“Bosnia is under my skin. It’s the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.” (Paddy Ashdown – High Representative for Bosnia & Herzegovina (2002-06).)
Gothenburg Opera House had a six month closure from March to September 2026 while they fitted new stage equipment, but tickets went on sale just before they closed in March for the productions they would be performing once they reopened. I bought a ticket for their new staging of La Traviata as soon as they went on sale, but only later considered how to turn a trip to Gothenburg into a longer Europe Explored expedition. Perusing the flight schedules, I saw there was a flight to Sarajevo the day after the performance of La Traviata. As I had never been to Bosnia & Herzegovina before, I decided to make a trip there and combine it with visiting Ravenna, a place I had contemplated going to on a trip to Italy last year, but couldn’t get the schedule to work on that occasion.
Day 1 – Wednesday 16th September 2026 – London to Gothenburg
The journey to Gothenburg has become familiar to me. My flight from Stansted Airport left at 10:15 and arrived at Gothenburg’s Landvetter Airport 10 minutes early at 12:55. There was no queue at immigration for EU passport holders, but I was asked by the border official about the reason for my visit to Sweden. When I replied it was to see La Traviata at the Opera House that evening, he responded that that was a very good reason for coming. Landvetter Airport is some distance from the centre of Gothenburg and I just managed to catch the 13:05 bus to the city centre – only 10 minutes after the plane had arrived.
I checked in to my hotel near the bus station and then went to explore the now familiar sights of the city. On my previous visits to Gothenburg I have topped up my card which gives access to the four city museums, but on this occasion I decided not to, but instead went to the medical history museum that I had not visited before. This small museum describes the changing medical practices and facilities within the city.
Sweden is a virtually cashless society, with restaurants, museums, public transport and the opera house not accepting payments in cash. This caught me out when I first came to the country and I returned with 1,000 Swedish Kroner unspent. Outrageously, the Bureau de Change where I obtained the currency had refused to change it back, claiming that the two 500 Kroner notes were too high a denomination for them to handle, despite the fact that they had given them to me in the first place. So, on this visit, I found a currency exchange that had good rates which gave me €80 for my Kroner plus a small amount of Kroner in change.
I had booked a table in the good pizza restaurant that I usually frequent before the opera and had one of their tasty pizzas before heading from there to Gothenburg Opera House. This was just the second performance of Gothenburg Opera’s new production of La Traviata, the première had been on the previous Saturday. It was sold out, but nobody came to sit in the seat next to me. Having booked as soon as tickets went on sale had enabled me to get a spot near the middle on the front row of the balcony.
La Traviata was beautifully performed. The stage scenery was minimalist, but the costumes were lavish and the choreography was manic at times. It was fortunate that the scenery was simple for this production, because the other two scheduled shows due to kick off the new season at the Opera House have had to be cancelled as the stage equipment is not yet ready. I thought Ania Jeruc, the Polish soprano who played Violetta, was excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed my evening.
Day 2 – Thursday 17th September 2026 – Gothenburg to Sarajevo
One thing that had changed since my previous visit to Gothenburg is that the hotel I usually use no longer includes breakfast in its core price. As I am not a big eater of breakfast, I rarely find it worthwhile to pay extra for a breakfast, so first thing I just went for a walk round Gothenburg, mainly within the Trädgårdsföreningen, the extensive park and gardens right in the centre.
I returned to the hotel to collect my bag before walking the short distance to the central bus station to catch a bus back to Landvetter airport. As Bosnia is not a member of the EU, nor within the Schengen area, when I got to the airport I had to head to the non-Schengen departure area, used by flights to the UK. The flight to Sarajevo was the only one departing about that time, so the non-Schengen area was fairly quiet.
