There’s a songbird that likes to perch in the scrub of almond and fruit trees outside our window here in Mostar, in southern Bosnia, and he’s been singing his heart out all night. I don’t know what a nightingale sounds like, but I’d like to think that’s what it is.
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| One of Mostar's bombed out buildings |
I wonder what happened to the wildlife during the three-year war here in the ’90s when about 80 rockets a day were apparently being fired from one side to another. Certainly the pictures we’ve seen of the city when peace was finally brokered in ’95 show how much of the beautiful old Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian architecture was reduced to rubble, despite its thick stone walls, and the trees were bare, leafless stumps.
Our hostess, Jedrenka, told us how most people had no choice but to hide in their basements all day long, venturing out occasionally for buckets of water or food. She evacuated first to Croatia with her two young children then, because she is married to a Muslim and has a Muslim surname, had to move on and ended up in Norway for two years. Her sister is still in Bergen, where she works in a fish factory: “She is rich,” Jedrenka said. By Bosnian standards, she probably is.
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| Site where Franz Ferdinand was shot. |
Her husband stayed behind to fight and, luckily, survived but Sarajevo especially is full of overflowing graveyards packed with bright, new, shiny white gravestones of the many thousands who died between 1992-1995. I'd forgotten, too, the role Sarajevo played in WWI, as the site where Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his pregnant wife, Sophia, were assassinated, prompting the start of hostilities. We visited the site, where there is now a small museum.
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| Mostar's tourist traps - views and good food. |
Jedrenka has named her hostel – which is really just part of her home – after her 32-year-old daughter, Nina, who also lives there with her husband and their two-year-old son, and pretty much runs the business except for meeting travelers off intercity buses. We were met from the Mostar bus at the main terminal and gladly accepted her offer of a room at reasonable rates – and a lift!
“Mostar survives just on tourism now,” she told us. “So thank you for coming to Mostar and helping us.”
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| view from the bus |
My pleasure, I replied, and I meant it. On the bus ride in we’d been stunned by the magnificent mountain ranges of layered rock – the higher peaks still topped with winter snow – and the many rivers run fast and wide in shades of clear blue, green and turquoise, depending on the bedrock. White water rafting and skiing are becoming popular but we haven’t met any travelers who’ve taken up the challenge yet. The water is predictably icy cold and taste wonderful in the taps but even in the 25-30C days we’re enjoying, you’d have to be brave the take on the rapids we’ve been seeing.
On our last morning in Mostar we saw someone jump off the 21m-high ‘old’ bridge – locals get tourists to pay them to dive so we thought it was someone earning his living from the busload of Italians passing through town at the time. However it turned out to be an American overseas student (about to spend a year in Poland) who we caught the Dubrovnik bus with. He did it for his own ‘fun’ but said it was freezing. And a long way down.
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| Grape vines growing in the valleys near Mostar |
The villages are reminiscent of Austria with wide, chalet-style roofs on the houses protecting the last of the winter supply of wood, a few chickens, goats or sheep around the home and always a meticulously laid out assortment of vegetables being tended in neat rows, often edged with lime-washed fruit trees and with grape vines growing in the lee of the house or shed. Further down the valleys corn appears to be a staple, and many properties have long, thin timber storage sheds with vented walls, all packed with dried cobs of corn.
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| Tea house, Sarajevo. Might look old but the proud owner said he only opened 10 days ago |
Both Mostar and Sarajevo have at their centre a network of narrow streets and alleyways full of timber-shuttered buildings dating back to the Ottoman Empire times, when Turkish customs and architecture influenced the architecture, while the more recent stone buildings have the larger, grander style of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Handicrafts are still a mainstay of the tourist stalls – carpets, silver and copper/bronze jewellery, woven fabrics, ornate coffee pots and cups, knitwear with intricate patterns similar to Austrian or even Scandinavian designs, plus more recent military memorabilia: medals, old guns and sabres and 1990s bullets fashioned into ballpoint pens. And lots of nationalistic flags and hats.
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| Souvenirs, Mostar |
Wine is a big local industry too, and not bad from what I’ve tasted.
We also visited the local brewery in Sarajevo, which is in a wonderful old building with domed, brick-lined ceiling and ornate chandeliers and side lights. They only brewed three beers – dark, light filtered and light unfiltered – but all pretty good. It cost 5KM for 500ml = about 2.5 Euro = $3.50-$4. Even cheaper in the shops, where a ridiculously large 2L plastic bottle of Sarajevskaya costs between 1.80KM to 3.50KM, depending on size of the supermarket.
Food is also very affordable, with a full place of Cevapi (10 meat fingers, round bread, salted cream sauce and chopped raw onion) only costing about 7KM ($4-$5) even in tourist areas – less elsewhere. The yummy Beg soup (hearty chicken and veg) was only 4KM ($2-$3).
We’ve been impressed with standard of English of some young people we’ve met (and the responsibilities they take on – our hostel in Sarajevo was being run by 18-year old son of the owner, done while juggling legal studies and some seriously hard partying on May 1 - which we joined for a while) but then unemployment in Sarajevo is apparently at 50% and, while there’s a lot of building a repairing still going on, it’s impossible to ignore the extended and overflowing graveyards everywhere and the pock-marked buildings, either half-occupied or now deserted, that keep the recent troubles right at the forefront of your consciousness.
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| John on official beer-tasting duty. |
On the surface, everything seems fine, although I’ve heard the ‘front line’ road in Mostar now separates the population more than it ever did before, and children in schools are more likely to be separated by religion than in mixed classes, but the people we’ve met have been positive and hopeful – and falling over themselves to make your stay comfortable and enjoyable. OK, maybe not the tram driver who wouldn’t let us on because we didn’t have local coins after arriving on an international train on a public holiday when all the banks and exchanges were shut, but the Dutch/Bosnian good Samaritan couple who paid our fare for us certainly made up for her.
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| Stream through graveyard, Sarajevo. |
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| Inside Sarajevska Brewery |
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| Sarajevska Brewery |
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| John by shot-up building, Sarajevo |
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| Marble cobblestones, Mostar bridge |
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| Market stalls by mosque, old Sarajevo |
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| Mostar's rebuilt 'old' bridge at sunset |
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| View from Yellow Bastion overlooking Sarajevo. Snow on peaks top left! |
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| Site of caravanseri, Sarajevo - offered free accommodation. |
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