| Introduction: I have so much stuff that I wrote during this trip, it is impossible to group it into specific daily events, locations, and chronology. Sure the places fall into this pattern, but the conversations I had and my own thoughts I had during transit transcend through the trip and build on each other so to write out my trip I'll start with the basic itinerary and branch out into my digressions. Also, pictures will be added for emphasis as they are processed. Sound good? Well it's how I'll do it. Also, this is just the notes transposed from my journal, not a formal write up or anything=)
Basic outline of chronology
1) Sarajevo (100%)
2) Travnik (100%)
3) Banaluka (100%)
4) Jajce(100%
Small digression on Landmines(100%)
Small digression on real life(100%)
5) Mostar (66%)
6) Majigorie/David Hume (99.7%)
7) Food/Water Poisoning ( don't remember much at all. I was deathly sick) (Haven't started)
8) Pristina, Kosovo (Haven't started)
9) Serbia/Belgrade (Haven't started)
10) Summary (Haven't started)
5/28 11:45 Sarajevo: First Impressions
Transit day: 9 hours to Frankfurt, 2 to Vienna and 2 more to Sarajevo, +8 hour time zone change and even more layover time makes it over 24 hours of transit. <<russian phrase(need my keyboard that's in storage)>>
Arrived at the hotel around midnight, literally 2-300 meters from the Franz Ferdinand assassination. First thoughts is that the town is beautiful at night with a river running through the old town with small bridges spanning it. Went through the old town that night just to get a feel of the place then crashed due to exhaustion
5/29 Cafe at the end of the world
So besides jetlag, started the morning out well with a trip to the top of a mountain that overlooked Sarajevo, so I took in the view drinking coffee and talking about the history of the region with two locals. Off in the distance of the skyline there was a white/grey haze on a mountain. It was tombstones. It's odd, it all seems to peaceful and yet there was utter destruction 15 years ago that destroyed the entire city. Very unreal scene of tanks firing down on civilians in the city and snipers killing people crossing streets in search of water.
Bosnian food has proved to be amazing, simply put! My russian is very helpful, especially with the older generation. Bosnian is identical to Serbian and Croatian and is about the same as Spanish to Portuguese. Stopped by another cafe downtown after lunch and talked to more locals about daily life, everyone is eager to speak to a foreigner and get their story out there. Everyone my age or older remembers some aspect of the war and how it affected their life. For example, during it, a child would stay inside for the duration of the war, NEVER venturing outside. Imagine living 3-4 years of your life inside your bedroom not understanding why people are shooting at your city and killing innocent people. All you want to do is go outside and run and play with friends. One of the store owners I was talking to showed me a picture of the destruction of a 155mm shell that landed in his shop during the war. Everyone has a story. People lost children to snipers, imagine their outrage that you would feel if someone willingly shot your 5 year old son. A famous interview with a father was actually calm, and all he said was that he wanted to drink coffee with the serb that shot his child and talk about what could make him do such a thing. That man is the definition of stoicism.
Throughout the city are things called Sarajevo roses, mortar damage colored with red cement, a daily reminder of the damage sustained. To understand imagine a city. Now imagine no buildings in the city. You now can picture the post war damage. Bullets still are embedded in buildings, artillery damage is still there. You can see the scars of the past everywhere you go. Despite this, there is an Orthodox Church, Mosque, Catholic Church and a Jewish Synagogue on the same city square. It is possible to coexist, there is essentially no religious fundamentalism, people just want to move on. I realized this when I walked to the west side of town on an old ottoman fortress overlooking the city watching the sunset and heard church bells ringing while a Mosque had its call to prayer at the same time. Again, despite the scars of the city, they bring out the beauty and make the experience real. This is life exposed as it really is. You can never hide your history
This is the first day of being in Sarajevo and the Balkans, I have not touched on the subject of food, real conversations with people or anything that unpredictable. People I've met range from random shop owners, restaurant owners, people I met in cafes:bars:clubs, gypsies, homeless, mafia, people very pro and very anti US, US embassy officials
5/30 The tunnel and the mafia
Visited many of the religious buildings in Sarajevo, all sustained damage through the war, but it kinda adds to the value of them. I don't want to get into my religious digression yet, that's for later on, so I'll just leave it as that and pictures will be up when I get to them. These buildings date back to the 1400's, so really really old.
