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The Cemeteries of Sarajevo

My Travel Writing Scholarship 2011 entry - Journey in an Unknown Culture

WORLDWIDE | Monday, 28 March 2011 | Views [155] | Scholarship Entry

All the parks in Sarajevo have been converted into cemeteries. The city has been built into a valley in the mountains, and from most vantage points (of which there are many) the view is one of buildings clinging to slanted surfaces and, in the patches in between, clusters of little white crosses. History is so immediate here, in this region. A few hundred kilometres away, Germans three generations from World War II are learning about their country’s legacy and wondering what to do with a guilt that isn’t theirs. Here in former Yugoslavia, however, war was just the other day and this small, land-locked ball of Bosnia formed the front line. Many people I pass in the street remember those parks when they were still parks.

The little, two-story place where I’m staying has a line of bullet holes peppered across its front facade, a sight common to maybe every 6th or 7th building. The girl I’m staying with, a Czech law student, is working in Sarajevo writing reports for the war crimes trials going on just down the hill. She tries to explain what she understands of the conflict - the aftermath, the implications, the right and wrong - but there is no explaining. It’s too complicated. The only thing to clearly emerge from such a thick tangle of politics and ethnicity is the sheer, harrowing violence of it.

Traveling through former Yugoslavia is a journey of politics, difference of opinion and scar tissue. There is no avoiding the past – it is still too much a part of the present. In Kosovo, conversation with strangers moves straight from pleasantries to the war in roughly five minutes; in Belgrade, great hulks of buildings stand half-destroyed and fenced off. Sarajevo is no different. Its city centre is functional and bright, the old town a crosshatching of pedestrian malls and quaint little shops, restaurants with menus translated into English, and fountains in town squares. But framing and interlacing all of this is constant evidence of a city newly emerging from a very real, very recent past.

From my vantage point high on one of Sarajevo’s many hills, the overwhelming beauty of the place stuns arriving groups to silence. They climb the stairs to the lookout chatting, beers and picnics in hand, and then stop abruptly and stand, quietly surveying the great damp mountains scattered with mist and red rooftops. It is the white crosses between those rooftops, however, and the bullet holes in the walls beneath them that truly makes traveling to places like this journeys of perspective. History doesn’t lay dormant in books in Sarajevo - it is right there, evident and affecting and constantly challenging the assumptions of its every visitor.

Tags: #2011Writing, Travel Writing Scholarship 2011

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