<b>October 24-28: Celebrating Sarajevo</b>

Some cities charm me on arrival, others I never warm to. I loved Lisbon at first sight, but have no desire to revisit Madrid, for instance. (No need to tell me that Madrid is marvelous, just be glad we don't all like the same things.) Of the major cities on this trip, Riga had made my revisit list, and now Sarajevo joined it.

Of course, getting there had put me in good mood, despite leaving Mostar under gloomy skies and from a cavernous bus station. Although I'm a big train fan, I had passed on the train ride between Mostar and Sarajevo partly because the train left uncomfortably early, and partly because I didn't want tunnels obscuring the views. And the views as we followed the Nereva river valley through the mountains were indeed impressive.

Then, I got a very warm welcome at my hotel, the Safir, especially when I showed the young woman on the front desk the Fodor's trip report which had led me to choose it - http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...eturn-trip.cfm. (True, I wasn't quite as pleased with the hotel myself, as I explained on tripadvisor - http://tinyurl.com/7rf8pdp. ) But I think I would have fallen for Sarajevo anyway. For all three Sarajevos, that is: the Ottoman quarter with its pedestrian streets and quaint shops, the Austro-Hungarian quarter further west, with its stately buildings, and even the newer section still further west towards the airport and "sniper's alley" where people daily courted death during the siege.

With the notable exception of the National Library, still being rebuilt, fewer bombed out buildings were in-your-face reminders than in Mostar, and I saw few "Sarajevan roses" - star-shaped shell craters in the streets, painted red - but the war was still very much a presence. Just eight years after the city hosted the Winter Olympics, Serbian regiments of the encircling Yugoslav army attacked the city and started a siege that lasted close to four years. "Siege" is almost too tame a word for the shelling which resulted in over 10,500 deaths and 50,000 injuries, and targeted, besides the irreplacable contents of the National Library, the Winter Olympics' venues and even hospitals.

I took a tour that included a visit to the 800 meter tunnel under the airport runway that had kept a vital trickle of supplies coming into the city. I spent a sobering hour in the History Museum. I even ate lunch in the Holiday Inn, which was the home of the foreign journalists during the siege, and therefore largely spared attack. And I marveled both at the endurance of the inhabitants, and the viciousness of the attackers, who had so recently been citizens of the same country. I also wondered why it had taken so long for the rest of the world to try to stop it.

Sarajevo could have been depressing, just one more chapter in the dark history of human warfare. Instead, the spirit of the Sarajevans, their refusal to surrender, was inspiring. Here were people, used to a comfortable, 20th-century, urban life, suddenly back in the Dark Ages, living in the basements of bombed out buildings, risking death every time they ventured out to find food, fuel and water. The museum shows how they improvised and made do, how teachers and doctors and nurses continued their work. The tour shows the odds against them, the damage the town suffered, but also how they kept fighting.

Near the end of the tour, I asked the guide, a man who spent many nights camped in the winter snow on the one mountainside the Sarajevans held, defending his city, what relations were like today between Serbia and Bosnia. He replied that they weren't fighting. In the Balkans, perhaps that's as good as it gets.

Beautifully written. It brings back memories of what my daughter told me when she was there. Did you travel outside of Sarajevo while you were there, into the countryside? I understand that there are still places Americans need to be wary of, and of course one of the sobering realities is the number of unexploded landmines which remain, especially in BiH and Kosovo.

thursdaysd--I have enjoyed reading your report and am especially interested in your thoughts about Croatia and BiH, the countries I have visited.

My husband and I visited a friend in Sarajevo in 2010 and it was one of the most memorable trips we have ever taken. I see you have read julia_t's great trip reports. She and I have traded recommendations about books and movies over the past year or so. The last one I read at her suggestion was The Girl in the Film, a novel by Charlotte Eager, a British journalist who covered the siege of Sarajevo. very powerful.

Your report has reminded me I still have a copy of Balkan Ghosts by Kaplan to read.

Enjoying your report and have a few questions about our June trip.We have a 1 week cycle tour of Istria and then have about 13 days to work our way down the coast to Dubrovnik and then Bosnia and ending in Budapest where we meet our daughters and their families on June 30th.This doesn't seem to give us a lot of time.We plan to rent a car from Istria to Split
1.We plan to take the bus to Mostar from Dubrovnik and then catch the late afternoon bus to Sarajevo.Do you think this gives us enough time to see the sites in Mostar.
2.We are thinking 2 days Dubrovnik, 2 days-3 nights Sarajevo would you give more time to Sarajevo
3.We plan to take the train Sarajevo to Pecs stay overnight and catch an afternoon train to Budapest.I'm hoping that this gives us enough time in Pecs.My husband was there as a school child and is anxious to go back.
I really appreciate any advice you can give on this portion of our trip



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Hi Katyt,

1. Yes, provided you get an early bus, and you really just want to see the bridge and maybe the bridge museum.

2. I'd give more time to Sarajevo and less to Dubrovnik. Substance over style...

3. I loved Pecs!!! But the train ride was quite something - wait for the next post but one.

<b>October 24-28, 2011: Sarajevo Reborn</b>

While it's hard to walk the streets of Sarajevo, and look up at its encircling hills, without remembering the war, the city has moved on. Apparently, plenty of money for restoration poured into the city after the siege was lifted (guilty consciences at work, perhaps), and the streets I enjoyed exploring were no longer lined with burned out buildings.

