Sarajevo |
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21 März 2024 - Sarajevo
"You are lucky. This car was in a wreck last week so it has all new paint." Not exactly what I wanted to hear from the rental car guy as he handed me the keys in the hot afternoon sun. Sarajevo is a little over an hour flight from Zürich. The city really is in a valley surrounded by hills. I can only imagine what it must have been like during the 3 year siege when morters were being fired from those hills. The airport is far outside the old city though, so my first impression of Bosnia was the concrete communistic towers that one sees all over eastern Europe. Driving into town is like peeling an onion. The Habsburg and Ottoman layers are there as well as the modern skyscrapers of Bosna i Hercegovina. The city feels alive with history and a myriad of cultures.
"I know it's not 6 o'clock yet, but we close early for Ramadan." said the girl as she unlocked and opened the door to the bookstore outside the mosque. Still, a smile got me in. And I ended up leaving with a copy of Sarajevo Marlboro from their small English language section. Sadly my Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian doesn't get much past hvala. For some reason Duolingo has stayed away from the south slavic plucentric language, and my attempts to get into using the Drops app have stalled on numerous occasions. Plenty of people are eating and drinking in the cafes despite it being Ramadan. The mosques don't seem to be open for visitors either. They have prayer rugs set up outside, with separate sections for men and women of course. What about all the other genders? immediately pops into my head as a joke, but I think it would be lost on the Chinese tourists that were also hoping to go inside.
Sunset is heralded with fireworks, I suppose to celebrate completion of another day of fasting. Ramadan is definitely a more intense month than my dry January. In the old city there's also a gothic cathedral with a giant statue of Pope John Paul II. To prepare for my trip last night Iwona and I watched a Martin Sheen flick where he plays a catholic priest in Međugorje who took serious the children in the 80's who said they talked to the Virgin Mary. In an eerie way it reminded me of the children who instigated Salem, Massachusetts' witch trials in the 17th century. Still millions of people (Iwona included) have made the pilgrimage to Međugorje, as Martin Sheen's character in the film so aptly puts it "I don't know if they're telling the truth, but I want to believe."
The Jews of Sarajevo, however, are not here in large numbers anymore. The Nazis took care of that much more effectively that Ferdinand and Isabella did. Many of the Spanish Jews came here or to Salonica in the late fifteenth century. Their langauge, Ladino, is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German, and Bosna i Hercegovina is the only place outside of Israel where it is still recognized as a minority language. The synagogue near my hotel is now a museum, but I suppose that's a somewhat better fate than the empty plot in Heidelberg where the synagogue was razed. Selfishly I'm a little irritated that I can't use my Spanish here.
Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics in '84 while Los Angeles hosted the Summer Olympics. I still have a souvenir cup from the latter that my Aunt Dell picked up, but I have no idea what the mascot was. In Atlanta in '96 it was a blue thing called Whatsit? when introduced, but it became Izzy by the time of the Olympics and then disappeared soon afterward. Sarajevo, however, has not forgotten their mascot, Vucko the wolf. He is everywhere. There's even a giant inflatable Vucko in front of the shopping center outside my hotel window that I've been watching people take their picture with this evening.
