Location: Oslo's Gardermoen airport.
Time: just after 1am.
I landed here an hour ago. My connecting flight to Helsinki leaves tomorrow morning at half past ten, and the cheapest, most basic hotel nearby costs about 80 Euros. Its reviews on booking.com are strikingly vitriolic, and getting there on the airport shuttle will set me back another 15 Euros.
Naturally, I'm not going to pay that. So I'm bedding down on the airport floor.
The particular spot I've chosen is a kids' playground, surfaced with something like astro-turf which is marginally more comfortable than the cold, hard tiles that predominate elsewhere.
I've taken up position directly beneath a piece of play equipment shaped like an aeroplane, designed for small folk to crawl through. At the moment, there's an adult asleep inside it, arms folded over his chest like a movie vampire in a movie vampire's coffin. There are about half a dozen others around me, shifting and starting in their sleep.
The website 'sleepinginairports.com' places Gardermoen at number five on the list of best airports in the world for a good night's rest. Personally I'd have to disagree ... though admittedly, I haven't tried all the others.
Aside from the discomfort, the task of falling asleep is further complicated by a whirl of thoughts. Tomorrow I start summer camp, and the first day of camp is always intense ... so that's on my mind of course. Also, I'll be back in fabulous Finland, which means that "Mmmm, Finland" feeling has begun creeping up on me ...
Even more than that, though, my brain is replaying things I've seen and heard over the past few days. It's been an extraordinary time, with lots of new information to cram in, 'cause this week I finally did one of those things I've been planning to do for years and years ... I went to Sarajevo!
*cue cheers, streamers etc*
I often find that, when a particular city really inspires and excites me, it's quite difficult to write about afterwards. I end up sounding like I'm advertising the city, which is really not the point of Ranting Manor. So I re-wrote this entry several times, trying to make it not sound like a travelogue.
Then I thought: "Screw it! Embrace your inner travel brochure-writing hack! Ride that wild cliche-o-coaster right to the bitter end!" And, you know, other thoughts like that.
So ... here are approximately ten reasons why you should absolutely, positively, and without further ado, visit the heck out of Sarajevo.
REASON #1: THE JOURNEY
Why? Well, because you can also arrive by bus, which generally entails travelling through about half of Bosnia-Herzegovina. And that's a super-worthwhile experience ... assuming you're one who's partial to a bit of a road trip, of course :-)
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'MINI-FJORDS' AT DUSK Near Zvornik, Bosnia-Herzegivona, 15.07.14 |
You spend most of that time winding past 'mini-fjords' and fjells, sleepy villages where the houses are a tiny bit reminiscent of Swiss chalets (only without the obsessive-compulsive neatness), heavily sedimented rivers and streams, and impressive peaks towering skyward, close enough to the road that you frequently pass signs warning of falling rocks. And since there are basically no passing lanes, you end up snail-pacing along behind trucks loaded with timber for extended periods, as the forests glide past you in slow motion. It feels like the opposite of time-lapse photography.
So yeah ... a frikkin' long journey, to be sure, but a memorable one :-)
REASON #2: THE WELCOME
On the evening when I arrived, I'd set out from Belgrade at around four in the afternoon. By the time we pulled into Sarajevo's barely-lit and somewhat creepy bus station, it was after eleven.
I was concerned that my small, family-run hotel might not have anyone on night duty. I needn’t have worried, though; the owner and his friends were sitting in the lobby bar, where they seemed to remain almost permanently for the next three days. Before lugging my wheelie bag up two flights of stairs, the owner gave me a warm, sympathetic smile, and handed me a complimentary shot of rakia (slightly sweetened plum brandy – a classic Balkan drink with a 40% kick), to ease the pain of the journey.
I could tell I was going to like this place ;-)
REASON #3: THE TOUR
I'm not always a fan of the City Tour. Having said that, though, there are some cities in which it really does seem appropriate to join a tour, just to get your bearings and decide which bits you want to explore later at your leisure. Sarajevo definitely falls into that category. There's so much going on just within the architectural fabric of the city, you really need a bit of orientation to help you make sense of it all.
So I signed up for the tour on my first day, and I'm glad I did. Staring around and gazing up in awe, I could fade in and out as needed. Sometimes I'd be focused on the tour guide's nuggets of information; other times he'd be a distant buzz as I lost myself in the details of the street. It dragged a bit towards the end, but it was a necessary intro to a city that's as layered as the outfit of an Australian tourist on an Arctic dog-sledding expedition.