The flight was nearly full, with a number of passengers going to the World Veterans Judo Championships that were being held in Sarajevo. It was cloudy with no view for much of the way, but upon entering Bosnian airspace the views improved. As the plane approached Sarajevo, it was easy to see that Sarajevo is surrounded by hills on all sides. Cutting through the hills to the north was what looked like a new major road (the A1) which had many viaducts and tunnels.
The plane arrived at Sarajevo Airport ten minutes early just before 3pm. Bosnia not being in the EU meant that my normal mobile phone contract would not cover activity in the country, so I remembered to turn on the eSIM I had purchased in advance. It is also virtually impossible to obtain Bosnian Marks in the UK, so, given that many places in the country only accept cash, I had to choose an ATM at the airport from the many in the arrivals hall to obtain some local currency. The advice I had seen suggested using the ATM from a major bank as these had better exchange rates and lower fees. You are also advised to take out a reasonably large amount in one transaction, as there is a fixed fee per transaction. The ATM I did pick nonetheless seemed to charge a hefty fee, but I judged it right and took out sufficient cash to just last for the time that I was in the country.
Buses from the Airport to the city centre only run approximately hourly, but I was lucky and when I came out of the terminal building I could see the incoming bus arriving, meaning that I only had a 10 minute wait before it was ready to depart again. I was in two minds whether to catch it to my hotel, which was on the way to the city centre but about two miles out, or go all the way to the city centre. In the end I chose the latter.
I got off the bus from the airport at the stop for the Latin Bridge. It was in the side street opposite the Latin Bridge that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, an event that precipitated World War I. From there I went for a short walk in the immediate vicinity, and called in at an information office to try to understand how public transport worked in Sarajevo, as the information I had found online was contradictory.
I tried catching a tram back to my hotel. I had been told that I should just pay the driver in cash, but when I boarded the driver was sitting in a self-contained unit at the front and it was not obvious how I should buy a ticket. There were card readers by each of the sets of doors, but they were not operational. So rather than risk being fined for not having a ticket, I got off after a couple of stops and walked the rest of the way to my hotel.
The hotel was located just off the wide boulevard that runs westwards from the centre of Sarajevo and is lined with tower blocks. During the siege of Sarajevo, which lasted four years from 1992 to 1996, this road was known as sniper alley, as Serb gunmen regularly shot at those on the road from positions within the high buildings. My hotel was heavily shelled during the siege and left as a burnt out wreck, but has subsequently been restored. Being in a predominantly Muslim country, the hotel was strictly halal, with no alcohol or pork products being served.
For dinner that evening, I had a choice of well reviewed restaurants within a rather beaten-up housing estate just across the Miljacka river from my hotel. This area, Grbavica, was a Serb district prior to, and during, the Siege of Sarajevo, but all the Serbs left at the end of the war destroying as much of it as they could. Walking through a graffiti-strewn area like this at night would have left me feeling unsafe back home, but here, as there were lots of people around, I did not feel uncomfortable.
The reviews of the restaurant I had chosen, said the food was good, but the service was sometimes poor. This proved to be the case. When I first walked in the waiters ignored me – to be fair, this was partly understandable, as I discovered in Bosnian restaurants, you just sit at any unreserved table. I then had to attract a waiter’s attention to get a menu and again to order. When I tried to place my order, I was just greeted with ‘no red meat’ and the waiter promptly walked away again. When I finally got him back, I established that chicken with cheese sauce was still available, so I ordered that. When it came it was very nice, but I later noticed that someone at an adjacent table was having a burger – obviously, burgers don’t count as red meat!
Day 3 – Friday 18th September 2026 – Sarajevo
After breakfast in my hotel, which included burek (a traditional savoury pie in filo pastry), I set off for Sarajevo railway station. It was not that I wished to depart from Sarajevo so soon, but as I had an early departure from there on Sunday, I wanted to check how long it would take to get there from the hotel. Also, it is no longer possible to buy Bosnian railway tickets online, but I wanted to get my ticket in advance in case of potential problems on the day. Buying the ticket was a lengthy process with it having to be part printed and part hand written and authorised with a rubber stamp. This produced a top copy and lower quality bottom copy. Bizarrely, the ticket office retained the good quality top copy and I was given the flimsy carbon copy. The whole process was reminiscent of buying tickets in Communist countries 40 years ago.
