Two weeks in Bosnia. The country that remembers.
Sarajevo, Mostar, Blagaj. Travel where history isn't decoration — it's still in the walls, the street names, the silences. A country that insists on being understood before it lets you enjoy it.
Most countries have a past. Bosnia has a presence. The war ended in 1995. That's thirty years ago. In historical terms, the day before yesterday.
You arrive in Sarajevo and you can see it on the buildings if you know what you're looking at — and you know what you're looking at within the first hour because the city doesn't hide it. The repairs are visible. Some buildings still have the marks and nobody has patched them. Not as memorial, not as monument. Just as a record of what happened, left in place because the people who live there don't need reminding and don't particularly care to curate the history for visitors.
This is the thing that makes Bosnia different from any other place I have travelled in Europe. The past is not presented. It is present.
Getting there, and what you're getting into
Sarajevo is served by a small international airport. Flights from Vienna, Istanbul, Munich, London. Not many direct connections from most cities — Bosnia is not on the major tourism circuit in the way Croatia or Slovenia have become, and this is part of what makes it worth going.
The drive from the airport into the city is approximately 20 minutes. On the way, the road passes through Dobrinja — a suburb that was on the front line of the siege. The apartment blocks have been repainted in most cases, but the layout of the neighbourhood — roads that dead-end abruptly, gaps between buildings that shouldn't be there, a geometry that doesn't quite make sense — reflects what happened. The city was redesigned by artillery. Some of that redesign is still visible.
I stayed in Baščaršija, the old Ottoman bazaar quarter. It is the most intact medieval market district I have seen in Europe — more intact than Istanbul's Grand Bazaar, less touristic than Dubrovnik's old town. Narrow lanes, coppersmith workshops, mosques, a sixteenth-century covered market, and coffee shops that serve Bosnian coffee in the traditional way: a small copper džezva, a glass of water, a cube of rahat lokum, no milk, no hurry.
Sarajevo: three days minimum, five better
The city rewards slow attention.
The Sarajevo War Tunnel (Tunel spasa — Tunnel of Rescue) is 800 metres of underground passage dug by hand under the UN-controlled Butmir airport between 1993 and 1995. It was the only link between the besieged city and the outside world for most of the siege. 340,000 people were trapped in Sarajevo for 44 months — the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, longer than the Siege of Leningrad.
The tunnel is now a museum, maintained by the family who owned the house at the city end. They were there during the siege. The father, now in his seventies, sometimes walks through and will talk if you ask him the right questions. There is no audio guide. There is a short documentary, shot during the siege, that runs on a loop. It lasts about twenty minutes. It is among the most disturbing twenty minutes I have spent in any museum.
The Markale marketplace is where two mortar attacks — in February 1994 and August 1995 — killed a combined total of 105 civilians. There is a plaque. The market still operates. People buy vegetables and cheese and bread at the stalls next to the plaque. I found this harder to sit with than the formal museum spaces — not because it was more graphic, but because the continuation of ordinary life around the memorial felt like a more honest representation of how atrocity gets absorbed into a city than any monument does.
The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina holds the Sarajevo Haggadah — one of the oldest surviving Haggadot in the world, produced in Barcelona in approximately 1350, brought to Sarajevo by Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, hidden by a Muslim curator during the Nazi occupation in 1941, and hidden again in a bank vault during the siege in 1992. The museum that houses it was itself under fire during the siege. The object has survived more than its display case should have allowed.
Walk through the city and you will pass, within a few blocks, a Catholic church, an Orthodox church, a mosque, and a synagogue. This was Sarajevo's defining characteristic — the four religions coexisting in a small city, each with their own quarter but sharing the streets. It was what made the city a target during the war. It is what makes it worth understanding now.
Mostar: one night, maybe two
Mostar is three hours south of Sarajevo by car, or four by bus through mountains that make the journey worth the extra time. The Neretva river is a green-blue that looks artificial — a colour that belongs in a swimming pool rather than a river — and the old bridge (Stari Most) that gives the city its name arches over it in a single Ottoman span that has been there since 1566, was destroyed by Croatian forces in 1993, and was rebuilt and reopened in 2004.
The bridge is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In high summer, it is very crowded. In May or October, it is less so.
The thing to understand about Mostar is that the city is still divided. The 1993–1994 battle line ran roughly down the Neretva, with Bosniak forces on the east bank and Croatian forces on the west. The formal ceasefire was signed in 1994. The informal division of the city — in terms of which cafes people use, which schools children attend, which political party receives which vote — has not fully dissolved in thirty years.
This is not dramatised for tourists. You have to look for it. A conversation with a local will tell you which side of the river they grew up on before they tell you almost anything else about themselves. The geography of the city is not neutral.