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HAPSBURG ARCHITECTURE ON TITO STREET Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.2014 |
Btw, the tour I took begins on the elegant Ulica Marshala Tita – Tito Street. This is actually a great starting point, because it entails a discussion of the man more associated with the word "Yugoslavia" than any other, and whose death led to its break-up (directly or indirectly, depending on which account you read).
Walking down a 'Tito street' anywhere in the former Yugoslavia is quite a lot like walking down any street in the former USSR that has a statue of Lenin at its main intersection (and there are a ton of those!). It makes you think about the convolutions of history, and about how we 20th/21st century folk manage to take these in our stride, getting on with our little lives while the world around us goes through serial upheaval.
Pretty damn intense, in other words :-)
REASON #4: TWO 'OLD TOWNS' FOR THE PRICE OF ONE
Ulica Marshala Tita is actually the main drag in the Hapsburg part of town, and as my little walking tour progressed, I became more acquainted with that district. Interestingly, though, it's just one of two 'Old Towns' here.
To explain this, I need to delve into a bit of history.
Let's begin with a war. This is Europe, after all – historical home of the "How about we go next door and confirm our Divine Right to rule by killing our neighbours?" approach to international relations.
So ... a couple of entries back, I mentioned the Russo-Turkish war of the 1870s. Not a hugely well-known conflict in the world at large, but Balkans-wise it turns out to be über-significant. It set the stage for a lot of what came later, and in a sense, its outcome still reverberates through the region today.
For example, after the war there was something called 'The Treaty of Berlin', by which Sarajevo was signed over from the Ottoman Turks to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It remained part of their territory until after World War I, at which point a rather intriguing new country called Yugoslavia (which means "land of the southern Slavs") party-popped into existence.
In the intervening 40 years, Austro-Hungary – ruled at that time by the house of Hapsburg – put a fair amount of effort into persuading reluctant Sarajevans that they were living under worthy, responsible rulers. They introduced electricity, tram lines and a bunch of other stuff designed to coax the population out of their tiny alleys filled with fragrant shisha smoke, and into the modern European world.
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LOOK - WE'RE IN BUDAPEST! Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
They also vastly extended the city – but very sensitively for the time, they didn't flatten existing buildings and construct new ones over the top of them. Instead, they left the Ottoman centre completely intact, and started construction where the old part ended, extending its main street to the west.
This decision is one that I think almost every visitor to Sarajevo must appreciate and marvel at. In the 19thC, Sarajevo had already long been known as a 'meeting point between east and west', but the new centre dramatically accentuated that idea. Now when you go there, you can stand at the confluence of the Ottoman town and the Hapsburg town, where east literally meets west – at least from an architectural point of view. Someone has even helpfully painted a compass on the ground, to mark the spot.
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NO WAIT ... WE'RE IN TURKEY! Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
The Ottoman town, meanwhile, is beautiful. Along the main streets are elegant mosques and medrassahs, a karavanserai and a bezistan (ancient trading place, currently being restored).
Radiating out from the main thoroughfares are poky little laneways, some barely wide enough to squeeze through. If you peer down to the end of them, you find that some lead into hidden courtyards, while others offer a view of the green hills that surround the city. Sometimes the low awnings of the two-storey buildings almost touch in the middle, so you have the impression of walking through a covered maze.
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PURIFICATION FONT OUTSIDE THE CENTRAL MOSQUE Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
Granted, you do have to share all of this with a fair number of tourists, but still, it's a pretty magical kinda place.
REASON #5: THE 20thC STARTED HERE
When I was at high school, Modern History was my favourite subject by a long, long way. I just couldn't get enough of it, and I even took an extra unit in which people who knew stuff tried to cram the complexities of revolutionary theory into my 17-year-old brain. It was mind-bending at the time. In fact, it still is.
Of course, the two World Wars were pretty huge on the syllabus, and so we talked a lot about why they happened – both in terms of underlying causes, and of the 'sparks' which ignited each conflict.
In the case of WWI, the spark (as I'm sure most of you know) was the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a jittery young lad named Gavrilo Princip, who was part of an organisation called The Black Hand. And that assassination took place in Sarajevo.
To be more specific, it took place on this street corner here:
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FRANZ FERDINAND ASSASSINATION MUSEUM Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzigovina, 16.07.14 |
The story is worth recounting, because there's definitely more than just a whiff of wtf? about it.