I had intended to catch a tram from the station into the city centre, which is about a mile and a half away. According to Google maps there is a tram line which terminates at the station and a tram was due in a few minutes. After waiting for about 10 minutes with no sign of a tram even approaching, I gave up and decided to walk. I could find no way of getting real-time public transport information in Sarajevo.
The centre of Sarajevo is divided into two noticeably distinct areas the Ottoman quarter (Baščaršija) and the Austro-Hungarian quarter. I decided to start my exploring in Baščaršija, but to get there I first had to walk through the Austro-Hungarian quarter. There is a line on the pavement marking the dividing line between the two areas inscribed with “Sarajevo – meeting of cultures”.
The Ottoman quarter is a maze of of narrow alleys crowded with shops and people. At one end of it is the Sebilj, a wooden structure which serves as a drinking water fountain. In my wandering through Baščaršija, I stopped off at the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, the main central mosque of Sarajevo. It was built in 1530, but was extensively damaged during the Siege of Sarajevo and was reconstructed, removing much of the Austro-Hungarian pseudo-Moorish additions to its decorations.
Near to the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque is Sarajevo’s old synagogue, built in 1581, which is now the Jewish Museum of Bosnia & Herzegovina. During World War II the Ustaše-run Croatia, a Nazi puppet state, occupied Bosnia & Herzegovina. The Holocaust significantly reduced the number of Jews in the country, although a small community remains and there is still a functioning synagogue in Sarajevo.
I next went to Sarajevo City Hall, built in the 1890s when Sarajevo was under Austro-Hungarian control, in a pseudo-Moorish style. It was in this building that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie attended a reception in 1914, their last public engagement before they were assassinated when their driver took a wrong turn and stopped on their way back from the City Hall. In 1949 it became the home of the National and University Library of Bosnia & Herzegovina. During the Siege of Sarajevo the building was shelled by Serb forces surrounding the city, destroying the building and causing the loss of hundreds of thousands of rare books and manuscripts. The building has now been beautifully restored and looks immaculate inside. In the basement there is an exhibition about the history of the building and its restoration. The exhibition also features the performance held in the rubble of the building in 1994, while the city was still under siege, of Mozart’s Requiem conducted by Zubin Mehta.
I don’t normally stop for lunch when exploring, but I wanted to make sure that I had some ćevapi while in Bosnia. These are small, slightly spicy, minced meat sausages served with flatbread and chopped onions. I stopped at a small establishment in the heart of the Ottoman quarter, where I ordered a small portion of ćevapi (five sausages) and some freshly made lemonade.
Feeling refreshed, I went to two museums in the Ottoman quarter. The first was located in the Brusa Besistan, a domed building dating back the 16th century, which once served as a market hall. This museum covers the city’s history up to the end of the period of Ottoman rule. The second museum is located next to the spot where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and covers the period of Austro-Hungarian rule in Sarajevo from 1878 to 1918. This is a small museum and a lot of it is devoted to the details of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.
I then moved on to explore the Austro-Hungarian quarter. Throughout the city you can find on the pavements ‘Sarajevo roses’. These are places where a shell landed during the siege and killed three or more people, the holes caused by the explosion having been filled in with red resin. I encountered far too many Sarajevo roses during my wanderings. Two of the biggest losses of life occurred when the Markale market was hit by shells on two occasions, killing 68 and 43 people respectively and injuring hundreds more. The Markale market still operates and was busy when I went there. In the middle of the market, not marked by any other memorial, you can see the Sarajevo rose from the first attack and if you look closely you can still see a bit of the shell in the hole it created.