After walking around those buildings and taking the train to the museums in Sarajevo, we headed to the famous tunnel that resupplied the city when it was under siege from 1992-1995. This tunnel ran 800 meters, and was wide enough just for the boxes and bags of food and about a little lower than my shoulders. People waited for hours to go in and out of this tunnel and was the only reason how Sarajevo lasted. 20 million tons of food passed through it, on peoples' backs. It's significant because it was the only way into the city. I need to put a map up that I took a picture of but essentially, the other 95% of the city was surrounded by the serbs. There was a narrow field in the north/east where the airport was that the UN controlled. The tunnel went under the airfield and successfully routed food during the entirety of the war and was never destroyed. In addition it bypassed the international arms embargo and allowed Sarajevo to fight back. It was very unreal being in this place that was dug out in desperation because the rest of the world turned its back. Bosnians thought that they were European. They hosted the Olympics in 1984. When the Serbs attacked, they immediately thought that there would be international support because genocide doesn't happen in Europe. The lack of aid in this war prompted very strong(perhaps too strong) of a response during Kosovo's independence in 1999.
Went to a club called "The Club" in Sarajevo, pretty much the only one there. Cultural pro-tip, Rakija is the soju of the region, around 40-70% alcohol depending on the type so be careful =). Met several people here, got to talk in Russian a good deal, and ran into a bunch of middle-aged mafia bosses. Overall a good night. Walked back to stari grad and randomly ran into a Serb and his German friend and got ourselves invited to a local music venue. This was at 3 in the morning so it seemed like a really good idea to follow strangers to an unknown place. Music played there was sevdalenka, like traditional folk, basic description is not much instrument melodies but really intricate vocal harmonies. This type of music is now put to techno/electronica and is called turbofolk. There is a music rivalry between the two groups. You will never get a moderate response on turbofolk. What a great word, anyways got back around 5am which brings us to tomorrow~
5/31 Hike at the end of the world//This is the real Sarajevo
Struggled to get up at 8am the next morning, yeaah painful. I think I averaged maybe 5-6 hours of sleep a night, so I pretty much get so much less sleep during the summer than I do normally. Anyways, the destination was lukomir, a village on top of a giant mountain inhabited by around 50 people or so, and is the last traditional self sustaining old style town in Europe. The hike there was almost as interesting as talking to the people on the top of the mountain. Went through forests, cliff ridge lines, meadows(yes very sound of music looking). At the time it might have been the coolest scenery I've seen in ages. The town escaped all of the war and the people who lived there really did enjoy the old way of life but still have a sense of humor. One interviewer once asked an old man what his daily routine was to tell kids at a school. The old man replied, I get up have a drink and go out to the fields. The interviewer replied, you can't say that, kids will be reading this tell them something like you read a book, something that we can tell them. The man replied I wake up in the morning, read a book, go to the fields and read there. Then I go out with my friends to a store and read there before coming back home and reading a book. Sarcastic old bugger eh?
Went back to Sarajevo that night and took pictures of one of the graveyards in the city squares. All the dates in the graveyard are between 1992-1995. Almost every graveyard in the city is dated between those years. The pictures that came our are pretty haunting, amazing. After that we walked up to the burned down white castle, a real castle not the restaurant, and got the city at night before we got the Sarajevo Sunrise the next morning. From that view, every mountain top/ treeline that you could see surrounding the city was landmined. Such an ugly thought from such an amazing view.