See, the Archduke had already had a bomb thrown at him on that day in June 1914. And it had happened on the very same street – on the very same block, in fact. He'd been on his way to an official engagement with his wife Sophie, and the boulevard was lined with spectators. A few of them were members of the Black Hand (who nowadays we'd probably label a 'terrorist organisation', without analysing what that actually means beyond the fact that they were shooting at people and they didn't have a permission note from the government).
Most of the Black Hand guys were armed, but for various reasons, they were unable to do anything at the crucial moment. Several of them, it seems, were just catastrophically disorganised – if you were going to make a comedy movie out of an assassination plot, this would probably be the one to choose. But the third guy in line had a bomb, and he threw it at Franz and Sophie's car.
In a display of ineptitude that appears to have been the Black Hand's unintentional trademark, he missed Franz and Sophie, and blew up the car next to theirs. He then swallowed poison and leapt into the nearby river, but the poison didn't work and he couldn't manage to drown himself, so he was fished out and arrested. Several of his cohorts, who'd been standing along the street concealing their various weapons, were collared too. Most of them died in prison, but one went on to become a history professor.
At this point, one has to wonder what could've motivated the Archduke to attempt another 'pass the crowds and wave regally' stunt on this street, where he'd nearly been blown up just hours before – especially when he was in an open car with his wife sitting next to him. But there you go; never underestimate the idiocy of a European aristocrat, or the disaster that may result from it.
So anyway, after his meeting, off went Archie Dukie down the boulevard once more. Gavrilo Princip was sitting in a tea house, no doubt wondering to himself whether there were any other violent anti-government groups in Bosnia who weren't totally useless, and whether they'd accept him as a member. He saw the Duke's car approaching, and – probably unable to believe his luck – he stood up, went outside and shot Franz Ferdinand dead. Then, you know, political squabbles, Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia, Germany declares war on Russia, and a bunch of other European countries all jump in, like baseball players leaping on top of their fighting teammates to form a big pile of flailing guys in numerically-coded pyjamas.
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THE 'KENNEDY MOMENT' Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
Looking at this from street level made me think that the incident in 1914 must have been, in a sense, almost Europe's 'Kennedy moment'. But it also re-kindled memories of Year 11 Modern History lessons, in which the masterful Brother Sean (probably my favourite teacher ever, and certainly one of the people responsible for igniting my interest in the past) had brought these events to life so brilliantly and evocatively.
So yeah: an essential street corner if you're a Modern History nerd ... like, say, me :-)
REASON #6: THE FOOD
Balkan cuisine is vastly under-rated. I mean, if you asked your friends to make a list of countries they'd visit on a 'world food tour', how many of them would name a Balkan nation? My guess would be approximately none ... whereas personally, I think there's every reason why they should.
For a start, if you like white cheese (which I do), stop reading and get on a plane right now. I actually don't think I had any idea how good cheese could be until I first visited Bulgaria. Then this month, I found out it's a region-wide thing; you can just as easily find yourself doing the white cheese-swoon in any Balkan country. And I do.
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BALKAN DELICACIES Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14 |
In Sarajevo, you also get the added twist of the Ottoman influence (although to be fair, it's noticeable in the eastern parts of Bulgaria too). And the results are definitely Food Tour-worthy!
At the start I mentioned that I was having trouble sleeping on the airport floor, and that things I'd seen and heard in recent days were adding to the difficulty. Here's an example of something that's been on replay:
“You see those houses just there?”
Five heads turn away from a mildly pretty Jewish cemetery, to regard two unremarkable two-storey semis, each with a windowless, white-washed wall on one side.
"Mm-hmm".
“I was in this one, and the Serbs, they were in that one. Sometimes in the evenings, we could hear them talking and playing cards, probably drunk. And then the next morning, they would try to take our house and we would try to take theirs ... you know?”
"No", I thought, "I don't know. But you clearly do, and that blows my mind."
That little vignette occurred yesterday afternoon, as I was standing on a hilltop overlooking Sarajevo's old centre, half-way through another tour (this one called 'The Siege Tour'). The guy doing most of the talking was a wiry, middle-aged Bosnian man, who drove us around to a series of locations in the hills and near the airport, showing us various 'hot spots' and tearing through half a pack of cigarettes in the process.
In most European cities, the tour guides really know their history. They learn it, they memorise it, and they repeat it every day. But in Sarajevo, some of the guides simply have no use for all that study; I mean, why would you need to study historical events that you were actually a part of?
