On my second morning in Sarajevo, Bosnia, I amble along the Miljacka River. The river is the color of tea, just a few inches deep in some places, and flecked with trash. It trickles north to south, meandering along the east side of town. The banks overflow with weeds. I pass an Ottoman style overpass that I recognize from Rough Guides as The Latin Bridge. It’s the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.
I veer away from the river and up a cobblestone street. I peer into open doorways. Through one, old men with grubby hands and stubbly chins and white t-shirts eat breakfast and watch TV. Through another, a metal worker puts delicate engravings into a bronze serving plate. Through a third, a gray-haired woman trims a child’s hair. At some point, I realize I’m lost.
I like to get lost while I’m traveling. Never at night, but during the day I leave my hostels and walk until I didn’t know where I am anymore. I stumble down side streets and alleyways and thoroughfares, sometimes on a whim and other times because something catches my fancy. I feel like I learn more from a city’s underbelly than from its tourist circuit.
I decided to visit Sarajevo three days ago when I was in Belgrade, Serbia. The only reason I’d heard about it was because of the 1984 Winter Olympics and the Bosnian War. But I can’t discern any trace of that war today.
I walk uphill until my legs burn and I have to stop to catch my breath. I cross a road and to my right, through a break between two buildings, I see a flash of white. Intrigued, I head toward that whiteness, down a shaded alleyway, past a dumpster.
When I come out between the buildings it makes sense. I’m staring at a hillside of gravestones. Hundreds upon hundreds of gravestones that glimmer like a mirage.
There is no fence on the hillside so I walk straight off the street and into the graveyard, sinking to my thighs in wildflowers. I wade through the flowers until I reach a walking path.
I stop at the first gravestone. Jasarevic Ramiz: 1941 to 1995. The stone may explain how Jasarevic died, but I can’t read the Bosnian script below the dates. I move on. Faud Hodzic: 1990 to 1992. Besim Hrustic: 1963 to 1994. I move faster, deviating from the walking trail, trampling through flowers.
Some gravestones have pictures of men or women, girls or boys. Some are simple and some are elaborate. Some are decorated with wreaths, teddy bears, and handwritten letters.
The common denominator is the year of death: 1992, 1993, 1994, or 1995. I see these years on every stone. In a moment of insight, I understand that this is a mass gravesite for victims of the Bosnian War.
I’m so affected that I spend an hour, maybe two, in the graveyard. Maybe it’s the shock of discovering the graveyard accidentally. Maybe it’s the fact that the Bosnian War seems more real to me than other wars because it occurred in my lifetime. Maybe it’s because I spent fifteen months in an actual warzone, woke up to the sound of incoming mortars, and can comprehend how traumatizing that experience would be.
When I finally tear myself away from the graveyard at midday, Sarajevo is a different city. I see the remnants of war on every corner. High on the walls of buildings I notice, for the first time, the indentations where mortar rounds impacted concrete. Fissures run off the craters. Some of the pockmarks have been filled with red paint, creating the appearance of flesh wounds. I read later that these paint-filled mortar marks are called “Sarajevo Roses.”
Down by the river, I walk in the shadows of an enormous building that is barricaded and covered in sheets of plastic. A plaque offers explanation. This was the National Library. It was destroyed by Serb artillery in the early morning hours of August 27, 1992. Serb forces launched twenty-five mortar rounds at the library from four locations in the mountains. They also dropped forty mortar rounds around the neighborhood, preventing the fire brigade from reaching the library. In a matter of minutes, 1.2 million books and six hundred sets of periodicals were engulfed in flames.
I learn that this was the largest book burning in world history. An onlooker I read about said that the smoke of burning books obscured the sun. Pages of literature floated in the air like gray ghosts, lines of text still visible, then disintegrated in front of people’s faces. Nineteen years later, the National Library is still under construction.
***
That evening, a man named Ammar and I sit at a restaurant, sipping tea. Ammar was born in Sarajevo but his English is excellent. After a few hours I come to the conclusion that he is more of a gentleman than many men I’ve met overseas.
