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Sarajevo II
Oct. 27th, 2017 10:45 pmSo we woke up around lunchtime on Friday 6 October, with my diarrhoea situation not much improved from the hell that was the night before. My stomach was still quite bloated, assumedly from the combination of rich food and gassy beer which had put me in this mess. Still, I tentitively grabbed a shower before heading out into a rather rainy city, with Wolfie incredibly desperate to get food of some kind. Throwing caution to the wind, we ended up in a place called Metropolis, a rather conservative choice right outside the Catholic cathedral. I wanted something steady, so this cafe turned out to be a good choice, with me opting for the scrambled egg on toast. I thought something plain would undoubtedly help and I was gearing up for it, so imagine my disappointment when the scrambled eggs turned out to be fried and they had put some cheese based substance on the bread. This all made it a little too rich, but I did manage to eat it, before heading off to the bathroom once again. My head was killing me, it was pretty much like the worst hangover I had ever had, which wasn't particularly surprising considering the amount of water I had passed overnight. I stuck with bottled water over lunch, but it wasn't really enough and I still felt pretty wretched.
The plan after this was to go to a few museums, with the heavy rain showing no sign of abating. We had intended to go to the cheery sounding Museum of Genocide, which we had tried to enter the night before on our way to Gastropub Vučko. The sign outside had said it shut at 10pm, but upon arriving there (down the darkest most dingy corridor I had ever set foot, through a heavy locking door then up a dusky staircase), the nice man at the front desk told us they actually shut at 9pm and recommended we come back the next day as it was already around 8:40pm by this point. So this was going to be the first order of business, but the guidebook recommended a museum on the other side of the Cathedral to where the cafe was and as we were practically there and the rain was falling heavily, we thought we would go there first. Little did we know that we were going to be occupied for over three hours.
Galerija 11/07/95 was set up by Sarajevan photographer Tarik Samarah, who spent most of the mid 1990s investigating the massacres that occurred in and around Srebrenica. His gallery is named after the day the genocide started which, from 11-22 July 1995, would see 8373 Bosniak men and boys massacred in the worst act of acrocity on European soil since the Holocaust. The museum is not an easy experience, harrowing and humbling in equal measure. It's only one large room and yet in that room there were things that will stay with me forever. As you enter, you are met by a wall of images, faces of all of the people who were killed. In the middle of this opening section, there were computer screens which using Atari-style graphics went into incredibly detail about the build-up to and execution of the massacres. Everything was highlighted - the indifference of the UN and the failings of the Dutch troops in particular who had meant to be protecting Srbrenica as a 'safe area' (their derision, as demonstrated by their graffiti, of the local population was incredibly shocking), the failed communications, the positioning of both the Bosnian Army and the Republika Srpska troops and how events unfolded in the region which resulted in such bloodshed. You could have sat at these screens for half a day, such was the methodical detail, with each day practically broken down into an hour by hour chronicle of what happened. In the end, I must have been there for an hour and a half, and I only saw a fraction of the program.
Further down the room, there were still life images captured by Samarah as he followed the exhumation teams and stayed with the women who had lost members of their families. Through this process, he wanted to pay homage to the victims - all of them, those who were massacred and those who were left behind. There was a lot of talk about moving on, trying to heal a fractured country after such bloodshed, and this was indeed the main theme of Samarah's work - love, not hate. The images of the exhumations were perhaps the most harrowing, of scattered bodies discarded in ditches, skulls poking through the soil where beforehand only fractured dolls marked the mass graves. There were also images of daily life continuing for the widows, grieving mothers, portraying loneliness and sorrow. This was hard to see, but the worst was undoubtedly the video footage. This was 1995. A year I recognised. A year I remember. I've been to museums focusing on the atrocities committed by the Soviets in the Cold War, or by the Nazis in World War Two and yet all of those were more distant to me, an important part of history but one that had happened outside my lifetime. But THIS was something I remembered. I had seen it on the news, albeit not to this detail. Bill Clinton was President (and it was he who opened the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial and Cemetery in 2003 where all of those who were killed have since been laid to rest), the coaches they had used to move people to their deaths were familiar, even the protagonists were known to me. The video was not comfortable viewing. In it, you saw desperate people trekking over mountains in fear of their lives. You saw some of them being herded onto buses and worst of all, there was footage of some of the executions. This I will never forget. Men younger than I, lined up with arms bound, waiting in line as those in front of them were picked off. At the end of the film, there were overhead shots of the places where most of the executions took place - schools mainly, where Bosniaks were piled in before the Republika Srpksa soldiers machine gunned them inside. There were a couple of tales of survival, many recounted at the trials of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić in The Hague when they were indicted for genocide. These recounts were truly terrible.
