My time in Bosnia Herzegovina has had three phases and I want to tell you about them. I’m sorry for writing so much about Bosnia, but there have been to many things in my head not to tell them.

First phase.
The Romans needed 150 years to conquer them, the Turks another 150 to conquer the city of Jajce. Bosnia is a tough country and this is how it’s been during their entire history. This made me think that they have gotten over the war, I imagined a country wanting to be free and independent again. Free of wars and with a future. I arrived to Bosnia Herzegovina with an open mind but looking for this.

Second phase.
I learned more things about the country and it was not very encouraging. Dayton agreement finished the war 15 years ago and seems nothing has changed since, separated schools, changing governments that look after their own people, cities divided by a river, I saw separation everywhere and a country with a very fragile framework, the ministers are multiplied by 3, giving 140 ministers, imagine the expense and the paperwork.

I also learned how the war was created with TV reports frightening everybody “they come for us”…
Also, how one side or the other got villages involved in the war that had nothing to do with it, getting people who were living in peace to join the war by fighting with their neighbours.

I´ve met NGOs who told me how history is taught in schools without trying to unite the people and I was not liking it at all. I was thinking that even there were people trying to do help, if one day the peace forces would leave everything would collapse and the war would return in the exact same way.
The video is about the first and second phase:

As I say in the video, I don’t like it, it’s a stereotypical image that doesn’t tell what Bosnia is now, it doesn’t show the cafes with people talking, the streets with shops and pedestrians, and the tranquility of the landscapes or about the villages with history.The video is shit but I’ve posted it as it has been part of my thinking process.

Third phase.
I changed my way of thinking again. 15 years seems to be a lot of time but it’s not(Bosnia is like a small child and we don’t ask kids for too much) and there’s alot been done during this time, the normality that one feels in a city is extraordinary, the cities have been reconstructed, this is a huge step.

Bureaucracy is one of the biggest problems but NATO is focusing their efforts on solving it.
Nobody wants to come back to war, they say that if there’s work there won’t be problems and cultures are starting to mix. Mostar the divided city has started joint budgets, the ambulance service for example. There are mixed kinder-gardens, it seems the 15 years are crossing some wounds.

All this has made me come back to something similar to my first phase, I’ve had a great time in Bosnia Herzegovina and I’m sure Sarajevo is going to become a popular destination to spend a weekend as Prague, Barcelona or Edinburgh with the bonus of seeing the city of the war and the mix of cultures that no other european city has. Also as not that many people have come, it gives an exploratory feeling that you don’t have in London or Rome.

I recommend you coming, moving is easy, cheap, there’s a lot of people that speak in English and transportation is not expensive. It will need some more effort to move around but you’ll be rewarded, be sure.
This is why I regret about the video, It would have been more enriching if I recorded a video of the new and beautiful rather than the old and hurt.

During my time here I’ve also learnt about the trade and merchant scene in Bosnia. The crossroads of cultures also meant a merchant hub and cities like Disoko, Jajce Travnik Gorazde and Livno swapped goods from east and west.
There also was a small community of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain in 1492 settled in several towns bringing their delicate crafts onto the scene.

To finalize, if any of you have interest on some videos on Sarajevo during the siege, here you have some:
– First part of a documentary of people living their normal lifes
– Second part.
– Shooting to civilians. Take notice of the backgroun; clean streets, supermarkets, normal lights…

Ah!! A comment for guys about Croatia, and I don’t mean to be sexist. I give you a reason for not liking Croatians… they invented the tie!!!

See you soon

Fernando

Sorry, this entry is only available in Español.

Alfonso, a friend from Burgos, worked in the army during the reconstrucion work in Bosnia. It sounded like going to hell at that time. He said that Bosnia was really pretty, he was there twice, one of them was constructing a bridge. What makes Bosnia stunning is the environment, the landscapes with mountains.

In Bosnia it´s said that if a person is born on a snowy day that person will have a long and healthy life.

Here the walk started. Although they have a lot of great places including Linx and Bears, just 0,6% of the country is protected, the average in europe is 7%.

The majority of things that I wanted to see on the mountains were not accesible due to the snow, so one day we went snowshoeing.

Bit of a hike.

