Bosnia and Herzegovina

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11. 08. 2008 Sarajevo (BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA) I'm writing from a rickety Bosnian bus. Well yes, we're travelling towards Sarajevo, this city we've heard named on the TV news for so long, protagonist of an endless war. We're heading right there, and for a soldier like me it's very moving, especially because Bosnia is still today a territory where our contingent operates! Along the road, as we skirted the airport, I saw a plane take off and I thought to myself: 'In an hour and a half this one will already be in Italy!' We, from the border, took more than fifteen! I love travelling like this, discovering every place starting from the bottom, certainly more tiring and hard on our bodies but more precious for our souls...

We move the way they move, we eat the same things they eat; even this is living the place that hosts you! This bus reminds me so much of the one taken from Mexico to Belize, except for the music, which here is a sad Gypsy-Slav lament, and the people don't have the perennial smile of those black faces but gaunt faces carved by suffering! The conductor, like many others, speaks to us in Serbian almost as if we understood it; I get the impression they really believe they're still an empire, the one Tito worked so hard for, but meanwhile, while Karadžić (a dictator accused of many crimes against humanity) is being arrested, here they're organising demonstrations and protests against this action. An exhausting bus journey, few kilometres covered in almost 8 hours...

Every now and then the bus stopped, picked people up, dropped others off, checked the tyres, stopped at the mechanic, then to eat... Bosnia struck me enormously. You expect to find ruins, buildings collapsed by the bombings and instead... The landscape from Belgrade to here: a mix of the Alps and Finland. Lots of green hills, trees, pastures with cows, sheep, little flowers... I was expecting a second Macedonia, or even worse, and instead I'm left open-mouthed once I'm here... 12. 08. 2008 Sarajevo (BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA) Are you sure there was a war here? Well, on the outskirts many buildings bear the marks, the wounds of a conflict only just past and that must be erased, but here...

Last night I was chatting with Samra, a very nice Bosnian woman, and when I asked her if she knew a war museum she could point us to, she froze me by saying: 'Honestly I don't know, we're trying to forget it!' Yesterday, as soon as we arrived, we looked for a hostel right away... What an adventure! Our dormitory was tucked down a dark side street near a cemetery without even a small sign... Would we be right to trust it? If the 'one-eyed guy' hadn't accompanied us in his van we'd never have found it... The people are nice at least. There are various little groups of Australians, Swiss and German women with whom we spent a bit of time laughing and joking! The old town struck me a lot, so full of people, not too many tourists, and packed with wonderful girls.

Honestly I was expecting to find a mix of Israel (for the military deployment) and Macedonia (because the population is Slavic-Muslim). Only the latter expectation matched; in fact it was striking to see those girls with slender bodies, angelic faces, ice-cold eyes but with their heads covered by the veil... We met a few local girls, Muslim without the veil, very sociable, people who had experienced the war on their own skin, though they were children. They talked of shelters, unions, community: 'What was mine is also yours!' Girls whose fathers were called to fight and who could only embrace them again 4 years later, at the end of the conflict, the luckiest ones! Remember that so many people died that the cemeteries no longer had room, so they began burying them on the playing fields that a few years earlier (1984) had hosted the Winter Olympics.

What a mockery! A field that represents the symbol of world peace and shortly afterwards turns into a place of eternal rest caused by war! We saw the Olympic area, or what remains of it, during the bus tour we did with Jasna and Emira, two girls we met on the first day and who helped us find our way back to our hostel! Jasna in particular is a stunning girl, so much so that she broke into the heart of my Portuguese friend, convincing him to stay in Sarajevo! The tour showed us the city's surroundings; it struck me a lot to see the spot where in 1914 the heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and which, as we know, triggered the First World War! Walking through the centre, every now and then the mournful laments of the muezzin from the minaret provided the background... [ continues at: ]