The rest of the exhibition was dedicated to the Siege of Sarajevo, with a number of arty posters based on popular culture (for example an Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup Can pastiche) highlighting the plight of the city. Some made reference to the Winter Olympics having been there only eight years prior to the siege beginning. Meanwhile, on the screen in the centre of the room, after the harrowing footage of Srbrenica, there was an art-house type film about how long ten minutes can be. It started off in Rome, with a Japanese photographer wanting to get his film developed and an Italian developer convincing him that he could do it inside ten minutes. This perplexed the tourist, who said that no-one could do it in that time. This introduced the viewer to the concept of how long ten minutes can be, with the clock on the studio's wall morphing into a clock in a shelled house in Sarajevo. The story involved a young boy who was sent out to get water and bread, which was rationed but delivered by a truck every day. While he was out, the shelling started again, and he hid with some troops, before heading back to his house, only to discover his parents had been killed. The film then morphed back to the photographer's shop and we saw the tourist picking up his photos after just ten minutes, highlighting how much can happen in that time. Like with everything else in this museum, it was incredibly heartfelt and moving. We had intended to go to the Memorial itself, but the distance was quite long and with me feeling ill, we thought it would be best not. But this more than made up for it, no matter how difficult it was. We left three hours later, completely drained, shellshocked and overawed. I had never seen Wolfie look as disturbed as this and we were at a loss as to what to do so we decided to just walk aimlessly around the city for a while.
It took us a long time to regather our thoughts, but noticing that the Gazi Husrev Beg Madrasa was still open, we decided to take a look. We had tried to get into the mosque opposite, but the erratic and misleading opening times meant it was shut again. However, at least we did get to see the Madrasa, which is now a museum detailing how Gazi Husrev Beg founded the city of Sarajevo in the sixteenth century. There was a fascinating film which talked about the building of the mosque, madrasa, caravansarai, market and baths, a lot of it linked personally to Gazi Husrev Beg, whose mausoleum stands adjacent to the mosque. There was a little fountain in the heart of the square courtyard of the Madrasa, with a corridor on all four sides of this space leading to rooms. It was in these rooms that the life of Gazi Husrev Beg was detailed, along with life in the Madrasa. There was plenty of beautiful callgraphy in the Arabic script, along with old ornate copies of the Qur'an. There were also deeds concerning various building projects in the city along with Beg's waqf, or charitable endowment to the city. Indeed, most of the main buildings in Sarajevo were down to this great man and it was fascinating learning more about him. Interestingly, in the aforementioned film, we discovered that the world's longest running public toilet is in Sarajevo, having been established in 1530 and still used to this day. There's a plaque outside detailing this, which is on one of the side streets. The toilet is actually directly opposite the mosque and where the caravanserai used to be, whose foundations we ended up discovering during a later nighttime ramble in the city as we wanted to boost steps to 10,000. While wandering around during the night, we also got to see the mosque all beautifully lit up and the clock tower, with its Arabic script for its numerals, which was interesting too. While on this walk, I was delighted to note they have Nutri Bullets here, which is my absolute favourite late night teleshopping infomercial.