In the Austro-Hungarian quarter the architecture is a complete contrast to the narrow alleys of Baščaršija, with wide roads and neoclassical façades. In this area are both the Catholic and Serb Orthodox Cathedrals. Within an alcove of a former bank building is the eternal flame, a memorial to the victims of World War II.
I then spent the rest of the afternoon visiting three exhibitions about the more modern history of Bosnia & Herzegovina. The first was a photographic gallery relating to the Srebrenica massacre in 1995 when the army of Republika Srpska committed genocide against the town’s Bosnian population, killing 8,000 men and boys while they were nominally under the protection of the UN. While the overall horror of the massacre is deeply disturbing, there were two little details in the exhibition touched a nerve with me. In the abandoned barracks used by the Dutch UN ‘peacekeepers’ there were a number of examples of deeply racist graffiti about the Bosnians left by the ‘peacekeepers’. Also, when the memorial to the Srebrenica massacre was opened after the war, the women who had managed to escape went back for the event. The buses they travelled in through Republika Srpska were ‘guarded’ by the Republika Srpska police, with a couple of policemen in each vehicle. The women realised that these policemen were probably the same paramilitary thugs who had murdered their husbands, sons and brothers.
The next two exhibitions I went to were equally grim. One was specifically about the Siege of Sarajevo and the other about the genocide that took place across the country during the 1992-96 war. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted four years, longer than any other siege of a major city in the 20th century, and over 11,000 citizens were killed. During most of this time homes did not have electricity or running water, yet people still tried to go about their daily life in as normal way as possible. Having been in Croatia last year, where the President during the war, Franjo Tuđman, was treated as a national hero, in Bosnia he is considered a demagogue in the same way that Slobodan Milosovic, the Serb leader, is. One wonders, had Tuđman not died of cancer in 1999, if he too would also have faced trial in The Hague, as Milosovic did.
After a harrowing few hours in these exhibitions, I returned to my hotel. I finally worked out how to pay for tram tickets. If necessary you knock on the door of the driver’s cab and he swivels round in his seat to sell you a ticket. When a lot of people need to do that, as they did on the busy tram I caught on that early Friday evening, the tram makes very slow progress. However, it was a good job I did catch the tram, as it was raining hard by the time I got off.
That evening I continued my exploration of the restaurants in Grbavica. I chose a Turkish restaurant, with a friendly proprietor who came and introduced himself to me by name. I had lentil soup to start, followed by mixed kebabs. The service was a lot more attentive than that of the previous night.
Day 4 – Saturday 19th September 2026 – Sarajevo
My first stop today was at the National Museum of the History of Bosnia & Herzegovina which was only a short walk from my hotel. When I had gone past the museum on the tram the day before, I thought that it could not be open, as the building looked so dilapidated, with some of it boarded up. But it was open. It has a number of thematic exhibitions covering Bosnia & Herzegovina from World War II onwards. The section on the role of women in society explains how communist Yugoslavia under Tito had banned the wearing of the burka and niqab in 1950 – the restriction was lifted in Bosnia after it became independent.
There is also an exhibition about the role of the foreign press during the siege of Sarajevo, many foreign correspondents were staying in the Holiday Inn which is located at the city centre end of sniper alley. It was extensively damaged during the war, but has been fully restored and now trades under the name Hotel Holiday.
There is a section about how people found routes to avoid being shot by not going down sniper alley. In particular, from the city centre it was preferable to walk along the railway line and some of the back streets parallel to the wide boulevard, which were less likely to be in a sniper’s line of fire. This way was known as the Put Života (Road of Life) during the siege. Despite people having no electricity or running water at home, the middle class continued to dress smartly and travel daily to their office jobs. One image that will stay with me is of a young woman running down the railway line, dressed in a smart skirt and shoes, and carrying a stylish bag and umbrella. She was trying to get to her office opposite the hotel where I was staying, which would still involve crossing sniper alley at some point. The UN used to use its armoured personnel carriers to drive back and forth across the road so that pedestrians could shelter alongside them to cross.