This is the best you can come to experiencing the damage the war did. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MZpezT0vjs
There's Sarajevo for you
6/1 Travnik: Civil Engineers meet water
There is one main thing to say about Travnik, some civil engineer must have had a blast designing it. The small river that runs through the town separates numerous times from placed boulders and diverges to reach the entire town. There are purposefully built waterfalls, rapids, and waterwheels. This entire stream actually stems from a waterfall by the old fortress that overlooks the town. We only stayed in Travnik for one day/night so we made the most of the engineering project at night and got some of my favorite nature pictures. In terms of the city, it has just as many mosques as Sarajevo, so that gives you an idea of the skyline. I have a picture of 3 minarets(mosque spires) with the sun setting, so they are pretty common. What still gets me is hearing the call to prayer 5 times a day, starting at 5am, it's really interesting though, I have several audio files of it. On a side note Arabic calligraphy is still one of the most beautiful written languages. All of this reminds me I am in a different world and reminds me of two things
1) Continue in my aspirations of moving outside of the US
-Side question, is my longing to live away from the US common of people who grew up here. To clarify, I'm not talking about like Paris, or Madrid, but like removed, remote 3rd world. I always feel more at home there. Also, be serving in the US military and not wanting to live here makes no sense at first but I got it down that I kinda feel obligated to do my service and have a clean conscience as that is the last debt before I am completely debt free. From my experience, I am in a very small minority of this mentality.
2) Explore more local culture in the US. Colorado is going to make this really tough -.-
Back to Travnik!
So for not spending almost any time here, this is my main takeaway besides the fact that they have amazing trout. The islamic religion has been incredibly tarnished in the past 8 years. There is a mosque in this town with local shops on the bottom floor. That's like a church with a shopping mall in it to all of you religious christians. I highly doubt you would agree to have something like that, which in my mind means that the Muslims in Travnik are more open than a high percentage of so called open minded/cultured westerners...
just a thought...
6/2 Banaluka->Jajce//The days in the journal are starting to blend
Banaluka is a really, really old city. Also, it is the second largest in all of BiH, Bosnia and Herzogovnia. It is the largest city in the Republic of Serbska, which means...it's orthodox...big surprise. Short history, the Nazi's took it over, and sent a lot of the upperclass serbs to concentration camps. We just stopped by because our real destination was Jace, a town with a giant waterfall, and apparently one of Europe's top 10 most beautiful ones.
I personally don't get how people make top 10 lists of things like that, I think that every one is amazing. It reminds me of the scene in Dead Poet's Society where the text book tries to make a graph that measures how great a poem is. We need to appreciate the sole beauty of it, not try to wrangle out a confession.
O' Captain, my Captain
Jajce has almost no tourism, it has no signs to indicate where things are, even the waterfall is hidden and believe me, it's hard to hide it. Also in Jace besides the waterfall, is the conference room where all the European leaders met as part of the anti fascist league. Tito had a pretty awesome chair. Trivia fact, Tito is loved by many because he held the ethnic groups together and they felt apart of something bigger than themselves, communist or not, he is still revered. The guy who was in charge of the museum loved him, he also lost a son in the war so this museum is very important to him, and shared his life with me. I need a lot more life experiences before I could even begin to match him in telling stories. Hmm what else, the town had a mausoleum we went down into, a clock and a guard tower, pretty standard for the region, though making spooky noises in the mausoleum is kinda creepy.
final notes, staying up late to get sunset pictures and waking up early to catch the sunrise is starting to run me down and is keeping me busy. The transit in cars/busses etc gives me a lot of time to think about life which if done too much can be dangerous because you'll start to live inside your own head rather than in the world.
Deep thoughts are nice and make me smile when I ponder
//First short, but important digression//
Landmines suck. If you ever invade a country, do not litter it with landmines. Those things are vile. In my pictures you see the backgrounds and say wow those mountains are pretty. WRONG, I'd say about 60-70% of them are covered in landmines and inaccessible. Sarajevo is surrounded by mines at the treeline so people couldn't uproot the strategic advantage of the surrounding hills. Now, post conflict those things are still everywhere rendering useful land a wasteland. This kills potential GDP and employment which hurts their economy. Essentially, something used 20 years ago is still scarring the country.
Unfair portion, Serbia, the country that placed the mines there, has none on their own soil. I know right now I'm taking the Bosnian side of things and am making the Serbs seem to be evil people...My tone will change when I get to the Kosovo and Serbia chapter and relate my experiences with people there into words.
Back on topic, nobody knows the location of all the mines in Bosnia, and even marked minefields shift with the erosion of soil, so now you have shifting minefields in places you don't know exist. Tell me when this seems like a horrible thing. I'll sweeten the pot, rural children play in the mountain sides.
//End digression
6/3 The Journey to Mostar!
