A Walking Tour through Sarajevo

The morning after I got into Istanbul, on June 15th, dropping my suitcase off at a friend's, I took off to Sarajevo. I was greeted at the small airport there, tucked at the base of a row of mountains, by rain and by my friend Emily, who pulled up in a taxi. She had been living there all this past year, doing her research on the city during World War II. In the taxi, on the way to her place, I learned that the entire city exists in a sort of long strip along the river, buffered by parrallel mountain ranges on either side. On our ride, the first buildings we passed were high-rises from Tito's time, many of which had been on the front lines during the most recent war, and which still bear the scars to show it.

We spent the first day or so just strolling around. In addition to the many bullet-ridden buildings that filled the city, I was particularly struck by Sarajevo's main public park, which seemed a poignant example of how this city, and its inhabitants, coexist with the memory of the recent war, to the point that its omnipresence appears to have been normalized: the park doubles as a cemetery, and - although it undoubtedly began as a historic cemetery, housing old-style Ottoman gravestones (vertical white tombs that seem to have turbans perched upon their heads) - added to these, along one of the main thouroughfares and amidst passers-by, young couples and old men playing over-sized chess games on the pavement, are new graves, from the recent fighting and the seige of the city, still too new to really match the grey tone and rough edges of the older tombstones behind them.