The east bank is the tourist circuit: the old bazaar, the Koski Mehmed Pasha mosque with its minaret view over the bridge, the diving tradition (young men dive from the bridge for donations from tourists, a practice that predates the tourism by centuries). The west bank is less visited and has better coffee. Go there.
Blagaj: an afternoon
Twenty minutes from Mostar by car, the Buna river emerges fully formed from a cliff face at the foot of a mountain — one of the largest karst springs in Europe, producing 43 cubic metres of water per second from an underground system that nobody has fully mapped. At the mouth of the spring is a 16th-century Dervish tekke (monastery), built into the cliff, still occupied by the Bektashi order.
There is a restaurant at the spring. The trout is farmed in the spring water. Eating it while watching the water pour from solid rock at a volume that makes the air feel different is one of the more disorienting pleasant meals I have had.
What Bosnia requires of you as a traveller
I do not mean this as a moral injunction. I mean it practically: Bosnia is a country that does not perform its history for visitors. It does not route you around the difficult parts. It does not translate the complexity into a simplified narrative that resolves cleanly at the end of the tour.
The conflict from 1992 to 1995 is described differently depending on who you ask. Bosniak, Serb, and Croat perspectives on the war are not reconciled into a single account and probably will not be in my lifetime. The international community's role — the UN's failure at Srebrenica, the delay in NATO intervention, the arms embargo that left Bosnian civilians unable to defend themselves — is documented and contested simultaneously.
You will be offered versions of this history by drivers, guides, hotel owners, and the person at the next table. The versions will not agree. The right response is not to arbitrate between them. The right response is to listen to all of them and to leave with a more complicated picture than the one you arrived with.
This is what slow travel is actually for. Not the bridge. Not the tunnel. The conversation that makes you less certain than you were when you sat down.
Practical notes
Season: May and September are ideal. Summer is hot (Mostar in July is 38°C regularly) and crowded on the tourist circuit. Winter is cold and some accommodation closes.
Language: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are mutually intelligible and officially distinct. English is widely spoken in Sarajevo, less so in smaller towns. Bosnian coffee is served without milk; asking for milk is not rude but it is not what you're there for.
Getting around: Sarajevo is walkable. A car is necessary for Mostar and Blagaj. Buses run between the main cities but take longer than they should and schedules vary.
Money: The Bosnian convertible mark (BAM), pegged to the euro. Extremely affordable relative to the rest of Europe — a full meal in a good Sarajevo restaurant is €10–15. Hotel rooms in Baščaršija start at €40.
Read before you go: The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić (Nobel Prize, 1961) — a novel spanning 400 years of Bosnian history centred on a bridge in Višegrad. Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović — short stories written during the siege. The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway (fiction, but useful orientation). For non-fiction: Bosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm. Dense, scholarly, essential.
The thing that stays with you
I spent the last afternoon in Sarajevo at the Yellow Fortress (Žuta Tabija), a promontory above the old city with a view over the entire bowl of the valley the city sits in. The mountains are close — 1,200 metres, visible from everywhere. During the siege, those mountains held the guns. You can see the field of fire from the fortress. You can see why the city was impossible to defend.
A man in his forties sat down next to me and, after a few minutes, asked where I was from. We talked for an hour. He had been twelve when the war started. He told me about the particular experience of growing up in a besieged city — not the dramatic parts, which are well documented, but the texture of it. The boredom. The absurdity of trying to do homework with no electricity. The way people's characters revealed themselves under sustained pressure.
"We thought the world would come quickly," he said. "We were mistaken about the world."
He said it without bitterness. It was just a fact he had learned, like the mountains are close and the spring at Blagaj produces 43 cubic metres per second. He had integrated it.
That is the thing about Bosnia: the people have integrated things that would break most places. The country hasn't forgiven — forgiveness requires a conversation that hasn't happened between the parties — but it is functioning. People are raising children and opening restaurants and arguing about football and fixing the potholes. History and daily life occupy the same space without resolving into each other.
I don't know what to do with that except to say that it deserves to be seen.
Sources & Further Reading
- Malcolm, N. (1994). Bosnia: A Short History. New York University Press.
- Andrić, I. (1945). The Bridge on the Drina. (trans. Lovett F. Edwards, 1959). University of Chicago Press.
- Jergović, M. (1994). Sarajevo Marlboro. (trans. Stela Tomasević, 1997). Archipelago Books.
- Rieff, D. (1995). Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. Simon & Schuster.
- UN Secretary-General. (1999). Report of the Secretary-General Pursuant to General Assembly Resolution 53/35: The Fall of Srebrenica. United Nations.
- UNESCO World Heritage Committee. (2005). Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar. UNESCO.
- Siege of Sarajevo: 5 April 1992 – 29 February 1996. Duration: 1,425 days. Sources: International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).