Bosnians live for coffee and we couldn't go to the country without sampling some, so after this I took Wolfie to one of the many coffee houses in the old town. I'm not a fan of coffee so I had a deliciously velvety and thick hot chocolate, but Wolfie had a coffee in the Turkish style, thick and bitter with the grounded bean sediment still at the bottom. It's served with a Turkish delight sweet and Wolfie was a big fan. Coffee has often united this country together and I was fascinated to learn that after the Bosnian War, one way the government tried to unite the country was through a poster campaign which merely said 'Go for a coffee'.
I still wasn't feeling particularly well and so was struggling to work out where best to eat. We traipsed around the Old Town for a bit, looking for something I think my stomach could take. I had concluded that the rich Bosnian food perhaps had set all this off, and so I wanted something rather plain and boring, much like my lunch. I was a bit gutted about this as when travelling abroad I like to sample the local cuisine but I couldn't risk another night like the night before. In the end, we thought we would head to McDonald's, which was in the Austro-Hungarian part of the city. So we started to make our way there, when a restaurant to our right caught our eye. Called Klopa, it too was recommended in the guidebook and as it had familiar food like pizza, we thought this would be better than a fast food chain. We went inside and the charasmatic gentleman soon sat us down. I was sticking with water due to my stomach, but he did manage to persuade me to try the lamb cutlets, which he told me was the house speciality. Wolfie had already ordered these and he recommended them over my pizza. I did worry about my stomach but I deduced that lamb was familiar enough. In the end, I needn't have worried as the food was exquisite, so tender, with a nice red tomato paste complementing the meat. It was served with potato wedges in a rich cream sauce I had to avoid, but it was definitely great gastronomy and I am really glad I was persuaded to look beyond pizza.
Wolfie wanted to go back to Vučko but I was unsure, fearing the gas and the alcohol would set me off again, so I pursuaded him to go back to the hotel. I took some nice pictures of the alleyways in the dark on our way back, feeling a little down that it was Friday night and we were retiring so early. Still, we had the bottle of Brkic red wine to drink and the TV channels you could get in the hotel room were incredibly interesting, including the main stations from Oman, Sudan and Iraq. The latter, with its straight laced news reporting interspersed with the join the army commercials, was arguably the most intriguing but I did get into a soap opera on the Sudanese station. We were also delighted to see our old friend Bernd das Brot on the KIKA channel, so our evening was pretty great, with the wine going down very well. Alas, it did set my stomach off a little bit so we had to leave half the bottle, a shameful waste, but at least we did get to try it.
The plan after this was to go to a few museums, with the heavy rain showing no sign of abating. We had intended to go to the cheery sounding Museum of Genocide, which we had tried to enter the night before on our way to Gastropub Vučko. The sign outside had said it shut at 10pm, but upon arriving there (down the darkest most dingy corridor I had ever set foot, through a heavy locking door then up a dusky staircase), the nice man at the front desk told us they actually shut at 9pm and recommended we come back the next day as it was already around 8:40pm by this point. So this was going to be the first order of business, but the guidebook recommended a museum on the other side of the Cathedral to where the cafe was and as we were practically there and the rain was falling heavily, we thought we would go there first. Little did we know that we were going to be occupied for over three hours.
Galerija 11/07/95 was set up by Sarajevan photographer Tarik Samarah, who spent most of the mid 1990s investigating the massacres that occurred in and around Srebrenica. His gallery is named after the day the genocide started which, from 11-22 July 1995, would see 8373 Bosniak men and boys massacred in the worst act of acrocity on European soil since the Holocaust. The museum is not an easy experience, harrowing and humbling in equal measure. It's only one large room and yet in that room there were things that will stay with me forever. As you enter, you are met by a wall of images, faces of all of the people who were killed. In the middle of this opening section, there were computer screens which using Atari-style graphics went into incredibly detail about the build-up to and execution of the massacres. Everything was highlighted - the indifference of the UN and the failings of the Dutch troops in particular who had meant to be protecting Srbrenica as a 'safe area' (their derision, as demonstrated by their graffiti, of the local population was incredibly shocking), the failed communications, the positioning of both the Bosnian Army and the Republika Srpska troops and how events unfolded in the region which resulted in such bloodshed. You could have sat at these screens for half a day, such was the methodical detail, with each day practically broken down into an hour by hour chronicle of what happened. In the end, I must have been there for an hour and a half, and I only saw a fraction of the program.
