the Serb soldiers, far off in the hills to the East. They probably only saw it through the small hole of their binoculars or maybe a sniper site. There's no way they could have heard the gory sounds of the event that they just caused. Nor could they probably make out the faces of those 25 human beings on the ground - and they surely did not know their individual stories, their families, or anything else that made them human beings. All they could see, as I imagined it, was tiny bodies, far in the distance, like ants marching in line collecting food, or maybe like a video game in which indiscriminate killing and maiming has no real world consequences. But from their perspective, they could have no way of knowing the devastation and total disregard for human life that they had just executed.

And all that separated those two perspectives was a couple miles.

As we walked further to the West, we arrived at a memorial site for all the children who were killed during the Bosnian war in Sarajevo. All in all, 1,000 children were killed in Sarajevo alone, and 15,000 were killed in the whole of Bosnia. The monument, Dzevad told us, symbolized two forms, a mother and her child, separated by the violence done to them.



We ended the day on a much more positive note at St. Anthony's Catholic Church for mass. This church was our Week of Compassion leader, Amy Gopp's, church while she was in Sarajevo during and after the war. During her time here, Amy started a choir composed of individuals from several main ethnic groups - Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Croats (Catholics). And the purpose of this choir was to bring people together and to have them sing the various songs from each other's tradition. So, for example, one the night that we worshipped there, the choir sang songs from the Catholic tradition, but there were Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims singing these songs. Amy's intent in creating this group was this - that by teaching these individuals the songs of each other's traditions, they could begin to understand the "other" a little better, and hopefully through that new understanding, these various ethnic groups, who had been at war for 4-5 years, could begin to reconcile with one another.

I don't know yet how well the reconiciliation is going, but I know that the music was incredible and just knowing the story behind the choir made the moment very powerful. Below is the church - St. Anthony's Catholic Church.


Our closing worship last night was led by Rev. Diane Faires, a recently ordained minister from Vanderbilt Divinity School. She focused on Exodus 3:1 - the story of Moses, the burning bush, and Moses' recognition that he was standing on God's holy ground. As I thought about the ground upon which I walked, I thought about the contrasts and paradox present here. I remembered that at one of the museums, we learned that the original plan for Sarajevo was to be a place of refuge for the poor, that there would be Ottoman soup kitchens and lodges for those who could not provide their own, and that residential space would be created for travelling scholars and religious leaders. The very foundation of this city seemed to have "the least of these", about whom Jesus spoke, in mind. But this is also the city where over 1,000 children were killed in a four year period from shelling and sniper fire. This is a city whose gorgeous mountains surrounding it provide for outstanding views, but those same hills were the literal face of the enemy and the Achilles Heel of the city.

So it is clear to me that there is much that is paradoxical about this place. It is a city and region of contrasts, both a beautiful place, and one that has seen complete and utter devastation.