More arresting still is the fact that this guy's first-hand experiences of being besieged in his own city are far from unique. They're not even unusual. Nearly every Sarajevan over the age of about 25 has at least one ‘siege story’ to tell ... which is perhaps not overly surprising, when you consider that the Siege of Sarajevo (from Feb 1992 to the end of 1995) was the longest of the 20th Century – even longer than the Battle of Stalingrad or the Leningrad Blockade. To find a comparable one in Europe, you have to go back to Gibraltar in the 1780s. And the Sarajevo Siege is in living memory of, say, at least half the people you see there in the street.
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A 'SARAJEVO ROSE' Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
You sense this immanence of history everywhere as you walk around. Sometimes it's overt – the museums will put on exhibitions with names like 'Srebrenica 20 years on', and things like that – but elsewhere it's more subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) woven into the architectural fabric. You look up, and you see a whole mess of plaster marks which show you where bullet holes have been repaired. Or you look down and see a 'Sarajevo Rose' – a splotch of red paint marking the spot where a citizen was killed by a shell or rocket impact.
Notice, btw, that behind the 'rose' pictured here you can see the bottom of a wall. That wall belongs to one of the city's cathedrals, and the honeycombing that starts about 20cm off the ground is the result of shrapnel. Chilling.
Sometimes it's even in what you don't see.
During the siege, foreign journalists covering the story took refuge in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, which suddenly became the world's most recognisable ugly mid-range hotel. Although both sides had agreed not to fire on it, the building took any number of indirect hits, and I remember seeing footage of it looking decidedly embattled, with smoke pouring from windows and so on.
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HOLIDAY INN Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
Today the wounds are gone, and the building has been completely restored to its original hideous yellow-and-orange self. It stands fairly near the old centre, surrounded by a small, neat garden. But although it's on a main street, its environs are strangely quiet and unpopulated. This near-silent calm, and the utter lack of anything that betrays the hotel's recent past, are more than a little creepy.
REASON #8: THE NIGHT LIFE
When I travel alone I rarely regret it, but Sarajevo was an exception to this, just because the night life is so great.
As I mentioned earlier, I'd come here from Belgrade, where after about 10pm it's all about the 'splats'. These are old boats moored on the banks of the river Sava and converted into pretentious night clubs for beautiful people. They're probably fun if you're under 25 and so hip that it hurts; but as I'm neither of those things, it left me cold and mildly nauseous.
A few scattered clubs in the Hapsburg parts of Sarajevo offer something vaguely similar to that, but the bulk of the night spots are outdoors, in alleyways and small hidden squares. At around the same time a battery of second-rate DJs commence their mediocre noodlings in Belgrade, these little Sarajevan nooks fill with people, drinking coffee and wine, smoking nargile (tobacco pipes) and sitting on tiny plastic chairs under the low-hanging eaves. It's one of the most intimate nightlife settings I've seen anywhere ... and apparently it goes on well into the a.m. hours, every night of the week.
Hence my slight regret that I wasn't there with friends. It would've been great :-)
REASON #9: THE UNEXPECTED
You see things in Sarajevo that tend to undercut your expectations and presumptions about the world.
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QUR'AN-READING BABUSHKA Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 16.07.14 |
I couldn't bring myself to photograph the babushka directly – it just seemed like too much of an intrusion – so instead I took a shot of her reflection in the tram window.
Likewise yesterday when we were on the Siege Tour, there were some truly unexpected moments. Besides seeing wild horses on a mountaintop, and the burned out ruins of a fabulous late Soviet-era luxury hotel (looking suitably angular and science fiction-esque), we were also set loose by our guide at the top of a disused bob-sled run.
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ENTER THE BOB SLED! Hills around Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 17.07.14 |
REASON #10: YOU'LL MAKE ME JEALOUS!
I have this weird thing where, when people go to places I'd love to visit myself, I feel an idiotic sense of jealously. I said right at the start that Sarajevo has been in my sights for years, and in fact I've applied several times for jobs there. So every time I met someone who'd just recently been, I burned with envy.
The thing is, with some places, once I've been there the envy goes away. But with others, it intensifies. I suspect Sarajevo may turn out to be of the latter kind. When I left last night, it was with a sense of regret, and in the knowledge that there was so much more to see than I'd managed to cram into three days. Of course I had the "Never mind, I'll be back here" thought, but I know that a desire to return doesn't always translate into a future opportunity to actually do so.
So ... go on, then! Go to Sarajevo and make me jealous. You know you want to :-)
See you!
* What is the plural of "metropolis" anyway? I experimented with 'metropoles' (pronouncing the last bit 'eez') and 'metropolises' before settling on 'metropoli', but I think they all sound ok.
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