There is also in the museum a series of photographs taken in 1996, just after the siege had ended, and 15 years later, in 2011, showing how the damage in numerous locations had been repaired. (This is where I got the photo of my hotel in 1996, displayed above.)
Just along from the history museum is the National Museum of Bosnia & Herzegovina. I decided not to go there next, as rain was forecast for the afternoon, and I wanted to make sure that I could do things outdoors before it arrived. Instead I went to the tram stop near the museum with the intention of catching a tram to the city centre. I was slightly surprised that there were not many people waiting, as the stops are normally busy, but I assumed that I had just missed one. After a wait, I eventually spotted the tram I wanted approaching, but before it got to my stop it deviated from its published route and disappeared down a side road. I gave up waiting at this point and decided to walk. As I walked into the centre of Sarajevo, I noticed that there were a lot of police about, with one or two standing on just about every street corner on my route, which had not been the case the day before. I concluded that there must be some major demonstration happening for that many police to be around, but when I researched the matter I discovered that there was a police parade taking place later that day to mark the anniversary of the foundation of the Bosnia & Herzegovina police force.
My walk took me along the Miljacka river for a while until I came to the base station for the cable car which runs up Mount Trebević. It costs 10 times as much for non-Bosnians to buy a ticket than it does for locals. I caught the cable car up the mountain. From the top station there are clear views of Sarajevo below, because of which it was used by Serb forces to shell the city during the siege. Just eight years before the war started, Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in 1984. On Mount Trebević one can see the abandoned remains of the Olympic bobsleigh course. After following the bobsleigh course for a while, I headed off on another track into the woods which crown the top of the hill. From here I could see in the distance a TV tower on a higher summit beyond a slight valley. The TV tower is at the very top of Mount Trebević , which lies in Republika Srpska, whereas my walk had remained solely within the territory of the BiH Federation.
When I returned by cable car to Sarajevo, near the City Hall, I noticed that the police were now starting to close the roads to traffic. As the promised rain had not arrived, I climbed again to another viewpoint to the east of the city. The so-called Yellow Fortress (Žuta Tabija) was built by the Ottomans in the 18th century to defend the city against the Austrians. From here I had good views across the city.
On my way to and from the Yellow Fortress I passed an enormous Muslim cemetery, the Kovači cemetery. This is the main burial place for those killed during the siege of the city. As there were people paying their respects at some of the graves I did not wish to intrude and take photos. In the centre of the cemetery, under an ornamental canopy, is the grave of Alija Izetbegović, the President of Bosnia & Herzegovina during the civil war, who died in 2003. The party he founded, the SDA, is the main Muslim party in Bosnia and is now led by his son. There was going to be a general election in Bosnia & Herzegovina shortly after I left, and during my time in the country I observed a lot of electioneering.
When I returned to the city centre, I came across the police parade getting ready to set off. All the different branches of the police were represented, some looking very militaristic and heavily armed with sub-machine guns. I didn’t manage to get to the front of the parade before it started moving.
Once the police parade had gone past me, I went to find Sarajevo’s Olympic Museum. For those from the UK of a certain age, the winter Olympics there in 1984 will always be associated with figure skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean winning the ice dancing gold medal with a record score, accompanied by Ravel’s Bolero. It was also good to see in the museum footage of the bobsleigh course, that I had visited earlier in the day, being used in action.
When I left the Olympic Museum, although the police parade had passed, the roads had still not opened to traffic and public transport was not yet running, so I walked back to the National Museum of Bosnia & Herzegovina that I had skipped earlier. This is in four impressive buildings surrounding a central garden. One of the buildings is the museum’s library, while the other three contain the museum’s archaeology, ethnography and natural history sections. To be honest, I found the buildings and the garden more impressive than the contents of the museum.
