Article originally published in the February edition of Perceptive Travel. (All photographs my own).
I JUMP OFF A TRAM in the neighbourhood of Otoka, an old-school concrete jungle of grey Communist high rises, far from the city centre of Sarajevo.
Otoka looks and feels tough, the atmosphere surly and boisterous, nothing like the parts of the city where you might find tourists. Behind the tram station is a bridge lined with a mixture of old peasants and gypsies, selling whatever they have laid out on the ground in front of them: socks, slippers, onions, little bags of lavender.
I find the block I am looking for and read the plaque fixed to the side of the building, that informs me: "In this spot on the 9th of December 1993, Serbian criminals killed three citizens of Sarajevo.”
As I approach the entrance, the sound of a distinctly Balkan brass band fills the air, starting quiet and then getting louder, until a small orchestra of gypsy gentlemen pass by, in full musical flow, before disappearing round a corner.
A tall man in his late fifties, with a moustache and goatee beard, wearing a dirty green trench coat, is standing in the doorway of the building. He is Mišo, my Airbnb host, and he greets me in heavily accented English.
Together we cram into the tiny lift and Mišo presses the button for the sixth floor. His breath smells of a combination of cigarettes, stale brandy, and vomit.
Mišo (pronounced Meesho), is the first person in Bosnia since I arrived two weeks ago not to make me take my shoes off on entering his home. The flat is modest. Mišo lives in the living room at the front, there is a kitchen at the back, and then, behind a shower curtain installed for privacy, are the two guest bedrooms and a shared bathroom.
One room is mine, the other, he tells me, is occupied by a Bosnian girl who has rented it for the New Year celebrations taking place tomorrow.
"I have to ask you to not walk around with no clothes on," Mišo tells me deadpan. "I have told her the same."
After I am settled, Mišo knocks on my door to invite me to the living room to drink rakija. He offers me a choice between the apple, plum and grape varieties. I tell him in his language that I'll take the jabukovača, the apple one. Surprised, he asks how I know the word. Without switching back to English I tell him that I speak a bit of the language and that I am in Bosnia taking an intensive course at a local language school to improve my level.
Mišo pauses for a moment, before asking: "And just what language do they say they are teaching?"
"They call it BCS," I tell him. "Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian."
Mišo snorts, wags his finger and says: "Ha! Well that's not too bad. But I should tell you, I am a Serb and there is no such language as Bosnian. You know that? It is Serbo-Croatian language. Or Serbian."
"I know it is all one and the same language, but I don't get involved in the naming of it," I tell him. "If I am speaking to a Bosniak I'll call it Bosnian. I'll call it Croatian for a Croat and I'll call it Serbian for a Serb like you. I'll let you natives fight over the name."
Mišo pours the drinks, sits down, and offers me a non-branded bootleg cigarette from a little polythene bag. I quit smoking years ago but I take one to be polite. Mišo lights it for me. Then he speaks.
"You know, the term Bosniak..." he pauses for effect. "It is controversial. I am not happy with this word. You know, we Serbs are Serbs...Croats are Croats, fine … but Bosniaks...Huh! You know..." He pauses again, this time to curve his mouth down at the ends, raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders. "You know? Well I don't want to talk about that. But it's a controversy."
On the wall is a black and white photo of Mišo's parents when they were young. I ask him if he has always lived in Sarajevo. He has, apart from during the Bosnian war, when he went to Montenegro.
I wonder inwardly how it feels to be a Serb living in a building with that plaque on the wall outside. I have spent a lot of time listening to Sarajevans' war memories over the years, but am yet to hear a Bosnian Serb point of view. I ask Mišo if there are many Serbs living in the neighbourhood.
"Not anymore," he says. "Before the war this area was majority Serb, but most were forced to leave."
I ask how relations are now between the communities in the neighbourhood. "Is it like before the war, that people aren't interested in what religion their neighbour is, or..."
Mišo doesn't appreciate my line of questioning and interrupts me.
"You know, I get very angry when people still want to talk about or even think about the war. It is the past. History. Why would I want to think about all that now?"
