MB took a short trip to Sarajevo, capital city of Bosnia & Herzegovina (B&H) during the recent Eid break. The city has much past and recent history which attracts tourists from all over the globe and the city is known as the Jerusalem of Europe on account of it’s history of its religious diversity and tolerance.
The Sarajevo hills
MB also had a few beers in a great Irish pub in the old Ottoman district of the town, and a few more in a Glasgow Celtic/Scottish theme bar in the relatively newer Austro Hungarian side of town, but no need to get into all that! Better instead to recount a story or two from the trip and MB has chosen one from the past and one from more recent times.
Sarajevo is particularly famous as the city of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 2014, the heir apparent to the Austro Hungarian Empire at that time, which lead to the commencement of World War 1 some time later.
A museum now stands on the corner of the street, next to the assassination location
Briefly, Frans Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were in an open-top car on a tour of the city when 19-year-old Serb Gavrilo Principe fired a number of shots from a pistol while standing on the footpath as the car passed by, a mere meters from the car as it slowed and turned a street corner. Shades of Dallas, many years later, minus the grassy knoll. Franz Ferdinand died instantly, and Sophie soon after. Gavrillo later denied that he intended to kill Sophie stating that his only target was the Archduke and the assassination was to rid the region of the Austro Hungarian rulers.
Early morning tour on the Latin Bridge
The incident happened next to the Northern end of the Latin Bridge, a bridge that was built many hundreds of years earlier to bring local religious communities closer together, which crosses the cities Miljacka River. The scene is now a tourist Mecca and MB had a chat with a large Chinese tour who were swarming around the spot during MB’s early morning city walk-about. The Chinese man with the largest camera in the group proudly told MB that had consumed vast quantities of Guinness in Dublin in recent times!
MB stands on the exact spot from where Gavrilo Principe fired the fatal shots
MB took a guided street walking tour later that day and the first stop was the Latin Bridge location, where MB stood on the assassination spot and listened to the story that had dire later consequences.
MB’s second tale relates to the Sarajevo Rose. A rose is obviously a flower synonymous with beauty and colour and love. But the Sarajevo Rose is not like that. It’s a rose of memory and sadness and bloodshed and death.
The Sarajevo Rose
The recent history of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s are not taught in the schools of B&H. The thinking is that it’s better allow the kids to get on with life unencumbered by the past. If parents want to teach their kids about it, then that’s about the only way the kids will learn of it, absent any research of their own. MB’s tour guide for the street walk was a 21-year-old Bosnian girl, nominally Muslim, but with little interest in Religion or any practice of it. She looked like any modern young lady one would see in any secular city in the world. She was studying a degree in Film Production in the local university and was focused on the future, not the past, just like all her young friends, as she informed MB.
As mentioned earlier, the city of Sarajevo is surrounded by hills and mountains. During the 1990s war, the Serbian forces held 3 of the 4 mountains and the Bosnians the 4th. Shelling of the city was a regular occurrence, sometimes occurring when the population thought that temporary truces were in place or that shelling had ceased for a defined period of time. During those breaks from hostilities, the population would take the opportunity to visit food shops and open air markets to grab badly needed supplies. Occasionally, a shell would land in such locations with devastating deathly consequences. And so, in later times, the Sarajevo Rose became the symbol of memory of those who were killed under such circumstances. One can now see a number of them engraved into the footpaths as one traverses the city streets.
MB’s Sarajevo visit was brief, but very interesting. He took an overnight bus from Belgrade, Serbia to get there, and flew back to Belgrade by propellor plane, his first such flight and a 55 minute journey, before returning via Qatar Airways the Middle East. Well worth a visit, if it’s on your mind.