So far all I can say is that this trip has been an adventure of a lifetime. How often can you say that the government paid for you to go to several countries, and just hang out with the locals and learn about their lives. This place has had so much conflict in such a recent time. People in the US are still bitter about the Civil War, imagine that a war between the US in 1995 with mass genocide and the killing of civilians. You can't. The picture of every major city leveled to the ground is so foreign to Americans. The English, Germans, French, and Russians have had cities decimated, the Russians especially can relate to the massive percentages of population decrease, the post war population of Sarajevo was 60% smaller. We were upset when the troop death count in Iraq reached 2,000. Another stat, about 1% of the US population serves in the military.
Back to the trip. This is real life, not the surburban cardboard cut out of what a perfect world leads one to believe. Bullet holes scatter so many buildings, and you can follow the trail from window to window or someone that turned an AA gun horizontally and just knocked out room to room, floor by floor of a nonmilitary target. One of the coolest scenes I saw was a bunch of 6-7 year olds running around a park playing war. They have no idea. Many people have never left the country as adults so I assume that they just take the destroyed buildings as normal life. I feel that they missed out on forces that shaped their country, but at the same time, what bliss to not know the horrors that everyone else went through.
Anyways on the trip to Mostar we stopped at an Islamic pilgrimage site where supposedly Allah responded to a prayer and cut a giant (REALLY GIANT) boulder in half to make a passageway for travelers stuck on one side of the rock wall. There will be a digression later on after I go on the Catholic pilgrimage where another supposed miracle happened and they both relate directly to David Hume's discourse on human understanding, like puzzle piece fitting. Yes I know I am very lame because I love old books like that...
Mostar is smaller than Sarajevo, and pretty much the gem of Herzegovina because it's so close to the Croatian beaches that it gets a ton of tourists to the bridge(which fell down in 93) Similar to the amount of mosques that Sarajevo had, around 100 or so. The river now splits the Croatian catholics and the Bosnian Muslims, but it didn't use to be like that. Also, on the Croatian side of the river is a large church spire built to match the height of the Mosque on the other side of the river. The hillside also has a giant cross looking down on the city.
Staying in a museum of an Ottoman house built in the 15th century. People pay to go upstairs where we stay to see the lounge between rooms and a display room that looks exactly like the one we are staying in. Pretty amazing place to crash for 3 days
Key thoughts:
1) going to sleep at midnight and waking up before 7 every morning is not healthy
2) Language is the key to connections on the global scale. If you were an American who could speak Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian people would be flat out amazed. I met a local shop owner who spoke Russian, English, Spanish. and Italian in addition to the bossing language. It's funny how we expect everyone else in the world to speak English, if they didn't American tourism would be killed.
3) The natural beauty of the country is preserved from the war ironically. The landmines force land to be left undeveloped
4) Losing all ties to the western world is an amazing feeling
That covers the first afternoon of Mostar, 2 more days left to cover in this city
6/4 Deeps thoughts and deep springs
There are two worlds of Bosnia/Herzegovina
1st, the beautiful landscape, everything is so picturesque and the buildings in the stari grad are styled as in old Austria. This is the glam, fake world.
The real world is full of old communist block apartment housing, all which scatter the skyline away from the restored downtown. These areas are still completely destroyed in sections and bullet holes decorate the walls. Old landmarks and statues are still destroyed, and graffiti hides some of the damage. This is the unpolished, uncut, gem that is Bosnia. This is the image you should get when you think of Bosnia, 15 years after the war. The real image.
I saw kids playing in an old city square, war of all things. They were too young to remember the war, and as they grew up in this one town/country. They have no idea that the rest of the world doesn't have bullet holes in surburban towns.
Enough with the thinking, today I went to Blagaj, the source of the Bund river. At the source, there was an Ottoman Palace, a historic retreat from the city life built in the 15th century. Going inside, women have to wear a scarf over their heads, it is still a very respectful, traditional Islamic site.
After Blagaj, I walked to the Croatian side of town and visited their Cathedral. It was built entirely out of concrete with no decorations and matched the height of the mosque built on the other side of the river. Coincidence?