That evening I again ate in one of the local restaurants near my hotel. This time I chose an Italian restaurant. I tried to order a pasta first course and main course to follow, but the waiter assured me that the pasta dish alone would be sufficient. He was right, and the enormous bowl of tagliatelle al ragu was a meal in itself. By the time I had finished, it was still not too late, so I decided to celebrate my last night in Sarajevo by visiting one of the several bars that I had spotted in the Grbavica housing estate for a post dinner beer.
Day 5 – Sunday 20th September 2026 – Sarajevo to Mostar
I had to leave to catch a train to Mostar before my hotel had started serving breakfast on the Sunday morning, so I arranged for a breakfast bag to be provided, most of the contents of which I ate while walking to Sarajevo station. I arrived at the station at 7am and the 07:15 departure was already in the platform. I was glad that I had bought my ticket a couple of days earlier, as there was a long queue for the ticket office that morning. Given how long it took to issue my ticket, I’m not sure if everyone in the queue would have been able to buy a ticket before the train departed. I had researched which side of the train to sit to get the best views, but when I got on, all the window seats had been taken on that side. By the time the train left all the seats had gone and some people had to stand. The train uses spacious Spanish Talgo carriages, so there is plenty of room to stretch one’s legs.
There are only two trains a day from Sarajevo to Mostar – the one I caught and one in the evening. The train left on time, and although I was on the wrong side for seeing the Neretva river, I did have good views of the hills and mist filled valleys on the first part of the route. The train is scheduled to take two hours to reach Mostar, but arrived 10 minutes late at 09:25.
Mostar is the ancient capital of Herzegovina. I first walked towards the old town to get a feel for the layout of the city. As I got closer to the area by the old bridge, it became increasingly busy with tourists, such that when I reached the bridge it was packed. Interestingly, during my time in Mostar I don’t think I heard a single British accent, but plenty of Germans, Americans and Chinese.
The Old Bridge (Stari Most) was originally built at the end of the 16th century by the Ottomans, but was destroyed by Croat shelling in 1993. It was rebuilt in its original style and reopened in 2004. Mostar was, and is, a divided city: the Bosniak (Muslim) population living on the east bank of the Neretva river and the Croat (Catholic) population on the west bank. At the start of the civil war in Yugoslavia, the Bosniak and Croat forces combined to drive out the Serb-controlled Yugoslav National Army who were besieging the city, but then started fighting each other with the Neretva as the front-line. The Bosniaks had a foothold on the west bank, just the other side of the bridge, which is why the Croats destroyed it to disrupt their supply line.
I went to three different exhibitions in Mostar about its recent history. The first related the horrors of the siege of Eastern Mostar, which was every bit as bad as the siege of Sarajevo. The second exhibition was in two parts – the first was about everyday life before the break-up of Yugoslavia. Compared to other Communist countries, its citizens were relatively prosperous and were able to travel more freely. Nonetheless, dissent was cracked down on by the state security services. The second part of the exhibition presented the experiences of international peacekeepers who were sent to the area during the civil war. In a number of instances, inexperienced troops were totally unprepared for what they were going to experience in the former Yugoslavia. The final exhibition I visited is in a former Ottoman bathhouse and consists of a collection of photographs of life in the city during the civil war.
To escape from some of the more recent horrors, in the afternoon I visited a typical house from the Ottoman era – the Bisevic house. The house dates from the 17th century and is furnished in the Ottoman style from that period.
Later I paid a visit to the Karadoz Beg mosque, the central mosque of Mostar. It had been built in the 10th century, before being largely destroyed in the 1990s. It reopened in 2004. Its 35 metre high minaret is one of the tallest in the region and I climbed to the top to look across Mostar.
