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October 24, 2004

Cooking lessons in Sarajevo

SARAJEVO, BOSNIA: The first time I heard of Sarajevo was when the city was sieged by Serbs for three years in the 1992-1995 civil war, when the city was shelled constantly from the ridge of mountains surrounding it, resulting in 10,500 deaths. Sarajevo may be the only place outside Jerusalem where all three major western religions coexist somewhat equally: Catholicism/Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The city's appearance seems initially a bit strange. Sarajevo is laid out in a valley surrounded by a ridge of mountains with houses built up the ridge--many houses, apparently very closely together. In fact, the strange apperance is because there are virtually no mature trees in Sarajevo--almost every old tree was cut to provide heat during the siege, along with the park benches. Ironically, there are many big trees near Sniper Alley, where it was too dangerous to cut wood.

The siege destroyed much of the city, leaving bombed-out shells of buildings, ranging from families' homes to the Parliament. Indeed, the hotel where I am staying was rebuilt in 1997 behind its former self, which stands as a burned-out 7-storey concrete hulk with some crumbling Art Nouveau gingerbread. However, unlike in Mostar, most of the city has been repaired or rebuilt, including the Olympic skating arena. The city's mosques were spared destruction (unlike in Banja Luka where all 16 were blown up), and Ramadan observance is in full swing. I didn't realize it until I was sitting in an empty Muslim restaurant at dinner tonight shortly before sundown, and within a few minutes, every table was taken by hungry Muslim men. Sarajevo's old Turkish market is also a busy meeting place; in fact, it is busier at 11PM with Sarajevans than at noon when the few Sarajevo tourists like me were checking out the wares, which include 1984 Olympic shirts and pens made from semi-automatic weapon casings. I suppose that I've seen a half-dozen English-speaking tourists here, which is a good number. Had one slept from the years 1992-1995, Sarajevo might seem a rather ordinary east-meets-west city but for a few ghetto buildings. There are ATMs on every corner, billboards for Tide detergent, bustling terrace cafes, magazines with covergirl Paris Hilton, and smartly-dressed young Slavs promenading through the see-and-be-seen streets. United Colors of Benneton belly shirts are all the rage for the young femmes, despite the chilly weather. (This is sure better than Latvia, where the trend this summer was see-through white pants. This would have been a great trend, except older Latvians who ape the young trend-setters usually didn't grasp that see-through white pants require white thong panties.)

Much of Sarajevo is closed on Sunday, which was quite surprising given how shops were open at 11PM last night. The national history museum, however, was open with two exhibits on the war. The first concerned the Sarajevo siege cookbook, an informal collection of recipes that developed when Sarajevo had to survive on airlifted food aid and whatever could be scavenged. The cookbook included instructions for dandelion pie and cooked garden snails: "After the rain, in the park or garden, find snails, wash them, and cook as long as it takes them to leave their homes. ... Add salt, pepper, some canned tomato paste, a spoon of vinegar, a spoon of flour ... Cook well, add snail-meat, cook more. Try. Add whatever necessary." The second exhibit covered the siege in photographs and documents, including panicked mothers carrying children as they dashed across Sniper Alley, terrified men ducking to avoid mortar blasts, elderly women in plaid babushkas lying dead in the street after a Serb artillery shell hit a bread queue (killing 68), a bombed out cigarette factory that still managed to produce through the war's end, and some of the 250 Sarajevo Orchestra concerts held through the siege in the burned and roofless Orchestra hall. Teenagers step over dead bodies in the street. The library burns. A classroom's walls are splattered with children's blood. Surgeons at Koshevo Hospital operate by candlelight. Casualties are buried at night in the auxillary soccer field just behind the hospital (since snipers target even the funerals by day). In a sense, the bombed-out and bullet-riddled buildings that one sees here and in Mostar are nowadays regarded as white elephants like the unfinished hulks in Thailand (see the Bangkok gallery page). But unlike unfinished Thai skyscrapers, which were abandoned when the bhat collapsed in 1997, there is a tragic human element to Sarajevo's ghostly buildings.

• Bosnia: Sarajevo. Sarajevans young and old enjoy a walk through the park near Sniper Alley. It's pretty easy to pick on long-abused Sarajevo, so I choose to start with a happy picture.
• Bosnia: Sarajevo. Sarajevo's main street, 8 lanes wide, was dubbed "Sniper Alley" in the 1992-1995 siege. Serbian snipers sat in the nearby ridges and fired upon anyone, killing hundreds of women and 60 children as they ran across the deserted road. The big yellow Holiday Inn was the home of international journalists, as it was the only hotel operating during the siege. Today, colorful trams operate down the street, but the Holiday Inn still has small arms damage. The destroyed building at the far right is the former parliament.
• Bosnia: Sarajevo. Everyone in this cemetery is a Muslim who died between 1992 and 1995. Sarajevo has several such cemeteries, all segregated by religion, the most famous being the former auxillary soccer field.


• Bosnia: Sarajevo. World War I started in this non-descript intersection when a Bosnian Serb nationalist assassinated an Austro-Hungarian archduke in 1914. The monument to this Serb assassin was removed when the Serbs sieged the city.

Posted by adrianjo at October 24, 2004 12:08 PM

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