If you are an adept of dark tourism, you will love this war hostel in Bosnia which stands on the site of owner Arijan Kurbasic’s family home where he experienced the war as a child.
According to the New York Times, he greets guests wearing army fatigues, black boots, a helmet, and a flak jacket, and asks them to call him Zero One, his father’s code name during the war. Arijan Kurbasic makes it perfectly clear on his website – War Hostel Sarajevo is not for mainstream tourists and certainly not for the faint of heart. The 26-year-old is seated behind a pile of sandbags that function as a reception desk. He explains that he survived the Bosnian War as a toddler, “My family and I experienced a war we didn’t ask for, and we survived it out of pure luck,” says Kurbasic. “I offer immersive experiences and war tours to show what happens when people get divided into ‘us and them’.”
Should you have a taste for the macabre and end up staying in that most unusual hostel, you will find an unusual decor — lots of guns and, in one room, a poster screaming “Death” and “The End.”, The Travel writes.
The sofa in the hostel’s common room is covered in camouflage upholstery. Flags, news clippings, and automatic rifles hang on the walls. At night, deprived of electricity, guests read by lighting oil candles and fall asleep on sponge mats, listening to the sound of gunfire and bomb explosions played over a sound system. The years of the siege of Sarajevo stretch on inside the city’s War Hostel, a place where visitors get a taste of daily life in a war zone.
It will cost you 20 euros, about $22.50 to sleep there. There is smoke pumped out by a machine to create a choking fog. The floor is made from packed mud, while the walls and ceiling consist of crudely cut logs. You can sleep on hard wooden boards without a mattress. Material things like cell phones, jewelry, and watches are banned in the bunker.
At the war hostel, Mr. Kurbasic said his aim was not to create nostalgia for Europe’s worst conflict since World War II but simply to let guests, especially millennials, experience and understand the discomfort and deprivations of wartime.
We share important messages about humanity and life and we think that the best way to learn about anything is to experience it yourself, this is the core idea behind our hostel.
You will sleep on a bomb shelter bed, on the floor, covering yourself with a real military blanket used in the war. The blankets are your sheet, pillow and cover.
Everything is lit up with makeshift war time light bulbs run by a car battery. If you expect luxury and comfort, please do not come here. Everything around you, in the room you book carries a story from the war.
Love reading? Our hostel is literally like a book, the walls are packed with real war
newspapers which contain true survival stories from war torn Sarajevo, which you
can only read here.