Down in the canyon there was a river.

A Sheppard settlement for summer.

We went for the hike with Green Visions company, they have some very interesting excursions and they try to combine them with supporting the communities they work in. They are a very professional company but our guide was a little cocky and he told us we did not have appropriate footwear. Even though we were wearing GORE-TEX! However it´s alway funny to have somebody to make jokes of.

An interesting mosque, I initially thought it was a silo.

Bosnia and Herzegovina still have a lot of land mines, there are places even near Sarajevo that still have many. Setting them up is very easy but the effort to remove them is very difficult and expensive. If in doubt you can always ask a local to know if it safe.

A country with landmines does not mean that you cannot step off the asphalt. The mine areas are known and there are maps available. However it´s a problem for toursim development. Luckily, until now no tourist has had an accident with a land mine.

In Sarajevo you can go to the Mine Action Center(MAC) for a mini training course about land mines, however, when in doubt, the best thing is to ask the locals.

No need to commetn.

Once back in Sarajevo we went for dinner with Tom, an interesting man who works as a consultant developing tourism strategies in different countries. We asked for the local dish in the restaurant which was next to the restaurant that Bill Clinton dined in. The dish was beef with some creamy cheese inside and if you cut it wrong it sprayed all over as in the picture. I also have a video of it that will probably put in the next video.

Something totally unrelated to the post… While travelling from Croatia to Bosnia I started to think of a Christmas tale.
As we approach Christmas I’ll develop the story and post it here.

Soon writting about Mostar

Fernando

For any European of my age(and I guess for most westerners), names like Bosnia, Sarajevo, Kosovo or Mostar are names repeated in the news, we used to hear them on the sofa while we watched projectiles impacting houses and blue helmets in reinforced white vehicles around desolated cities. 18 years after the war started I want to see what all those names meant, see those cities and if possible get to understand that war a little bit.

Bosnia Herzegovina represents part of what my trip is, not for being on the silk route itself, but for being a crossroads between east and west, the mosques and churches in the same city for centuries living together, western customs and Muslims customs. The map could be folded by Sarajevo and Mostar and we´d have West on one side and East on the other.

I´ve compiled some pictures to complete the previous posts, let´s see if you imagined something like this.

Baščaršija mosque and under it a street full of normality. this is the most surprising thing in Sarajevo, the amount of normality in the streets. People having a walk or drinking something in a terrace enjoying a sunny afternoon in April.

Oslobodjenja Square in which men play chess, I guess it’s a socialist influence, but it’s just a vague supposition.

Four months it took them to build it. It is the tunnel that joined the siege city with the rest of the Bosnian territory. It went under the NATO controlled airport. The tunnel provided basic weapons to defend the city. It was also used to get food in. The Serbs tried to destroy it but they didn’t dare to touch NATO territory, this is why it survived the entire siege.

As I was saying the other day Sarajevo is surrounded by mountains and this is what made the snipers a key piece in the war.

On the left the rebuilt parliament building. On the right, the mustard coloured Holiday Inn, where the journalists stayed.

The Miljacka river crossing the city after the rain, therefore the colour. Just next to this place is where Franz Ferdinand was killed starting the first world war.

This picture tries to show how normal the city is. If it wouldn’t be for the mosques it could be any other European city. Also there’s very little amount of women wearing a scarf. As a Spanish journalist I met said, they have high hills and plunging neckline Muslims, and the majority want to keep it that way. Sarajevo has cathedrals, mosques and synagogues next to each other, I like it.

Sarajevo is totally surrounded by mountains, green mountains with colourful houses. In the picture an Austro-Hungarian building that has mount Izmir in the background, there are places that when you look around you see 3 different mountains pointing at you.

Every time I see the word sniper I imagine a concentrated eye looking through a scope. Dropping a bomb from a plane is “easy” you click a button and a few seconds later you hear an explosion, but in the eye of the sniper the face of the person to be killed is reflected while the sniper is concentrated, young or old, man or woman, blond or dark hair, scared or not. What are the memories of these people after their work? Fixed memories of images where you have been concentrated?

