Remember This

Over the course of our travels, I have learned something about myself: I’m not as bad at or as disinterested in history as I once suspected. Rather, during History of Europe 1217 to 1539 (or similar) I had exactly zero context into which I could put all those strange names and dates, and history class was thus a series of memory exercises rather than real learning and understanding.  This is probably the reason the only history class I ever found interesting or enjoyable was Colonial America, having grown up in the heart of where the action took place. Travel has changed this for me, and I have found that once I’ve visited a place, its history becomes much more meaningful and – at its best, which is often its worst – fascinating… especially when the history is recent enough to not even really be considered history yet.

Having come to this revelation in Southeast Asia (the most I really knew about Vietnam prior was some combination of Robin Williams movies & Billy Joel songs), I was particularly looking forward to our 5 day visit to Bosnia & Herzegovina (BiH), where we spent two nights in Mostar and three nights in Sarajevo.  This country and the Balkan region has been a battleground over the centuries as the Ottoman Turks pushed from the east and the Roman Catholics pushed from the west, getting all knotted up with Orthodox Christians and a few Jews along the way. This is an extreme oversimplification of an extremely complex and tumultuous history which Jason & I have been learning about through reading Dame Rebecca West’s 1930s travelogue tome about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. However given I have taken a break from this to read Tina Fey’s hilarious Bossypants, this is all the detail I can really remember (still not good at reading history, apparently).

I was not disappointed.  In BiH, history lives on every corner.  We admired from every angle the graceful Stari Most (old bridge) in Mostar which had sustained centuries of war, only to be blown to bits in the 90s conflict. We stood on the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated next to the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo, triggering World War I. We spoke with a guy in his early 20s who served us lunch in his family’s restaurant, and he told us about how his mother took him at age 5 and his 2-week-old brother to safety in Germany in 1992 while his father stayed behind to fight; it would have been shameful for him not to. We stood on a hill above Sarajevo and were astonished at the gleaming white pillars of the Muslim cemeteries that dotted the city, all with dates 1993-1996.  We visited a museum where the exhibit on children’s lives during the 90s conflict made me wonder, “What was I worrying about in 1993?”  Certainly not about snipers as I crossed the street or having my house rearranged by bombings.

So much horror has happened here – in the country and region – over the years recent and past, that what was really surprising to me was how beautiful and lively the country is. In my mind it would be grey and desolate, with people wandering about the streets all down and out. But these half-ruined / half-rebuilt and very vibrant cities are nestled in lush green hills cut by winding rivers. The café scene is unparalleled: there is so much socializing it made us wonder if anyone does anything other than drink coffee, smoke, chat, and strut up and down the street all day (this question remains unanswered).  It is probably an unreasonable dream to expect this peacefulness to remain in this highly charged region forever, but in Mostar, at least, they want to remember the past so as to not let it be repeated. 

Stari Most, Mostar