Beautiful Sarajevo
The city that has endured everything
The bus ride we took to Sarajevo, in the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ended at the relatively new, spacious train station. This was still a long way from the part of town we needed to go. The taxi that took us onward to the Baščaršija district smelled of spices and the driver played Turkish music. He wanted to tell us the entire history of his city during our short ride, and when I said I didn’t understand Bosnian, he just spoke louder.
I felt as though I had been transported out of Europe, to somewhere vaguely in the Middle East. Sarajevo would do that to me every so often during our stay, fleetingly, like a familiar scene rushing by outside a train window.
The name Sarajevo has come up a few times in 20th-century news for all the wrong reasons. It was where Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in 1914, one of the trigger events for World War I. It also became synonymous with conflict during the Bosnian War (1992–95). Sarajevo infamously withstood the longest siege of any city in modern times, at 1,425 days. Roughly 20 percent of the population perished or fled. The aggressor was the Army of Republika Srpska, the ethnic Serb faction that dominates in the rural areas south and east of the city.