His voice is deep and his posture aggressive, although non-threatening, just his natural demeanour. The rakija burns the throat as it goes down. The bootleg cigarette dries the tongue.
Mišo continues: 'When I think about the war, it makes me sick in the stomach. People should just move on. Forget about it. Stop remembering the past and look to the future. Bosnians are always looking at the war. That is their problem: they cannot move forward. Why still care? Why still remember?"
I decide that I will push him more on the subject when the time is right, but right now it is not. Instead I ask him what he does in life. He tells me he is a poet.
"Do you make money from writing?" I ask.
"No.”
Ha! Who does?
Bitterness punctures Mišo's voice as he tells me he has been unemployed since 2002 and that no one will give him a job because he has never been a member of any political party. He becomes animated. "It's bullshit! Bullshit! All fucking bullshit!" Before calming himself and saying that he manages to make ends meet by tutoring math and chess.
I ask him how rakija is made. He tells me that sometime in the next few days he will take me to his cousin's house in Eastern Sarajevo so that I can see the process for myself.
Later that evening I come back to the flat to find that my key won't open the door and nobody is home to let me in. I go to the little greasy spoon cafe next door, order a pljeskavica (similar to a burger) and text Mišo to let him know I am locked out. He turns up after twenty minutes and apologizes profusely—he gave me the wrong key—and then insists on paying for my dinner and won't take no for an answer.
A couple of evenings later, I return to the flat after drinking a large jug of Bosnian wine with my dinner and allow Mišo to persuade me to go with him the following morning at 9 to visit his cousin who makes the rakija. It will be my first visit to the part of Sarajevo that sits in Republika Srpska territory. I pack my bags, as tonight is my last at Mišo's before returning tomorrow to the city centre.
The morning sky is grey and the air is wet with drizzle as we get into Mišo's car and set off for Eastern Sarajevo.
It is just a ten-minute drive to the invisible line that separates the country's two entities. You know when you have crossed to the other side because all advertisements, road signs and even graffiti have switched from the Latin alphabet to Cyrillic. Apart from that, there is no official sign saying you have crossed into a different territory. Mišo tells me that in all other parts of Bosnia there are big signs along the border, but they decided it was for the best to keep it low-key in Sarajevo.
We climb the hill and enter the outskirts of a built-up residential area, full of newish blocks of flats, orange-coloured, ugly. Serbian flags hang from windows and balconies. A piece of graffiti on our right mocks the siege of Sarajevo: "Pazi Snajper" (Beware sniper)—the warning that was painted all along sniper alley during the war—with a large smiley face next to it.
A bit further into the entity we are met by a large mural on the side of a residential building, dedicated to Gavrilo Princip—the young Bosnian Serb who in 1914 shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, triggering the start of the First World War—and also dedicated to the local football team that represents Sarajevo's Serbs, Slavija. Most Serbs see Princip as a hero, while to most Bosniaks and Croats he was a terrorist.
Soon we hit a residential estate of cul-de-sac streets, lined with identikit semi-detached houses, none of which seems completely finished. Mišo tells me the whole neighbourhood was built from scratch at the end of the war to host Serbs who didn't want to live in the Federation.
We roll up to Mišo's cousin's house. Nikola is 50 years old and barrel-chested. He looks younger than his years. His handshake is tight. Immediately he takes me into the garage which houses his distillery and explains in Serbian—he claims not to be able to speak English—the process of turning fruit into rakija, before inviting us into his home for a drink. The two men lead me to a couple of sofas at the back and sit me down in front of the large screen TV, set to a music channel that plays turbo folk exclusively.
On the wall above my head is a small shrine to an Orthodox saint. The Orthodox cross can be found in numerous places around the living room, as can old black and white pictures of important cathedrals.
Nikola offers me a choice of rakija or wine, white or red, all of which are made in the garage. It is too early in the morning to be starting on the rakija so I opt for red wine. Nikola pours a huge glass and hands it to me, while he and Mišo decide rakija is the path they wish to take.
"Sit back," Nikola instructs me. "Make yourself at home."