That evening for my final dinner in Bosnia & Herzegovina I went to a restaurant with a terrace overlooking the Neretva river. When I arrived, I was told that it could take up to an hour for my food to be served, because a large group had come in just before me. Since the views were spectacular, I decided to wait, as it was a very pleasant place to sit with a drink, but in the event, my food came within 15 minutes. I decided to have ćevapi again, as it would probably be my last opportunity on this trip. Unlike in Sarajevo I ordered a full portion of 10 pieces, which in addition to flat-bread and onions, also came with chips and something similar to butter-cream.
That evening when I was back at my hotel, I found on YouTube a BBC documentary made by Jeremy Bowen in 1993 describing the siege of East Mostar. It was called ‘Unfinished Business” and I did not find it comfortable viewing – I think reporting is more sanitised these days. I just found it so incongruous that the streets full of tourists that I had walked down today were full of dead bodies just 30 years ago. The fighters interviewed in the programme did not appear to want a compromise peace, just victory. Given that they and many of the medics trying to treat the wounded were in their twenties then, they will now be in their fifties. I wonder what they now think of their neighbours from just across the river who were then trying to wipe them and their city off the face of the earth.
Day 6 (part) – Monday 21st September 2026 – Mostar to the Croatian border
Given that my hotel in Mostar didn’t cost much more than some hotels try to charge for breakfast, there was a surprisingly good breakfast included in the price. On my way to my first visit of the day, I stopped off at a post office to send a postcard home. When researching where the post offices are, I was confused since there seemed to be two different names appearing on Google maps. I assumed that, as is the case in some other countries, perhaps one was for post-banks that had been spun off from the postal services organisation, and would therefore not sell stamps. However, I was wrong. In Bosnia & Herzegovina there are three separate postal administrations. Republika Srpska has its own, which is not surprising since it is for most purposes a separate country. However, even within the BiH Federation there are separate Bosniak and Croat postal services. As the post office I chose was in East Mostar, it was a Bosniak BH Pošta office. Amazingly, the postcard I posted there arrived in the UK just four days later, before I got home.
From the post office I went to Džemal Bijedić House, which is a branch of the Museum of Herzegovina, which I had tried to visit the previous day, only to find it shut. The building is the birthplace of Džemal Bijedić, who was President of Bosnia-Herzegovina & Prime Minister of Yugoslavia under Tito. He died in a plane crash in 1977, which some believe was not an accident, as he was seen as a rival to an ailing Tito. However, there is no mention of this conspiracy theory in the exhibition about Bijedić’s life and death in the house. There are also displays about late 19th and early 20th century Mostar, together with an introductory film about the city that mainly focuses on the Stari Most. An upper room is furnished in the style that it would have been when Džemal Bijedić was born there in 1917 – he came from a prominent Muslim merchant family.
Next I intended to visit a couple of other places that are part of the Museum of Herzegovina, but both were shut. For one, I had originally misread that it was closed on Mondays, but I don’t know why I couldn’t access the other. Instead I decided to explore the western (Croat) part of the city.
First I went to the church of St Peter & Paul, a Franciscan Catholic church, which had been destroyed by the Serb-dominated Yugoslav National Army during the first siege of Mostar in 1992, and subsequently rebuilt. It has a very tall free-standing bell tower now called the Peace Tower. You can go to the top of the tower, but I decided not to, as there is only a lift to about a third of the way up and I thought that, since it was a warm day, I would get very hot and sweaty on the climb, which would not be pleasant for my long bus journey in the afternoon.
I continued further westward into the city on the west side of the Neretva. Wandering around here, it was noticeable as to how much better the housing appeared to be and how there were far fewer signs of war damage. It felt much more like being somewhere, for example, in suburban Germany, than anywhere else that I had been to in Bosnia & Herzegovina. On this western side of the Neretva, the election posters for the forthcoming general election were all for Croat parties, rather than Muslim parties that had been prominent hitherto. Politics in the country is still predominantly organised along ethnic lines. I walked through a large park, which bizarrely has a statue of Bruce Lee in it.
