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Friday 22 August 2008

A hint of heroism

Thomas Leveritt enjoys Sarajevo

The city sits, famously, in a valley ringed by high mountain walls, positions from where the Serbs besieged the city for years. There are wonderful, do-able walks up there, just a few kilometres from riverside to mountain-pass, where you can encompass it all. The steepness and proximity makes the experience breathtaking. There’s one particular restaurant, Kod Biban, just a single building with picnic benches on top of a mountain, that makes you feel you’re looking down, vertically down, at a spread-out map of the city.

That’s one of the things London doesn’t have much of, of course: any chance of perspective. In London, you just sort of slink in the back door and never get to see where you’re at. Coming in from either Newark airport or JFK, Manhattan announces itself like an orchestral strike. And from any of these hills surrounding Sarajevo — Alifakovac the mountain-cemetery, Hum with the TV mast shaped like a minaret (the better from which to call the faithful), Vratnik with the Austrian fortress — from any of these places, Sarajevo spreads out beneath you like a lover. You can see it all, a city camouflaged under trees, the magnificent Ottoman library at the east gate, the Comecon tower blocks out west, and beyond them blue valleys fading towards Mostar and the Adriatic. You understand the weird history of the place a bit better. The air gets in your lungs. You drink from one of dozens of public fountains — it’s spring water, straight up from the water-table, and purer and colder than anything you can pay top dollar for.

The weird history — because none of the beauty and joy of the place makes sense without an idea of how the Bosnians have put a very justifiable bitterness behind them. But for some reason, intelligent, well-educated Britons don’t seem to get the Bosnian war. To recap — what P.G. Wodehouse called the old sweats will just have to bear with me here — Bosnia tried to secede from the union of Yugoslavia, like Croatia and Slovenia before it. Unlike Croatia and Slovenia, Bosnia had no army with which to defend itself when the Serbs decided that rather than let Bosnia secede, they would instead kill the Bosnians and absorb their land into a racially pure Greater Serbia. That’s it in a nutshell: a neo-Nazi attempt at Lebensraum. It’s hard to think of a war with such obvious goodies and baddies.

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