As I do just that, Mišo leans in close to me and says: "Now I want to ask you about the war. Tell me, for you, the war in Bosnia was a purely civil war or it was a war with an aggressor?"
The question knocks me off guard. Both men are staring at me, waiting for an answer. I drink from my glass before replying.
"There was aggression."
It is not what they expect to hear. I am an outsider, in Republika Srpska, inside the home of a Bosnian Serb, drinking the man's wine...I am supposed to toe the line.
"So just who was the aggressor?" Mišo asks, angrily.
"I see the Bosnian Serbs, backed by Serbia, as the aggressors," I say.
I put my glass to my lips and think about what I am doing. Do I want to be going down this road? The atmosphere is tense. I didn't need to make it so. I could still fix it by just telling them what they want to hear. But I can't do it. I have nothing against Serbs; it's bullshit that I have a problem with.
"How can you say it was a war of aggression, when I am from Bosnia, I am Bosnian, this is my land as much as it is any Muslim's, I am not from outside, I am not from Serbia, yea I am a Serb but I am from here, my family goes back generations and generations and generations of Bosnians from this land. It was a civil war," Nikola says, demonstrating that he wasn't being entirely truthful when he said he didn't know English.
Mišo takes over from his cousin. "The Serbs were the victims in the war. In our ancestral village all Serb men and boys were massacred by the Muslims. Nikola was 25 at the time and was there. He only survived because he managed to escape through the mountains over a couple of nights and reach Serbian territory. On the way he touched a landmine and was lucky not to lose his whole leg. He was badly wounded."
Nikola pulls up a trouser leg and shows me the scar. I ask who laid the mines.
"They were Serb mines," Nikola admits, his voice as well as his eyes showing appreciation for the irony.
Mišo shouts that this whole suburb, Eastern New Sarajevo, was built after the war to house displaced Serb refugees. "So tell me how it was a war of aggression! It was Bosnian against Bosnian. Everybody who fought in that war was from here and was fighting for their land. There was no outside hand."
"That's not true," I say. "When the war started, it was waged by the Yugoslav National Army, in Serbia's interests, ordered by Slobodan Milošević. The Bosnian Serbs were supported by the Government of Serbia and the Yugoslav National Army, as well as paramilitary units from Serbia. They had all the weapons, all the hardware and all the manpower. It wasn't a fair fight."
"So what should we have done?" Nikola asks, laughing. "Destroy our weapons? Or maybe share them with the enemy? Should we have said Hold on, this is not fair, we have more weapons than you, we don't want to fight until it's even? You know, that's not how war works."
"You asked me a question. I gave you an answer," I say.
Nikola says: "OK, no more talk of war. How do you like the wine?"
"It's delicious."
He pours me another glass and then tells me about the time he spent working abroad, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, Kenya. He has been all over, contracted by the US military, building installations for them. He is looking forward to them calling him again and sending him away, because it pays well and gives him something to do.
He asks my opinion on Brexit. I tell him it is stupid. He says it is a good thing for Britain because they will be able to control who comes into the country. He illustrates his view with a story from his time in Iraq. His best friend on the compound was an Iraqi guy. The Americans had to employ local Iraqis so that there would be less attacks on the base. They also had to pay the local insurgents a million dollars not to attack them. Anyway, the one day the Iraqis weren't on the base, there was a suicide bombing that killed some Americans. The bomber was Nikola's Iraqi best mate.
"You see, you can never tell who is good and who is bad until it's too late," he tells me.
"How would tighter border control have made any difference to that situation?" I ask.
The two men look at each other, fail to come up with any answer, so change the subject onto their plan for turning the upstairs of the building into a guesthouse for tourists. They want me to write the Airbnb listing for them, make it sound appealing. Nikola tells me he has got a small minibus that, for a fee, he could take guests on excursions in, up into the mountains.
As I listen, I am fed ham, salami, smoked cheese and fresh bread, all produced by Nikola and his neighbours. The ham is the tenderest I have ever tasted.
