by Michael Jansen
As Hulagu’s army once laid siege to Baghdad, Serbian forces took up positions on the hills surrounding Sarajevo. The city was besieged, blockaded, and bombarded by aircraft, artillery, mortars, tank and heavy machine gun rounds. Between 9,000 and 14,000 people were killed, including 2,229 defenders. “Every family lost members,” Orjana, a siege survivor, tells me.
Installed in the Council of Europe offices on the seventh floor of a tower block, 10 “experts” brainstorm for a day and a half under the chairmanship of Bosnian deputy Ismeta Dervoz, rapporteur of the parliamentary assembly’s committee on culture, science, education and media. She is due to present a comprehensive report to the assembly.
At the end of the day we are taken to Sarajevo’s town hall, inaugurated in 1894 by the Austro-Hungarian empire. In August 1992, Serbian shelling destroyed the building, then the national library, with its 1½ million volumes, 155,000 rare books and 700 unique manuscripts. Restoration began in 1996 and completion was celebrated in May with a concert by the Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra.
We enter the pseudo-Moorish style building through a side door and are ushered into a grand lobby to the strains of the Blue Danube waltz and taken on a tour of elegant rooms perfumed by paint, too fresh, too bright.
That evening four of us stroll through the market near our hotel and sup at a restaurant where beer- and wine-drinking local folk and foreigners sit alongside tables set with tall glasses of lemonade where Bosnian Muslim families dine, the women bareheaded. Sarajevo is a tolerant city.
After our final meeting we are driven to Mostar in Herzegovina to view the reconstruction of the Old Bridge built by the Ottomans in the 16th century and destroyed by Croats in 1993.
The small, sturdy foot bridge, a cultural icon, arches over the Neretva River, connecting the two sides of the town. Crossing means dodging tourists who have made the reconstruction project sustainable through patronage of dozens of flourishing restaurants and scores of shops selling cheap goods made in Turkey and China.
South of Mostar at the 15th- century fortified town of Pocitelj we climb a steep slope to the ruined fort and take tea in the atelier of an engraver. Here the houses are built of stones, roofed in stone slates and set in luxuriant gardens. The town suffered heavy dam- age in the conflict and has been lovingly rebuilt but resettled mainly by artists on an unsustainable seasonal basis.
(Source: theIrishtimes)
