I’m warning you in advance that this is going to be a depressing post, so don’t be leaving comments that this made you want to go eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s or something. Sorry, my lame attempt at humor here.
With today’s post, I’m going to post some before and after pictures of the way stuff was and the way stuff is now. Some of the things look better now, some don’t. But I thought it’d be an interesting contrast.
Disclaimer: I really do like this city. I really do. It’s beautiful, and it’s got some neat historical stuff. But it’s difficult sometimes to look past the reminders of the war — they’re everywhere. For example, a picture I have on my camera but not my cameraphone (so hence it will be posted much later) is of some of the city cemeteries. During the almost four-year Siege of Sarajevo, the citizens of Sarajevo couldn’t get outside of the city to bury the thousands of people killed, so they started appropriating whatever open public spaces they could find. Like parks, and like the sports complex from the Winter Olympics. I don’t have a picture of those graves — that’s just on my camera as well. But looking at it is… well, I don’t have a word for it. And it’s in this really busy public area (as are many of the other graves) and people just go about their daily lives. THOUSANDS of graves.
Something else that’s a constant memorial — the Sarajevo Rose. I saw one of these our first day here and guessed what it was, and my guess was confirmed when I started to read the Wikipedia article on the Siege of Sarajevo (that I linked to in the previous paragraph.)
This is where a mortar hit during the war and killed one or more people. The mortar holes were filled in with red resin as a memorial.
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Today we started off our tour of gloom by heading to the city’s old synagogue, which dates back to the 1500s. It’s now a museum (there’s a new synagogue elsewhere) so we wandered through it to see what there was to see. It was an excellent exhibit, culminating with a display on Sarajevo’s Holocaust victims as well as the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during World War II. I don’t have any pictures of the museum that I took with John’s cameraphone (I do with my regular camera) but one of the things that struck me the most was a huge book they had with the names of the 12,000 Sarajevo Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. Intense stuff.
After that, John still wasn’t feeling well, so he headed back to the apartment while I climbed up the hill to the Olympic Stadium — it’s about a mile walk from the apartment where we’re staying (courtesy of a college friend of Joel!’s sister, who is apartment-sitting for another friend of hers. We totally scored — it’s a really nice place, and VERY central!) Anyway, I couldn’t get inside the stadium, but I did take some pictures outside. I kept forgetting to get out my camera phone (I was using my DSLR) so I only have a few pictures for today’s post, but like I said, I’ll post more later whenever I get around to going through the thousands of pictures I’ve taken this trip (and I’ll narrow down those thousands of pictures… somehow…)
This is the only picture I could find online that was even close to what I took today with my cameraphone. I found some better pictures of the opening ceremonies, but I don't have a cameraphone picture of them.
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The back side of the Olympic Stadium today, including the Olympic torch.
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The stadium is built into a hillside, and this is the downhill side. In an attempt to see into the stadium (it was closed) I walked around to the uphill side to see if I could look down into it. I couldn’t, but when I turned around to see the view from the other direction, well… yeah.
View from the Olympic Hill, standing with my back to the stadium. Click on this picture to enlarge it. No, really. Click on it.
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Those are all graves. Pretty much that entire lovely valley.
I don’t know why it hit me so hard, but it did, and the only thing I could think of to do was say the Lord’s Prayer. I’m not sure why. I didn’t know what else to do.
After that, I walked down the hill and took a right turn onto the main street and, then took a left and headed toward a few other landmarks.
I remember seeing this on TV -- it's the Parliament building after being shelled by the Serbs.
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Here, have another picture.
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Now it's been completely repaired, of course. I actually saw this as we were on the bus on the way into town a couple of days ago, and recognized it immediately. Oh, and the yellow Holiday Inn on the right side of the picture is where all the reporters holed up during the war.
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Here's a "before" picture of the Holiday Inn. I'm not sure if it was during or after the war.
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After taking the above picture, I kept heading down the street to where it crosses the Miljacka river, the river that runs through the center of the city.
Vrbanja Bridge, AKA Suada Dilberović and Olga Sučić bridge, aka the Romeo and Juliet Bridge.
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The above bridge’s original name was the Vrbanja Bridge, but it was the site of the first two victims of the Siege of Sarajevo, so it was named in their honor. However, it also bears the nickname “Romeo and Juliet Bridge” for the following incident, which I’m shamefully cribbing from this website:
A War Between Crazy People, Between Monsters
By Kurt Schork
Reuters
SARAJEVO, May 23, 1993 – Two lovers lie dead on the banks of Sarajevo’s Miljacka river, locked in a final embrace.