They take me out into the garden and show me the vegetable patch inside the greenhouse, with the homemade irrigation system that catches rainwater and runs it through pipes under the ground before spreading it evenly over the vegetables. Nikola is totally self-sufficient. They tell me to write about it in the listing, to let people know that they would only be eating and drinking home produce.
Every time my glass gets close to being empty, Nikola fills it. I write the listing for them, but I am sure tourists won't come. People visit Sarajevo to walk around the Turkish quarter. They come to enjoy the café culture and to see the spots that shaped European 20th Century history, such as where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in the neck.
Tourists don't come to Eastern Sarajevo. It is too far from everything, and is poorly connected. There is nothing to see apart from houses and blocks of flats, all built within the last twenty years. Still, I wish Nikola all the luck in the world in his pursuit of tourists. He is a good host and an amicable man.
The three of us continue drinking heavily through the morning. Eventually it is time to leave, but not before Mišo talks me into buying a bottle of wine from Nikola for 10 Euros. It is still late morning but feels more like late afternoon, on account of all the drinking. I have polished off a bottle of wine on my own. Mišo has been knocking back rakija without pause all morning and is showing the effects.
I follow Mišo as he sways towards his car, and we both get in. He starts the engine. I tell myself fuck it; if we die we die. Mišo starts driving and as we move through the streets he slurs stories that have no beginning and no end.
Close to that Gavrilo Princip mural, I spot a statue of him, along with a miniature amphitheatre dedicated to his remembrance, set in the middle of all these ugly blocks of flats. The statue bears little resemblance to the man.
I return to the car after taking a photo to find Mišo stood in the middle of a patch of grass, dick in hand, pissing into the wind.
I ask him: "Was Princip a hero?"
"Yeah he's a hero. Of course he's a hero. The Austrians were only here to take our money and to colonize. So yes, he is a fucking hero."
Mišo says he wants to say hello to some friends before we leave. I follow him to an inconspicuous glass door at the foot of a block of flats. The door enters into a tiny bar, standing room only, other than for a little table by the door, around which are sat a woman and three men, all chain smoking, drinking, talking, and laughing.
The woman stands, greets us and moves to behind the bar. She is about 45 years old and wearing a hoodie. Her face is that working-class blend of motherly and tough. She seems reluctant in her acceptance of Mišo grabbing her by the shoulders and kissing her three times on the cheeks to wish her a happy new year. The three men at the table alternate between paying us no attention and eyeing us suspiciously, as if we have intruded on a secret meeting. It is safe to assume this place doesn't see many if any foreigners.
Mišo introduces me to the group. They show the bare minimum level of courtesy required for such a situation, nodding their heads slightly to acknowledge my existence.
The woman pours us each a pint of red wine, which has been watered down and tastes like it has been sat in an open bottle for weeks. I pay for the two of us. The woman rejoins the table, leaving us to stand quietly at the bar with our nauseating wine. I get the feeling the regulars are not happy to have an outsider in the place. Mišo keeps trying to join in the conversation they are having, but they blank him completely. It is awkward to watch, not least because Mišo has just been telling me these are his dear old friends. They seem like the complete opposite. I start to pity Mišo. He is no longer the brash alpha but rather the unpopular kid at school that nobody wants to play with.
Mišo tells me that the guy sat next to the landlady drives the bus from East Sarajevo to Belgrade and back. I look at him in his bus company uniform, boyish face and expression, skinny chest on top of a round beer belly, like a little boy sat on a barrel, slurring his words and swaying from side to side, smoking a cigarette out of the side of his mouth. He is wasted.
"Is he driving today?" I ask, jokingly.
"Yes, later this afternoon," Mišo replies seriously.
The landlady is in love with the bus driver. She can't stop touching his hair, his face, his knee, and pulling him close for mock drunken hugs. The love appears to be unrequited.
Now more drunk than when we arrived, we walk to the car. It is still only midday and the weather is still miserable. We start driving back towards the Federation, as Mišo tells me what good people I have just met.
"They seemed a little put out by our presence," I suggest.
"No, not at all. They are good people. Nice people. They have no problem with anyone, but they are Serbs, this is how it is in Republika Srpska. People here don't do the pretend niceness of the Muslims in the city centre. They mind their own business. But they are good people."
