Sarajevo

I am a very lucky girl. I got to spend six days in Sarajevo with a native.

Sarajevo is fascinating. It is a mix of a thousand different worlds combined in one city, and that quality has been fundamental to Sarajevo’s identity for so long that even three years of war and siege did not erase it. As I now (thanks to Lejla) hear Bosnian everywhere I go, be it outside my room in Strasbourg or on the streets in Amsterdam, I heard languages from everywhere else on the streets of Sarajevo. The historical center of the city is architecturally half Austro-Hungarian, half Turkish, and we stepped from one to the other at least five times a day.

One of my closest friends from Geneva is Lejla Agic, who was born in Sarajevo and fled it shortly after her third birthday because of the war. She grew up in New Jersey and goes to school in North Carolina now but spends her summers in Sarajevo, and she invited me to visit her there. This was an opportunity I could never have turned down and which I extended in turn to my sister.

Maddie spent June and July in Cairo studying Arabic, so in a move of carefully orchestrated Magnuson logistics, we both flew into Sarajevo on the 23^rd of July. My flight was only 40 minutes long, but with a 45 minute delay and my long-lost sister and Lejla waiting at the other end, it seemed to take forever. I mostly watched out the window as the hills and mountains slid by underneath, wondering at what exact point I had crossed from Croatia and Bosnia…Maddie and Lejla were waiting for me just outside the arrival door. Maddie had been learning Bosnian for at least an hour and a half, getting a head start on me from which I never fully recovered.

After meeting Lejla’s incredibly welcoming parents and grandmother and resting up for a while (Maddie had flown out of Cairo at 2:10 am and had a long layover in Paris, so I would describe her as just a bit tired), we ventured out into Sarajevo for a grand evening walking tour given by Lejla. The Agic apartment is perhaps ten minutes to the west of the city center (I would refer you to Google Maps, but interestingly, if you search “Sarajevo” all you see is the main highway), so we walked from the area of tall apartment buildings into the Austro-Hungarian section of the city—which really felt like Vienna—and then across the abrupt line dividing pavement and paving stones into the Turkish quarter—which felt like Istanbul a thousand years ago before it became massive.

I had read two books before going, People of the Book and The Cellist of Sarajevo, so I had a mental picture of Sarajevo over the years and in the intensity of the war. In the outskirts of the city, the traces of shelling and sniping are still very much apparent, but the center has been beautifully restored. You walk and admire and exclaim but every once in a while, you stop long enough to notice the old mortar holes that have been filled in with pale red plaster, called Sarajevo Roses, or the memorial to the children of Sarajevo who died in the war, and it is too awful to think about. So you take a deep breath and say a quick prayer and walk on.

Lejla had devilishly kept secret the fact that our visit coincided perfectly with the Sarajevo Film Festival. The festivities began that evening, so the red carpet had been rolled out and a throng had collected in anticipation of celebrity arrivals later that night. Apparently Morgan Freeman showed up for the last few days of the festival… (I actually walked down the red carpet myself later that week to see a wonderful Turkish film, Vavien.) That Friday evening, we saw the city, admired the crowds, and indulged in the time-honored Sarajevan pastime of walking up and down the main drag to see and be seen. Lejla introduced us to her friends, the lovely sisters Mirna, whom we call Minche, and Elma Imamovic. We also stood on the very spot from which Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand and Sophie (those Austro-Hungarian oppressors!) and set off World War I. (And thus World War II and thus the Cold War and so on and so forth…Rarely does one get to stand in a spot so clearly imbued with historical relevance.)

Every day in Sarajevo, we slept in and then ate a delicious breakfast and practiced our Bosnian food words. Bosnian cuisine is delicious; I almost ate more in Bosnia than on the cruise! (And Bosnian desserts are a category all their own.) I thought the most interesting word was “paradajz,” pronounced “paradise,” for tomato. One morning, the usual routine was interrupted by me achieving self-actualization, more commonly known as learning how to cook baklava. Baklava is, as everybody agrees, the most delicious food known to mankind. (At some point, I always have to say no to more penne al pesto or white chocolate or strawberries, but I have never in my life turned down a piece of baklava.) Lejla’s grandmother made it with me, and it turned out to be perhaps even more delicious than all other baklava that came before. I will be making it at Christmastime; we’ll see if I manage as well on my own.

We structured our days around meals—would we like ćevapi today? Or burek or sogan dolma or palačinke or šampita or hljeb u jaje or—and fit in sightseeing around the edges. We wandered up and down the streets of the Turkish quarter, we drank tea, we saw a lovely exhibit of Arabic calligraphy, we peeked into the cathedral (where Lejla and I received very disapproving looks from the nun for our bare shoulders), we told dramatic stories from our love lives, and so on. Maddie and I visited the Zemaljski Musej—the national museum—to see the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illustrated Passover haggadah and the subject of The People of the Book. We also saw the natural history museum. I experienced many Redwall flashbacks as I looked at the artfully arranged scenes of stuffed animals, and there was an amazing yet slightly frightening section of insects—huge, beautifully-colored butterflies named after Greek heroes and massive beetles that made my spine shiver. All three of us visited the Franz Ferdinand museum (the city museum) where two important things happened:

1. I realized an unbreakable bond exists between us three—we all have ancestors who were cruelly oppressed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire! Down with the Hapsburgs!
   
2. We met Turkish TV Man, Lejla helped him come up with questions to ask the Bosnian president at an interview later that afternoon, and he offered to bring us along to Mostar on the Balkan Express along with the whole TV retinue.

As I always say, exciting things happen when Lejla smiles. I would tell you the story of the charming Sweet Corner waiter who may very well be the love of Lejla’s life and who was the unconscious focus of several of our Sarajevo evenings, but that is Lejla’s story to tell.

We went salsa dancing with Minche and Elma late one evening. I proved once again to have forgotten everything I had ever learned about salsa dancing, and I got to see my sister give herself over to the music and dance the night away, barefoot and whirling, in the arms of a handsome Bosnian. I could have watched Maddie for hours, but even good nights must come to an end.

One day, Lejla’s parents took us on a drive out of the city. They first took us to the headwaters of the River Bosna, where we sat in a lovely park and drank tea and coffee while Lejla’s mother told the gripping story of how she tried to take videocassettes out of Iraq in the 1980s, was stopped at customs, and caused such a fuss by insisting on her legal rights to the cassettes and showing her receipt that a man who was unquestionably one of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen waved her on. Afterwards, we drove up into the mountains to one of the 1984 Olympics skiing sites where we had a delicious lunch and picked wildflowers. Bosnia is mountain after mountain after mountain; I thought I was in heaven.

Of course, this means that if you wanted to siege a city for three years, Sarajevo is incontestably the perfect choice, thanks to its ring of mountains. Flying in on an airplane, I found this immediately obvious, and the impression was reinforced every day. Everywhere we walked, a hilltop was watching down on us. We had a long and memorable tea at Park Princeva, a restaurant up on a hill to the south of the city with a perfect sniper’s eye view.

The National Library is the one very obvious scar leftover from the war in the center of the city. The Serbs bombarded it particularly heavily, as it was a major repository of Bosnian culture, to the point where everything inside it was reduced to cinders. It is still undergoing reconstruction and covered in scaffolding and closed off to the public, but Lejla had told me that, once in a while when no one was nearby, she had slipped inside to look around. On our last full day in Sarajevo, we walked past the fence, up the stairs, past the signs, and into the library. It is still a shell with a ruined ceiling and exposed brick, but all the ash had been cleared away since the last time Lejla looked in, and repair work has started on the pillars.

Pictures.