The Valley of Clichés

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I was trying to think of a good title for my entry about Sarajevo and they all just sounded like clichés. "The Lost Olympic City", "The War-Torn Jewel of the Balkans" (well, that could be a lot of places), "The Melting Pot of the Balkans", various crap titles referencing Frankie Ferdinand and WW1, "The Valley of Hope"... there's a tunnel of hope, so... well, all of these sounded too seedy. Valley of Clichés it is, even though touristic clichés were few and far between.

Not much happened between Osijek and Sarajevo. On the Sunday after that dreadful walk I woke up late and chatted to the girl from reception at the guesthouse over a very hearty breakfast of whatever was left. I headed to the station promising myself to return to Osijek sometime, stay at Maksimilian again and go out clubbing in that supposed hostel I had arrived at first. From Osijek I went to Vinkovci which is a drab railway junction near Serbia, then from there to Slavonski Brod. I thought this town had looked quite nice, but wouldn't recommend it as a tourist destination, the old fortress is a cool place but that is it, and it was hard to find somewhere to eat. My room by the Sava river separating Croatia from Bosnia was nice, and I stayed inside and wrote all evening. The next morning I took a bus to Doboj in the Serbian part of Bosnia, with the flat land of Slavonia making way for green hills. This town was bleak, unfriendly and had clearly been hit hard by the recent floods. I waited there for three hours before getting on a train to Sarajevo. Note that I did not see a single other backpacker from leaving Budapest to getting on this train. I was well and truly travelling in fucking strange places, and even the smallest things like trying to change kunas into convertible marks had been problematic.

The only thing that I noticed when moving from the Republika Srpska towards the Federacija was that mosques started appearing everywhere on the hills, which I guess was the point of all that Dayton Agreement business. Arriving by train to Sarajevo was absolutely gorgeous. The plan of the city resembles Zlín but on steroids, spread out across a large valley with green forested hills on either side, with most of the city positioned along the river and sparser residential districts up on the hills. Coming in on the train along the valley means that the whole city is presented to you over a period of about 10 minutes before stopping with maybe a third of it to go until you get to the old town (named Baščaršija, bash-char-shia). Two feelings flooded me as I walked the three and a half kilometers from the station through the town, one that I had finally arrived at my destination (or as close to that as you can feel while backpacking) and the second that I truly felt very very far from home.

I checked in at my hotel and decided that, since I had a long list of things I would like to do here, I would get the most obvious cliché out of the way and go and check the bridge where Frankie and Sophie got shot leading to shit going down in Europe. It was pretty underwhelming to be honest. My original plan before the passport bollocks was to be in Sarajevo on the 100th anniversary of said shit going down (June 28th), which would have been a lot more exciting. On my walk back to the hotel, looking for a place to eat, I was stopped by a cry of "hey, my friend, come here and have some beer and some food!" In Prague I would have ignored this, since it would unequivocally mean that the beer and food are going to make an unreasonably sized hole in my wallet, but I stopped and checked the menu and saw the prices were kosher (or halal, if you wish) and sat down. The place was called Restoran Carpaccio and the owner, Sead, was very friendly and had only just opened it a few months ago, and the food wasn't bad. He seemed to be very friendly with the guy next door, a place called Zalogajnica Valter 071, which served tap beer. He introduced me to Vladimir, the owner there, and after finishing my food and bottle of Bavaria I moved next door and sat down for a glass of draught brew. There seemed to be no feeling of competition between them at all. As soon as I sat down I was invited to join a table of Scandinavians, a couple of Danish guys (one living in Greenland) and a couple of Finnish girls who had also just met each other at this place, and we became the Baščaršija Nordic Conference (I was admitted because there's probably a Viking in my bloodline somewhere or other) and kept on drinking beer and rakija into the night.

The next morning I wrote a few postcards and went to check the national gallery. It wasn't all that national, there was no exhibitions of Bosnian art throughout the ages as one would expect, just an exhibition of various works on the topic of refugees by artists from Banja Luka to Přerov, most living in Vienna. There was also a very creepy video exposition which had something to do with Frankie and Sophie but I couldn't really work it out. I then checked the Bursa Bezistan which was more interesting, showing artifacts, letters, weapons, pictures and other miscellaneous stuff from the city's history as well as a scale model of Sarajevo. I also ran into the male half of the Nordic Conference in here, so we went to get a mediocre burek afterwards before they headed off to Mostar in the afternoon. I decided to go and explore the Tunel Spasa (tunnel of hope) next, a tunnel under the airport built during the siege of Sarajevo while the city was bottlenecked by the Serbian army except for one strip of land in the south-east. Since crossing this strip of land would have been suicidal, they built the tunnel to ease transporting goods, food and ammo into the city from elsewhere in unoccupied territory. Most of the tunnel has since collapsed but a small section remains open as a museum.