6/5 Ruins, Waterfalls and Wine
Started out the day by going to a local castle ruin right by Croatia and heard stories of Croatian and Serbian concentration camps as well as individual acts that proved a single person can make a difference in the presence of great adversity. Now if only I possessed that kind of courage, one day I'll find out.
After that we stopped by 100CE Roman ruins as it was on the way to the waterfalls(Kravica). Freezing cold, like 55-60 degrees F, needless to say I went swimming. All the good pictures of this are on the other cameras, but it was really impressive in person. Several faux model pictures to be seen =)
Then we headed to a winery, where it was not so much a wine tasting, but homemade Rockia of different flavors before the actual tasting and then 5 bottles of wine to have completely. Then we went on a tour...I think they should rearrange the set up. The clover picture explains all.
Post-winery we hiked up the 2nd most visited unofficial Catholic pilgrimage site of Medjugorje, very rocky hike, very entertaining. Also, seeing everyone else there was interesting, large groups chanting going up the hill. The significance of the place is that apparently Mary appeared to 6 teenagers in (1981) I think?? Sometime in the 80's. Now millions of people visit it every year and at the bottom of the hill people sell small statues of Mary, Holographic postcards, prayer beads...anything to capitalize on the religious tourists.
After seeing the Islamic pilgrimage site on this trip in addition to this one, it got me thinking about David Hume's argument against miracles. Yes I visit foreign countries and draw relate what I experience to things I've read. In this case, seeing the Islamic pilgrimage site and the Catholic site and the people that they draw to witness the place where the supposed miracle occurred made thought patterns click.
I'll explain tomorrow in an update just on relating these things.
David Hume/Religion in Bosnia
As I said, being in Bosnia visiting religious pilgrimage sites related directly to his argument against miracles. In summary, the main part of his argument is that if all the miracles in each religion are true, than the validity of each religion decreases with so much supernatural activity. Being in Bosnia, I visited two major pilgrimage sites, one claimed that Allah broke a giant bolder in two a long time ago, and the other that Mary appeared to 6 teenagers in the 80's. Disregarding the other factors of Hume's argument of sources and the historical timeline, we will focus on just the part about miracles in different religions.
Assuming that there is only one correct religion, miracles in multiple religions makes no sense, otherwise there would be multiple ways to different afterlives and the whole concept of religion pretty much falls apart(if multiple religions are monotheistic, then the math just doesn't add up). In the very least, monotheistic and polytheistic religions clash in ideology. If both of these pilgrimage sites actually had miracles occur, then it makes sense that both religions are correct. However, both state that there is only one God
David Hume's idea is that because of this, one should treat every religion as if it is correct and with respect because of the moral ethics behind it, but to remain skeptical of religion. In practice, Bosnia, especially Sarajevo and Pristina Kosovo(later in this trip), exemplify this idea. People are religious, but Islamic people in Kosovo drink and some would even eat pork if a guest served it for them, to be polite.
Back to Hume, as multiple religions claim miracles of divine acts and as the number of miracles claimed by the followers increase, the likelihood of multiple religions having complete truth behind each miracle is doubtful.
Hopefully I expressed what I was thinking after visiting both sites on the long drive back to Mostar, and hopefully no one is offended, I just was relating my personal experience to a book I read, which I think is the goal of reading/learning, to apply the abstract knowledge to personal experience(or the other way around). //
This is common place...everywhere The tunnel bypassed the airfield A marker of a Sarajevo rose, a place where a mortar shell killed people Their eternal flame for the people lost when they repelled the Nazi's, the only place in Europe to launch an insurgency after being captured. An inferior graveyard picture from my camera such an awesome waterwheel Don't forget '93, the year when the Serbs finally knocked the bridge down View from outside a cave, all the hillsides were covered in landmines Part of an F-117(That's our plane for those that don't know)that was shot down in '99 The 3 mosques in Travnik in fog View from my window in the Ottoman house Transit picture on the road The Ottoman lounge(we borrow the display clothes) the bridge from a bombed out section and a person fishing Blagaj, source of the Buna river Post winery
"Hey look that cloud looks like a dragon" I wanted to buy one as a lawn gnome The unofficial Catholic pilgrimage // That's it for now, I'll finish it eventually Thanks for reading |
