It's No Accident

Today our route passed through picturesque northern and central Bosnia. Part of my impressions may have been colored by the weather: the thick fog that had surrounded us in eastern Slavonia lifted by mid-morning, and there was plenty of sun on the trip through the Bosnian mountains. I thought it the prettiest countryside I had yet seen anywhere in the Balkans. Small towns and villages with small Catholic churches gave way to a stretch with Orthodox churches and Cyrillic lettering on the street signs (Republike Srpska), and the number of tiny single-minaret mosques became steadily more frequent until they were the dominant religious buildings in central Bosnia.

Crossing a bridge in a northern Bosnian town, as seen through a bus window

We switched buses in Zenica, a place that I could describe as the Pittsburgh of Bosnia, except that Pittsburgh is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States and Zenica does not have much beauty to speak of. Maybe it is the Gary, Indiana. In any case, most of its imposing socialist-era industrial plants are now inactive. But it also lies in a valley, and the winter fog was thick again, lending the town an even grayer aspect. Perhaps some day this town will produce a Bosnian Bruce Springsteen.

You can measure how awful the war was in a region by clear visual cues and by the number of names redolent with horror that appear on the roadsigns. In eastern Croatia we were not far from Vukovar, and in addition to the minefields, there were plenty of buildings where the patched-up bullet holes were clearly visible. Even that doesn't compare to Bosnia. On the winding road from Zenica to Sarajevo, which crosses the snaking River Bosna nearly a dozen times, there are several entire villages that were burned out during the war, and to which no one has returned in the intervening eleven years. By now the roadsigns, too, show you to places like Mostar, Goražde, and Sarajevo itself.

The life is definitely back in Sarajevo. The streets are busily clogged with cars, and the whole city smells of the exhaust that gets trapped here with the winter fog. Marina reports that this was a common odor before the war as well, so it is nothing new.

We are staying with a woman who is a friend of the family and part of the city's dwindling -- and aging -- Serb population. She was in the anti-Nazi underground in Herzegovina at the age of fifteen, and her late husband was a Partisan and a Party member in the Tito years. When the last war hit, their house ended up behind the Serb lines, and they had to flee behind the Muslim lines to the center of the city. When they returned, the Četniks had wrecked the place and made off with most of the medals and other valuables he had earned from a lifetime of service to a country that no longer exists.