And I did enjoy myself. Mostly outdoors, although besides the History Museum, dedicated to the siege, I visited the neighboring National Museum, where I paid my respects to the Sarajevo Haggadah - is it blasphemy to say I was less impressed than I expected? I found the Jewish Museum, in the quiet, stone Sephardic Synagogue more evocative. And I visited a couple of house museums, much more to my taste than art galleries.

Sarajevo was already firmly embedded in 20th century history before the break-up of Yugoslavia, as it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on its Latin Bridge that led to the First World War. The bridge was attractive enough, but not particularly impressive, given the weight of history it carried. Several other bridges crossed the Miljecka River, but the water level was low, and the north shore home to a major road, and I mostly walked further north.

The older, Turkish, section was home to the souvenir shops, and to craftsmen, mostly metal workers. In additional to traditional materials, the casings from the shells that had fallen on the city were now being remade into souvenirs. Further west, in addition to the cathedrals, I found a big square, where even in the rain men played chess on the pavement with over-sized pieces. But mostly I just strolled, admiring the buildings and soaking up the atmosphere, and stopping off for coffee both in the old section, and in a newer, multi-story mall.

It turned out that I had timed my visit well. My last day I ate lunch in the Holiday Inn and bought a train ticket at the neighboring station. The US embassy used to occupy a house in the center of town, but had just been moved to a purpose built fortress near the Holiday Inn, and when I walked past I noticed one bored looking guard and a line of people sheltering from the rain as they waited to enter the consular section. The next day, a gunman opened fire on the embassy, wounding the guard. It's hard to imagine what he hoped to achieve.

Loving this, it's bringing back memories. I like your brief and concise yet informative musings on the conflicts between race and religion. You really have managed to sum up what was a very complicated situation, one that is very confusing for many of us living elsewhere in the world.

Why thank you, julia! I started out writing something longer, but round about paragraph three I gave up. First, it was boring, and second, it was providing too many opportunities for me get something wrong. But I did find reciting my "three Cs mantra" - coastal, Catholic, Croat - helpful in keeping things somewhat straight when I was traveling.

I grew up and went to school in England, so I studied a lot of European history. It is, of course, overloaded with wars, including all the ones officially about religion after the Reformation, but those in the Balkans are more confusing than most, maybe because there are three religions involved, not to mention the intersection of several empires. And I do wonder how much blame the Ottomans carry for identifying people by religion-as-ethnicity.

Thanks for the info thursdaysd. I think we'll add another day to Sarajevo considering your advice and informative trip report.

<b>October 28, 2011: Farewell to the Balkans</b>

No, this is not going to be a piece about how sorry I was to be heading for Hungary. I was actually rather pleased... Not that I regretted visiting the Balkans, which I had found always interesting and sometimes beautiful, but I was ready to rest up a bit.

This would be the second time I had arrived in Hungary by train, the first being an unfortunate journey from from Zagreb to Budapest back in 2004. The fast train I had expected morphed into a slow train that stopped at every station. The old-style carriages with non-AC compartments, a hot day, and the hours we spent traversing the southern shore of Lake Balaton, a blue vision of coolness out the window, added up to misery.

My go-to site for all things train is seat61.com, and Mark Smith had nothing much to say about the Sarajevo-Budapest Intercity I would take to Pecs. No doubt all would have been well, except that that the railway workers in the Republika Srpska had gone on strike. Where's that? That's part of Bosnia. Actually, saying it's part of Bosnia is shorthand as the country is properly known as Bosnia and Hercegovina, but almost half of it is the semi-autonomous Republika Srpska, the area ethnically cleansed by the Serbs during the war.

Thanks to the strike, my direct train journey involved three trains and one bus. When the train from Sarajevo reached the internal border with Republika Srpska, we got off the train and boarded a bus - only one was needed as there were less than twenty of us. A couple of hours later, at the international border with Croatia, we got off the bus at an isolated station, crossed the tracks and boarded a second train. At this point I figured I was set for the rest of the journey, but no. At the Hungarian border the remaining passengers, less than a dozen at this point, were kicked off the train again.

Turned out we had to wait for the southbound Budapest-Sarajevo train to arrive, and for its passengers to clear immigration, before we able to board the third train of the day. I believe that the people going through to Budapest had to change trains yet again in Pecs, but I was so glad to arrive I didn't hang around to find out. I was too busy tracking down the (helpful) Tourist Information office.

That wrapped up the Balkans leg. Thanks for reading. The trip continues here:

http://www.fodors.com/community/euro...o-budapest.cfm

Thanks again. Enjoyed it (although time constraints have me catching up slowly). Looking forward to hearing again about Budapest... one of my favs. And of Pecs too.