After a few minutes, Mišo pulls the car over and tells me he is going to buy cigarettes, do I want to come? No I'll wait. He wanders up the road and into a bar. Five minutes later he steps out of the bar and waves for me to join him. He wants me to meet another of his friends is code for he wants another drink. The bar is only slightly larger than the one we just left. Sat at the table are three hard-looking older men, dressed in hoodies, talking amongst themselves in deep voices.
At the bar is the friend Mišo wants me to meet, who says to me in Serbian: "You are an Englishman? Really? In Eastern Sarajevo?" He pauses to laugh for a few seconds before finishing: "You are the first. Your people never come to see us." Then he laughs some more.
Mišo orders two glasses of wine from the silent barman, as well as three packets of homemade cigarettes, twenty in each little polythene pack.
He pays for the cigarettes and then turns to me holding the bill for the wines and says: "Oh my god, 10 marks, it's so much! I don't have money."
"Don't worry, I've got it," I say, reaching for my wallet.
Mišo's friend tells me his trade is air conditioning installation but that he hasn't had work for a long time. He points through the window to the football stadium directly opposite and tells me it is the home of Slavija Sarajevo, the team for the Serbs.
"The Muslims have their teams in the city. And we Serbs have our team here: the greatest in Bosnia," he tells me.
I stand quietly and finish my wine while the two men drunkenly talk politics.
We say our goodbyes and stagger to the car. The short drive back to the Federation will be the last minutes I spend with Mišo. I know he is drunk enough to talk candidly, so I ask him what he can tell me about his experience of the war.
He points to the field on our left.
"Just here, next to the football stadium, was the barracks of the Army of Republika Srpska. I remember the tanks parked here like it was yesterday. And all the soldiers. All the people. This is where the Serbs of Sarajevo came to escape the city. And right here was the frontline," he says, pointing to just up ahead.
"Did you come here?" I ask.
"I spent the first three months of the war inside the city. Then I paid some people to get me across the line to the Serb side. I lived for a few months right here, right next to the Slavija stadium, until I was able to pay some more people to get me to Montenegro, where I stayed until after the war. I came back in 1997."
"How did it all feel?" I ask.
"You know I told you, it makes me feel sick in the stomach to talk about the war."
"Yes I know, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand. How did it feel?" I persist.
"OK, if you really want to know. The war was fucking shit. I still can't believe what happened to my city, OK?"
"How was it to return to Sarajevo after the war? How did people react to you?"
"Half of the people were happy. Half were not. Half said Thank you for coming back, you are one of us, we are all Sarajevans. The other half said What the fuck? You run back and forth freely between the two sides. You got out and went on a holiday for years; left us here to suffer and die. You want the best of both worlds. Fuck you! But you know what, I am too old and too tough and I don't give a shit what people say."
There is pain in Mišo's eyes and in his voice as he speaks.
"Did you know war was coming to Sarajevo? When Yugoslavia first started to fall apart, when fighting started in Croatia, did you have any idea then that it would spread to Bosnia?" I ask.
"None at all. When trouble broke out in Croatia, we thought it would be a ten, maybe fifteen-day problem. We never imagined it would turn into an actual war, and even less that the same could happen to our beautiful city."
"You really had no idea?"
"Really! You know, my uncle was high up in the Yugoslav military and he called me some months before war broke out and told me to get out of Sarajevo because the shit was going to hit the fan. But I told him What are you talking about? I don't believe you. This is my town, this is Sarajevo, nothing bad will happen here. And he said No seriously, you have to leave. And I said No, it can't be! And then it happened. We were living in a war. I couldn't believe it then and I still can't believe it now."
"So the Yugoslav Army knew months in advance that war was going to come to Sarajevo..." I say.
We finish the drive in silence and part with a handshake. I go my way, Mišo goes his.
Excellent read. Fantastic account and photography.
Hi Kris! Sarajevan here :D This story depicts the current situation in Bosnia so well, it made me feel angry while reading it (this is a compliment). Thank you for writing it and sharing it.