Near the edge of the park, was an exception to the undamaged buildings I had found in west Mostar. The tower block of the former Ljubljanska bank building was bombed out during the first siege of Mostar and the abandoned wreck of the building was then used by Croat snipers in the ongoing battle and siege of east Mostar. It was nicknamed ‘sniper tower’ and remains abandoned to this day.
I then made my way to Mostar’s east bus station to catch a bus to Split in Croatia. At the time of year that I was travelling, there were three buses a day from Mostar to Split, but two were at inconvenient times for my plans. The other two were run by a different company to the one that I was catching, which had rather better reviews than mine. You had to pass through a turnstile to access the bus station, but my ticket did not work and someone had to let me through. The bus station was fairly basic – open air, with no waiting room and no information as to which bay your bus was going from.
My bus, which had come from Sarajevo, arrived in the bus station just before its scheduled 1pm departure time. Unlike other long distance buses that I had caught in Europe, it was not possible to reserve a specific seat. When it pulled in, the driver got off and disappeared leaving the doors open. Normally you wait for the driver to check your ticket before getting on, so I hung back by the front door. However, I noticed that everyone else who was waiting seemed to be piling on via the open middle door, so I followed suit. I had worked out that to get views of the Dalmatian coast I would need a seat on the left side of the bus, but by the time I got on nearly all the seats had been taken and none on the left were available. I saw a spare window seat near the back on the right and went for that, but when I got to it it, I saw that the seat was ripped and its stuffing was falling out. So, I chose the seat behind. However, when I leant back in this seat, the seat back collapsed and I was deposited into the lap of the woman sitting behind me. By the time I discovered this the bus was full, with no spare seats.
We departed about 10 minutes late, and because of my broken seat I had to try to sit bolt upright and not put any pressure on the seat back. That was easier said than done and when the bus accelerated or went round a sharp bend I was again pitched into woman behind me, much to her annoyance. After about an hour and a half, the bus arrived at the Bosnian border with Croatia. It pulled into a parking area beside an office, where a bus making the same trip in the opposite direction was already waiting. After a bit of a delay, while the other bus was processed, our driver collected the passports of all his passengers and took them to the office, while we all remained on the bus. A short while later he returned with the pile of passports and handed them back – so there was no visual check of our identities by the Bosnian border officials, nor any check that everyone had provided a passport. Although, my passport had received an entry stamp at Sarajevo airport, it was not given an exit stamp.
Reflections on Bosnia
I was deeply moved by my short time in Bosnia. It has a long and interesting history, being part of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the 19th century. Its brief spell in the Austro-Hungarian Empire is mostly remembered for the event which triggered World War I, but it also left a legacy of grand buildings and Art Nouveau architecture. In World War II, Bosnia was annexed by the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, with all that entailed for the local population. The events of World War II have been overshadowed in recent memory by those of the 1990s. I found the history of the 1990s very disturbing – particularly so, because it is vivid within my memory – I was in my mid-thirties when the Yugoslav Civil War raged, having briefly travelled through Yugoslavia a decade earlier. I fear that the international community has not learned the lessons from what happened then and is even less preprepared to stop similar atrocities occurring again. I still wonder if there has been much reconciliation within the country, given the barbarity that was experienced. The Dayton Peace Accord of 1996 stopped the fighting, but Bosnia & Herzegovina is still not a normal country. The High Representative is a foreigner who is externally appointed, and has ultimate power. The two entities within Bosnia – the BiH Federation and Republika Srpska – are for all practical purposes two separate countries; for example, you won’t find any public transport between them. Even within the BiH Federation, there are clearly still deep divides between the Bosniaks and the Croats. Not being a member of the EU, means that Bosnia has not benefited from some of the infrastructure development projects that other former Communist states have. Yet there are signs of hope – Sarajevo does seem to be embracing multiculturalism to some extent, but as I don’t speak the language, I found it difficult to determine how deeps this runs.
[To be continued – Coming next: Croatia and Italy]