It's not really worth the trek to be honest. You have to get on a tram to the very end of the city, and trams weren't running to the end of the line due to repairs, so I went as far as I could and got in a taxi. The entrance fee to the museum is also pretty steep considering it only takes about half an hour to see. I walked back as far as I could before a massive storm caught up with me and I hid and waited for another taxi to take me back to the tram. I then went to check the war museum near the railway station. This really is interesting. It chronicles not only the recent Balkan war but Sarajevo during World Wars 1 and 2 as well, and also currently has a football exhibition (every time I saw anything related to the World Cup I felt so much pity for Bosnia who had been robbed of a place in the last 16 by that bloody fraud of a referee, Peter O'Leary). Most interesting of all, though, was the exhibition set up by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia on the upper floor, explaining about the people who had been convicted for war crimes in the conflict and going over the happenings in the conflict in each country. I have heard and read enough on the Balkan conflict to know that some of the facts presented in this exhibition were presented misleadingly, or at least omitting sufficient explanations, but that's not something I want to go into here. It's not that I don't trust the ICTY are telling the truth, more that trying to summarise such things in brief is always going to lead to confusion.

On my way back to the centre I passed a guy selling tickets to a Europa League qualifier between Željezničar (who I remember well for their absolute goalfest of a game against Viktoria Plzeň in the Champions League last year) and Metalurg Skopje, and decided, why the hell not. He advised me to take off my Viktoria Žižkov shirt with red and white stripes - the colours of Željezničar's archrivals FK Sarajevo - and swap it for a blue one. Fair enough, I thought, that would be my souvenir, a replica Željo shirt. I bought one for 20 marks off a stall in Baščaršija and was given a shoe-shaped keyring with the Bosnian flag on as a "present", which I guess means I should have haggled. I headed to Carpaccio for another pizza and another drink at Valter 071 before heading up to the old Olympic stadium. The match was pretty lacklustre but the Željezničar fans made a whole lot of noise and the atmosphere was great, aside from the hordes of riot police sitting at the front rows for what seemed to be no reason. The result was pretty depressing, though. More crap refereeing damaged Bosnian football as Skopje got a very questionable free kick in injury time and converted it, sending them through on away goals. There were no Macedonian fans present to celebrate with them, so the stadium just went pretty quiet as Sector 1312 lined up around the kop end to protect against an imaginary pitch invasion.

The next morning I went for a coffee at the lookout point above the Muslim war cemetery and made arrangements to meet up with the female half of the Nordic Conference that night, as we would both be heading south in different directions on Thursday morning. I then ran into them in the midst of a tour group up at Vratnik fortress, an old fortress whose history I declined to eavesdrop on since I dislike both stealing and tour groups, but gave me a perfect opportunity to get a selfie with the Sarajevo skyline. From there I headed to a town just outside the city called Vogošća, which I was interested in because it has one of those mental communist-era war memorials people keep posting lists of on Buzzfeed and other such sites. Public transport in Sarajevo is confusing (there is never any way of knowing what stop you're at), so I was worried this was going to be difficult, however it was the easiest trip I did during my whole time there, buses leave from Sutjeska (halfway from the BBI building to the Olympic stadium) and it's quite clear. The memorial to illegal/partizan fighters during the world war didn't take long to see and there were men working around it so I didn't stick around, but it was worth it. There was also a pretty weird mosque just behind it with a very modern minaret.

On the way back I got off outside a strange looking place I'd noticed on the bus there, a tightly packed collection of blocks of flats with a funicular railway going up them, apparently leading to a restaurant. I walked past Café London, Café Rio and Café Paris (the latter looking like the poshest) and paid 80 feninga to ride the funicular to the top. Apparently people use it to reach their flats more quickly, and it's free if you're a senior citizen. I had one beer at the restaurant at the top and was given a second for free for no apparent reason whatsoever. I chatted a bit with the owner and did some writing and headed back down the stairs to the main road feeling a bit merry.

Later I went down to Vladimir's bar and told him what I had been upto. He turned out to be a very interesting guy and full of stories. In a weird coincidence, he had grown up next to the funicular railway I'd just been on, and his grandfather, an influential Partizan during the second world war, had been the mayor of Vogošća during the time that odd monument had been built. What surprised me the most was how he could speak about the wars, including the siege of Sarajevo which he had witnessed and helped to resist, without showing any kind of strong emotion or pain. I had always thought that a golden rule for travelling in the Balkans was "don't talk about politics", but "don't start discussions about politics" might be closer to the mark - some people obviously don't mind talking about their country's past to people who are interested. The two Finns eventually arrived and we drank to Sarajevo, which I at least will remember as being the scene for the best three nights I have ever had in the Balkans.

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Photos

Scale model of Sarajevo
in the Bursa Bezistan

Pictures of Sarajevo
After the war and now.

Sector 1312
Željezničar vs. Metalurg Skopje