Further down the room, there were still life images captured by Samarah as he followed the exhumation teams and stayed with the women who had lost members of their families. Through this process, he wanted to pay homage to the victims - all of them, those who were massacred and those who were left behind. There was a lot of talk about moving on, trying to heal a fractured country after such bloodshed, and this was indeed the main theme of Samarah's work - love, not hate. The images of the exhumations were perhaps the most harrowing, of scattered bodies discarded in ditches, skulls poking through the soil where beforehand only fractured dolls marked the mass graves. There were also images of daily life continuing for the widows, grieving mothers, portraying loneliness and sorrow. This was hard to see, but the worst was undoubtedly the video footage. This was 1995. A year I recognised. A year I remember. I've been to museums focusing on the atrocities committed by the Soviets in the Cold War, or by the Nazis in World War Two and yet all of those were more distant to me, an important part of history but one that had happened outside my lifetime. But THIS was something I remembered. I had seen it on the news, albeit not to this detail. Bill Clinton was President (and it was he who opened the Srebrenica–Potočari Memorial and Cemetery in 2003 where all of those who were killed have since been laid to rest), the coaches they had used to move people to their deaths were familiar, even the protagonists were known to me. The video was not comfortable viewing. In it, you saw desperate people trekking over mountains in fear of their lives. You saw some of them being herded onto buses and worst of all, there was footage of some of the executions. This I will never forget. Men younger than I, lined up with arms bound, waiting in line as those in front of them were picked off. At the end of the film, there were overhead shots of the places where most of the executions took place - schools mainly, where Bosniaks were piled in before the Republika Srpksa soldiers machine gunned them inside. There were a couple of tales of survival, many recounted at the trials of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić in The Hague when they were indicted for genocide. These recounts were truly terrible.
The rest of the exhibition was dedicated to the Siege of Sarajevo, with a number of arty posters based on popular culture (for example an Andy Warhol Campbell's Soup Can pastiche) highlighting the plight of the city. Some made reference to the Winter Olympics having been there only eight years prior to the siege beginning. Meanwhile, on the screen in the centre of the room, after the harrowing footage of Srbrenica, there was an art-house type film about how long ten minutes can be. It started off in Rome, with a Japanese photographer wanting to get his film developed and an Italian developer convincing him that he could do it inside ten minutes. This perplexed the tourist, who said that no-one could do it in that time. This introduced the viewer to the concept of how long ten minutes can be, with the clock on the studio's wall morphing into a clock in a shelled house in Sarajevo. The story involved a young boy who was sent out to get water and bread, which was rationed but delivered by a truck every day. While he was out, the shelling started again, and he hid with some troops, before heading back to his house, only to discover his parents had been killed. The film then morphed back to the photographer's shop and we saw the tourist picking up his photos after just ten minutes, highlighting how much can happen in that time. Like with everything else in this museum, it was incredibly heartfelt and moving. We had intended to go to the Memorial itself, but the distance was quite long and with me feeling ill, we thought it would be best not. But this more than made up for it, no matter how difficult it was. We left three hours later, completely drained, shellshocked and overawed. I had never seen Wolfie look as disturbed as this and we were at a loss as to what to do so we decided to just walk aimlessly around the city for a while.