“Do you remember the war?” I ask him at one point.
“Yeah,” he says. “But vaguely, and sometimes I’m not sure how accurate my memory is because I was a kid, you know? I was six, seven years old. We’d be playing in the yard with a ball or something, and then we’d hear mortars whizzing through the air and our parents yelling at us to get inside. We’d run into the house and hide under the table. And after a while they’d announce an ‘All Clear’ over the loudspeakers. And then we’d go back outside and play again.”
“Were you desensitized to it?”
“I’m not sure. It was all we knew as kids. f that whizzing is one of your earliest memories it becomes normal. I mean, obviously it’s not, but you become used to it.”
“And how many times would that happen in a day? Getting mortared, I mean.”
“Sometimes once, sometimes dozens of times.”
“Does it still affect you?”
“Yeah, in subtle ways. A couple of months ago, for example, Sarajevo had a celebration with fireworks. My mom knew about it, but my brother and I didn’t. We were all in the house when the first fireworks went off. My brother grabbed my mom and me and threw us underneath the kitchen table. It was instinct, I guess.”
***
“I want to take you somewhere,” Ammar says. “It’s a surprise.”
I’m tired as hell. Because I lost my watch in Bucharest, Romania, I have to trust my body to wake me up at 5:15 a.m. Dubrovnik, Croatia, is the next stop on my itinerary, and I need to catch a trolley to the bus depot to get there.
But I want to see what Ammar’s surprise entails.
We get into a taxi and drive uphill, past the graveyard. Ammar says something in Bosnian to the driver and he lets us off at the end of a dead-end road. The area is devoid of people and surrounded by woods. I get out of the taxi and stand off to one side as Ammar hands the driver some convertible marks.
The driver reverses and the taxi makes crunching noises as it rolls downhill. We are alone. Just me and Ammar standing on a dead-end road in the forests above Sarajevo at nightfall. A light drizzle is coming down.
“OK,” says Ammar, approaching me. “You can’t see where we’re going. It’s a surprise. Close your eyes.”
I shut my eyes and Ammar offers me his arm. We start walking and I can tell that we’re headed uphill. I feel the curve of tree roots and pebbles below my feet. In this hyper-aware state I can also sense trees ahead of me and to both sides. But after a few minutes, I can’t sense them anymore and I know we’re in a clearing. We keep walking.
Finally Ammar stops me and says, “Open your eyes.”
When I open my eyes I see that we’re standing at the edge of an overlook in a small park on the fringes of Sarajevo. I can see the entire city below me. Lights impart a haze to the valley floor. Sarajevo is called the Jerusalem of Europe and I can see the roofs and spires and steeples of mosques, synagogues, and churches. I can also make out the brown flow of the Miljacka River.
The most beautiful thing about the view is not the city itself but the way the mountains look around Sarajevo. The Dinaric Alps are the fifth largest mountain range in Europe. They wind through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Albania. Ammar and I are standing on the edge of the mountains and they are also directly across from us on the opposite side of the valley. Compared to the city, the mountains are black.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Ammar asks me.
“Yes,” I say. I’ve been lucky to have had quite a few moments like that in my life, moments when you realize you’re experiencing something astonishing, like looking down from a Blackhawk helicopter as it flies over the mountains in Afghanistan, or riding a camel beside the Great Pyramids, or watching the sun rise above the Taj Mahal.
Ammar and I continue to stare at the skyline. “Can you see why Sarajevo is my favorite place on earth?” he asks. “Can’t you imagine staying here forever?”
We take seats at the edge of the overlook. A couple joins us in the park, whispering as they share a joint. Wisps of marijuana smoke waft in our direction.
We gaze into the valley. Stars dot the sky and the air smells like pine trees and damp earth. I’m five months into my travels and still hungry for the novelty of the next new city. But for a second I understand why someone might want to stay in one place forever.