Sarajevo Library that was bombed in which 600.000 books where burned, now it’s being rebuilt. How could those bombs sound? there was no electricity or gas, there was no noise in the streets as a recently snowed city. The bombs and shots had to sound even louder.

I’ve never got into an Islamic cemetery before. the tombs are so white and this one, on a mount in Sarajevo had good views of the city.

This shape over a tomb means that the person has visited meca(the precept hajj).

Faded over time a Sarajevo rose, but with the same meaning, someone died here. Apart from the Bosnians that died here 320 blue helmets died as well.

Sarajevo has trams and trolleybuses. Doesn’t it seem a totally normal city? Sorry for insisting, but this is like it is, this war wasn’t´ in a dessert or surrounded by palm trees. Sarajevo youngsters used to watch MTV and wear the same brands as we did. Maybe that’s why its more impressionable, because it seems it can happened any where and that makes you feel vulnerable, an unconfortable feeling.

A picture to reduce the drama. Eggs comes in tens not in dozens, probably for tradition, but ¿why are condoms sold in dozens?

In the previous post I talked you about the book ”The most beautiful word”. Even I talked quite a lot about it I haven’t spoilt the plot in case anyone want’s to read it.

Talking about books I have another recommendation. “The Fixer. A story from Sarajevo” from Joe Sacco, a comic creator that has other comics like “Palestine”. A bit of a different approach to understand a place. Goiko is a bit like the character in the comic.

I’ve had a haircut and getting a bus to Mostar by the Neretva river as Gemma did with her son.

See you soon.
Fernando

I start Bosnia and Herzegovina with a picture-less post. We saw Sarajevo a lot of times on the telly.

I arrived to Sarajevo by bus reading “The most wonderful word” a Margaret Mazzantini novel. I didn’t know anythiLng about the book, just that Sarajevo was in it. I started reading how the main character, Gemma, arrived there for the first time like me. Sarajevo was a normal city like any other in Europe, the war was not anticipated. I read how she discovered the city and its people, I soon found myself involuntarily following her steps. My first meal was Cevapciciy(grilled meatballs mmmmm) as her first meal was.

Goiko accompanied her during her first visit, I was accompanied by her. Goiko was her guide while she was investigating something for the university, there she met Diego, her future husband and Sarajevo, a city visited as a curiosity that became another character in her life. Sarajevo changed her life several times and I go around it’s streets remembering her feelings and I living her memories, it has been extremely interesting.
I walk around it’s streets and come across the things that Gemma talked about, the plaza where the old guys play chess or the too many(as she says) bridges over the Miljaka.

I’ve been imagining how the city changed when the war started, how the supermarket shelves became empty, how the trams stopped working thanks to the greanades and how to learn to sleep with the sound of shots.

When I read about the market I went there, she saw how it got turned into a black market where people sold their jewelery to get a heater or some fresh food. Now it’s a normal market where buying fresh food is not an event.

I see the Holiday Inn, where the journalists stayed because it was the only working hotel in the war. There she used to find some contacts. I went in and had a tea trying to imagine how it looked at that time when the sniper exposed rooms were closed, I’ve started writing this post as if it was one of those journalists.

I see the mountains that make Sarajevo so quaint, the same ones that made Sarajevo a hell during the war. The Serbs surrounded Sarajevo, they occupied the mountains and filled them with snipers, now in peaceful times you realize how hard it had to be living more than 1400 days stalked by the snipers. Gemma and Diego(her husband) crossed the streets running and when they raised up their heads they always saw a mountain and during the war there was always a sniper pointing at you.

The cars now stop at the lights, before they crossed as fast as possible what was called  sniper alley. Gemma tells how she learned that at noon they became less active because they were also human and they went for lunch and how in the afternoon they shot worse as they were having a sljiva(a kind of local brandy) with lunch.

In the centre of Sarajevo you find red painted stains on the ground, they are Sarajevo’s roses that indicate where atrocities happened or where a sniper hit a target. These are dead people from the three sides in this complicated story. Gemma sees them when returning after the war as she remembers the ones she lost this way. In this story there are great and sad things happening where hate is born and then tried to be forgotten. In Sarajevo’s siege 11,000 people died, 85% civilian.