For four days they have sprawled near Vrbana bridge in a wasteland of shell-blasted rubble, downed tree branches and dangling power lines. So dangerous is the area no one has dared recover their bodies.
Bosko Brckic and Admira Ismic, both 25, were shot dead on Wednesday trying to escape the besieged Bosnian capital for Serbia. Sweethearts since high school, he was a Serb and she was a Moslem.
“They were shot at the same time, but he fell instantly and she was still alive,” recounts Dino, a soldier who saw the couple trying to cross from government territory to rebel Serb positions.
“She crawled over and hugged him and they died like that, in each other’s arms.”
Squinting through a hole in the sandbagged wall of a bombed-out building, Dino points to where the couple lie mouldering amid the debris of Bosnia’s 14-month civil war. Bosko is face-down on the pavement, right arm bent awkwardly behind him. Admira lies next to her lover, left arm across his back.
Another corpse, that of a man shot five months ago, lies nearby. The dead man’s body is so wasted his clothes seem hollow.
The government side says Serb soldiers shot the couple, but Serb forces insist Bosnian Moslem-led government troops were responsible.
“I don’t care who killed them, I just want their bodies so I can bury them,” says Zijah Ismic, the dead girl’s father. “I don’t want them to rot in no-man’s land.”
Government and Serb authorities have discussed the matter, but so far are refusing a cease-fire around Vrbana bridge to permit recovery of the couple. The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), charged with providing humanitarian assistance in Sarajevo, maintains the bodies are a local issue.
“I’m an auto mechanic and I know a lot of people in this city,” says the girl’s father. “Everyone is washing their hands in this case, Bosnians and Serbs alike.”
In a country mad for war, Bosko and Admira were crazy for each other. The university chemistry students dated for seven years before moving in to live together nine months ago. With his father dead, no one would have blamed Bosko had he left Sarajevo when his mother and brother fled before war broke out last year. Instead, he stayed in the city.
“He had no one here, just Admira,” explains the dead girl’s mother. “Bosko stayed in Sarajevo because of her. Admira wanted to repay him by travelling with him to Serbia.”
Mystery, and perhaps treachery, surrounds the couple’s death. Government and Serb officials admit they agreed to let them pass through the lines last Wednesday afternoon at 4.00 pm. Bosko and Admira walked at least 500 meters along the north bank of the Miljacka river, fully exposed to soldiers on both sides.
As they passed Bosnian lines and headed for the Serb-held neighbourhood of Grbavica, someone shot them.
The young couple had been dead two days before Admira’s parents found out. Ham radio operators in Serbia contacted them trying to confirm rumours of Bosko’s death.
“I spoke to his mother then and she gave me permission to bury them together in Sarajevo,” says Admira’s father. “We want them to lie together in the ground, just as they died together,” he adds.
Frantic to retrieve the bodies, Admira’s parents are bewildered by unresponsive Bosnian and Serb bureaucracies, and by UNPROFOR’s hands-off policy. Zijah Ismic claims he begged UNPROFOR to let him drive one of its armoured pesonnel carriers in to get his daughter. He says the U.N. told him armour-piercing rounds from machine-guns and cannon around Vrbana bridge would go through the vehicle.
“Love took them to their deaths,” Ismic says of Bosko and Admira. “That’s proof this is not a war between Serbs and Moslems. It’s a war between crazy people, between monsters. That’s why their bodies are still out there.”
Here’s a link to a picture of the couple as they lay there. I was going to post it in the post, but I just can’t… so click on it if you want. Also, PBS’s Frontline did a really good piece on the incident — you can read the transcript here.
Incidentally, the reporter who wrote the above piece was killed in an ambush in Sierra Leone in 2000. Half of his ashes were interred in Washington, DC, and the other half were buried next to Bosko and Admira in Sarajevo. Also posthumously, a street that connects the Sarajevo Airport and the main street in the city (called “Sniper Alley” during the war) was named after him.
If there’s anything I got out of today’s tour of gloom, it was how amazingly lucky we are as Americans to live where we do and have what we have. Don’t ever take that for granted, folks.
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Where we are now:
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