I knew little about Bosnia and Herzegovina besides the war, which ended some 20 years before we booked our trip. I remembered watching news footage of women clutching shopping bags while scurrying across boulevards and ducking behind cars to dodge sniper bullets. Bosnia, as it is informally called, was sealed in my mind as a place where a grocery run could cost you your life.
War scenes continued to haunt me on our arrival. After receiving our Airbnb keys from our friendly host, I wondered about his role during the conflict. I’d heard that ordinary men had been conscripted to defend the country’s capital, Sarajevo, a fact confirmed by our walking tour guide later that afternoon. His own father had left his law practice to fight the Serbs after they surrounded the city. There were no resources to build barracks or to feed these men, so soldiering effectively became a commuter job.
War divides and distorts reality. As a child witnessing this conflict on TV, I thought snipers and explosions only belonged in films, not the evening news. Imagine the absurdity, for those Bosnian families, of living in two worlds: having breakfast with your family each morning before heading to a warzone; seeing your father returning home each night with not his briefcase, but a rifle and a bloodied uniform. Familiar places like the local market became bomb targets and pedestrian boulevards became infamous for sniper attacks. School was no longer safe to attend, so for four years, our tour guide, along with other children, was tutored by a rotation of neighbours in the basement of his building.
“But I don’t only want to talk about war,” he said. “There’s so much more to this city.” His declaration was a relief from harrowing history, granting us permission to experience the narrative of ordinary Sarajevo. In an Old Town café, we gorged on a delicious local dessert, tufahije, stewed apple stuffed with chopped almonds and sweet cream. Afterwards, we visited the wishing wall where students prayed for good exam results. Our first evening in Sarajevo saw us bar-hopping from a quaint, tucked-away English pub to a smoke-filled nightclub throbbing with beats and strobe lights.
Sometimes, the narrative of war was difficult to avoid as we tramped on Sarajevo Roses—shrapnel wounds in the sidewalk, filled with red to memorialise fallen civilians. The national library, with its grand Moorish columns and high stained-glass ceilings, is a monument to the infinite power of knowledge. But at the entrance, an engraved plaque remembered the 1992 siege that left the building completely gutted.
Before returning home, we visited the Tunnel of Hope. Running under the airport, the secret tunnel was built during the siege to smuggle food and munitions into Sarajevo and to help people escape. Civilians helped to build the entrance to the tunnel in the backyard of a house, now a private museum.
A middle-aged man who greeted us in the verandah, now converted into a museum gift shop, told us he helped to build the tunnel for a pack of cigarettes a day. Two of his children had died during the siege and his wife never recovered from her grief. Tears sprang to my eyes as I listened, and he gave me a consoling pat on the shoulder as if the losses were mine. A screen door separated the gift shop from his living room. We could hear laughter and see the moving silhouettes of people. “But my family is happy,” he assured us.
Any city worth visiting is filled with overlapping stories of past and present, ordinary and extraordinary. In Sarajevo, we found cobblestoned alleyways winding through ancient Ottoman bazaars, but we also found modern shopping malls and a pulsing nightlife. Bullet holes still scarred the concrete facades but forgiving green hills and drifting wisps of winter fog softened the landscape.
It’s the most compelling case to be made for travelling—the idea that you can witness a multiplicity of narratives about history and humanity. I realized that I had gone to Bosnia searching for a sense of closure that news outlets never really provided once the siege ended and international attention drifted to other conflicts. What I found, instead, was a reminder of the complexity of the relationship between now and then.
Written by Balli Kaur Jaswal