It took us a long time to regather our thoughts, but noticing that the Gazi Husrev Beg Madrasa was still open, we decided to take a look. We had tried to get into the mosque opposite, but the erratic and misleading opening times meant it was shut again. However, at least we did get to see the Madrasa, which is now a museum detailing how Gazi Husrev Beg founded the city of Sarajevo in the sixteenth century. There was a fascinating film which talked about the building of the mosque, madrasa, caravansarai, market and baths, a lot of it linked personally to Gazi Husrev Beg, whose mausoleum stands adjacent to the mosque. There was a little fountain in the heart of the square courtyard of the Madrasa, with a corridor on all four sides of this space leading to rooms. It was in these rooms that the life of Gazi Husrev Beg was detailed, along with life in the Madrasa. There was plenty of beautiful callgraphy in the Arabic script, along with old ornate copies of the Qur'an. There were also deeds concerning various building projects in the city along with Beg's waqf, or charitable endowment to the city. Indeed, most of the main buildings in Sarajevo were down to this great man and it was fascinating learning more about him. Interestingly, in the aforementioned film, we discovered that the world's longest running public toilet is in Sarajevo, having been established in 1530 and still used to this day. There's a plaque outside detailing this, which is on one of the side streets. The toilet is actually directly opposite the mosque and where the caravanserai used to be, whose foundations we ended up discovering during a later nighttime ramble in the city as we wanted to boost steps to 10,000. While wandering around during the night, we also got to see the mosque all beautifully lit up and the clock tower, with its Arabic script for its numerals, which was interesting too. While on this walk, I was delighted to note they have Nutri Bullets here, which is my absolute favourite late night teleshopping infomercial.
Bosnians live for coffee and we couldn't go to the country without sampling some, so after this I took Wolfie to one of the many coffee houses in the old town. I'm not a fan of coffee so I had a deliciously velvety and thick hot chocolate, but Wolfie had a coffee in the Turkish style, thick and bitter with the grounded bean sediment still at the bottom. It's served with a Turkish delight sweet and Wolfie was a big fan. Coffee has often united this country together and I was fascinated to learn that after the Bosnian War, one way the government tried to unite the country was through a poster campaign which merely said 'Go for a coffee'.
I still wasn't feeling particularly well and so was struggling to work out where best to eat. We traipsed around the Old Town for a bit, looking for something I think my stomach could take. I had concluded that the rich Bosnian food perhaps had set all this off, and so I wanted something rather plain and boring, much like my lunch. I was a bit gutted about this as when travelling abroad I like to sample the local cuisine but I couldn't risk another night like the night before. In the end, we thought we would head to McDonald's, which was in the Austro-Hungarian part of the city. So we started to make our way there, when a restaurant to our right caught our eye. Called Klopa, it too was recommended in the guidebook and as it had familiar food like pizza, we thought this would be better than a fast food chain. We went inside and the charasmatic gentleman soon sat us down. I was sticking with water due to my stomach, but he did manage to persuade me to try the lamb cutlets, which he told me was the house speciality. Wolfie had already ordered these and he recommended them over my pizza. I did worry about my stomach but I deduced that lamb was familiar enough. In the end, I needn't have worried as the food was exquisite, so tender, with a nice red tomato paste complementing the meat. It was served with potato wedges in a rich cream sauce I had to avoid, but it was definitely great gastronomy and I am really glad I was persuaded to look beyond pizza.
Wolfie wanted to go back to Vučko but I was unsure, fearing the gas and the alcohol would set me off again, so I pursuaded him to go back to the hotel. I took some nice pictures of the alleyways in the dark on our way back, feeling a little down that it was Friday night and we were retiring so early. Still, we had the bottle of Brkic red wine to drink and the TV channels you could get in the hotel room were incredibly interesting, including the main stations from Oman, Sudan and Iraq. The latter, with its straight laced news reporting interspersed with the join the army commercials, was arguably the most intriguing but I did get into a soap opera on the Sudanese station. We were also delighted to see our old friend Bernd das Brot on the KIKA channel, so our evening was pretty great, with the wine going down very well. Alas, it did set my stomach off a little bit so we had to leave half the bottle, a shameful waste, but at least we did get to try it.