The streets had hanging cables with no power as it was cut at the beginning. People used to use candles with as little oil as possible to make them last more, for heating they did small balls to make them burn slowly.

Gemma tells how the supermarket shells became empty, how the provisions came from the tunnel the Bosnians made to provide themselves with arms and be able to defend themselves. Also the tunnel brought food in, Gemma tells how some people got rich and now they drive big cars around the city.

The gunned down bodies during the day couldn’t be collected until night to avoid being the second victim of the sniper. They would bury them in the parks that every time had less trees and more tombs. The trees were cut for heating or cooking,  just 4 out of the 14 parks are left. Sarajevo has very cold winters enough to host the winter Olympic games in 1984. Gemma talks about blood dirty snow, beds in kitchens, the only place with some heating, and furniture burnt so as not to be cold.

Even as the war was going on, life continued and Gemma and Diego gathered with Goiko in some hidden underground bar where if it was possible they had a Sarajevska beer like the one I have with dinner, I’m not very excited about it but for them it must have tasted like normality.

As the days past food was short, nettles were cooked, tastes not forgotten and hated after too much repetition. Gemma talks how a day of rain was a blessing, an opportunity to have a fresh shower, collect water to wash the clothes. Not being able to wash with fresh water in more than 1400 days must have left a horrible smell on people and clothes.

The rain also brought snails next day, that compared with the 200 grams per person a day that  NATO provided where a tasty platter and full of proteins. The mother collected the snails while hiding because they where ashamed of being seen, probably by people in the same situation.

Gemma tells how a friend one day got some strength with those snails so tasty, he got dressed with a shirt and tie and walked to sniper alley, as people that couldn’t cope with any more did, and wanted to die with the little bit of dignity that they had left.

Goiko was her guide but in fact he was a poet, they became friends and lived things together. The war changed Goiko from doing love poems to poems of a dead friend and later to playing football with the heads of the decapitated enemy.

At the end of the book the writer also talks about how difficult it was leaving the war, “It was easier running between the grenades”.

Sarajevo has been intense.

Soon the pictures.
Fernando

Croatia has 1185 islands, I wanted to explore one with time and choose Havar, the one I thought would be more beautiful. Promised vineyards, lighthouses, flower fields, history, Mediterranean in pure state, fishermen and small villages with a relaxed life. This is what I found.

Here I am, ready to go around the island. What better way?

Havar town is where the ferry left me, in summer it becomes one of the most glamorous cities in the Adriatic with modern music clubs and restaurants, now in low season it’s a peaceful village to have walks in an pleasant place.

This is how the Adriatic is, no matter where you look there are islands.

Havar is all mountain and on the mountains are cultivated terraces. The lavender has not blossomed but in July the colour comes and the smell invades the island.

Spring is coming and the cherries are blossoming.

At night I had dinner with Havar wine, I liked it.

I was searching for Mediterranean images and I found them.

Lighthouses have always intrigued me, a lonely and salty life, maybe humid, with the keepers and some times their families, isolated but accompanied by the sound of the sea.

Several lighthouses along the coast has been prepared for tourism, this is one of them. From all the available ones, Palagruza is the one I’ve liked more. If it wouldn’t be for the price and that you had to be there for a week I would have gone. The rest of them are in the link, I leave it in my list of pending things to do.

Croatia has a lot of nudist beaches there’s even a complex for 7000 people. Also there are places where it’s been too much and that’s why this sign is here. Remember, for nudism its important to have the sun protector.

It could maybe be Ibiza or a Greek island but in this case it is Croatia. The best of it’s coast is that they are not over urbanized and that there are no buildings every where, there is sea, beach and mountain.

With Havar my trip around Croatia nearly finishes. Some people may say… and Dubrovnik? Dubrovnik is quite in the south and Bosnia Herzegovina is on the east, it’s much handier going east now and leave the end of Croatia while going to Montenegro. A bus of over seven hours has taken me to Sarajevo. I’ll soon tell you about all the surprises I’ve found here.

Also I add a picture I was feeling like putting when I talked about Naïve painting.

It’s not from Havar, but the other day I wanted to post it but didn’t do it, so here it is. This is what I meant about Dragon Ball landscapes for whoever didn’t know about what that was.

See you soon.

Fernando