Mostar - Intro to Bosnia and Herzegovina

I don't think that any of us were prepared for Bosnia.

I mean, I remember seeing the news reports when I was a kid about the conflict in the '90s, and we spent a solid 2 hour lecture learning about the details of the war and how it came about, but we didn't really learn anything about what Bosnia and Herzegovina was actually like as a country. 

For instance, none of us, and I mean none of us were prepared for how green it is. 

For some reason we all had it in our heads that it was some sort of rocky, desert place, not unlike Kamloops. We could not have been more mistaken. 

I thought it looked a bit like the island in Jurassic Park, all tree covered cliffs and green water, and if it wasn't for the occasional destroyed building, you kind of forget where you are for a second.

After driving through incredibly high, narrow, winding mountain roads in our giant beast of a bus, we emerged into an idyllic valley town called Jajce (pronounced "yiy-tseh") that had an honest-to-goodness medieval fort on a hill in the centre of the town. I swear to you was like something out of a fairytale.

Like, COME ON!

As we were all desperately trying to snap decent pictures out of the giant windows of the moving bus, Dr. Scheffel went into full professor mode about the history and significance of the fort.

During the Ottoman invasion, this was the last stronghold the Kingdom of Bosnia held against the Turkish forces, and as such it holds a place of great esteem in the hearts of the Bosnian people. This is why Jajce was chosen to host the second convention of the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia in which foundations for the creation of Yugoslavia took place. That's right, the creation of an entire nation was solidified within this historically significant town.

We all listened absently and continued to take doomed-to-be-blurry photos from the windows of the bus.

We are tourist trash.

The road to Mostar continued to be lush and green and mountainous and harrowing, but as it started to get dark we finally arrived at our hostel and emerged from the bus walking like creaky, arthritic, crone-people, glad to finally be on solid ground. Even though most of us spent large portions of the bus ride fitfully sleeping, we all just wanted to get horizontal and rest before plunging into our next assignment.

Dr. Scheffel took us on another of his walking tours today and, like Prague, we really got a deep understanding of not only the geography of the town, but of the social climate and tensions of the inhabitants, the specific details of how the war affected the town, and we knocked a few of the locations off our assignment list.

Oh, and the assignment here, GET THIS - we have to identify all religious sights, used and defunct, in the entire town. This may not seem like a daunting task, however as we looked out over the town from our vantage point outside the ruins of the old Orthodox church, the sheer number of minarets we could see peeking above the rooftops of the buildings across the town was sobering. (Future me: there were 25 religious sites in total. TWENTY. FIVE.)

The Croat Catholic Church and a Minaret from opposing sides of the river at night. 

The number of mosques is apparently significant, as the town is separated by a river and each side is inhabited by a different faith. On the one side are the Croat catholics, who have built a massive church steeple with an equally giant cross on top of the hill overlooking the town. On the other side are the Bosnian muslims who have countered the large size of the steeple with a multitude of mosques.

I appear to be eating an ice cream cone from the bottom. Madness. 

The sides of the river are connected by several bridges, however while the others are simply to facilitate vehicle movement, the Stari Most (or Old Bridge) is a walking bridge built during the Ottoman rule in the 16th century and stood for 427 years before being destroyed in 1993 during the war. It has since been rebuilt and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

I think every time we come to a new place, there's always a little something that reminds me that I'm in a different country, and I don't mean the obvious things like people talking another language, or seeing a bunch of old buildings or anything. I mean, like, the complete absence of peanut butter, or seeing military people with enormous guns at border crossings, or hearing the call to prayer blare from dozens of mosques at 5pm on the dot, every day.

The thing about Bosnia though, is that in conjunction with reconciling yourself to being in yet another brand new country, in this case there was also a recent and violent conflict that took place here, and the remnants of that are still very apparent.

Many of the buildings have been repaired like the old bridge, but there are still just as many that are riddled with bullet holes. The carnage from whatever these bullets caused has since been washed away, but the holes themselves still remain.

Often, brand new, freshly painted buildings stand on either side of a dilapidated structure, just trying to stay upright, the trees growing inside of it adding structural integrity and also a lending hand to its ancient ruin-like appearance

We finished our walking tour of the town in the Spanish Square that had apparently been the site of a major fight. All the buildings in this spot are either sprayed with thousands of bullet holes or only the skeletal remains of a single wall are still standing.

Seeing the destruction in this square shook me to my core.

I know we have it good in Canada, I know this. But I don't think I could even fathom how sheltered I was from any kind of reality where actual bullet holes are just casually spit across every surface. A reality where bombs destroy 400 year old bridges and reduce stone buildings to rubble. Where land mines are apparently still littered across the countryside. Where ethnic tensions are so high that actual genocide is something that could happen.

It is important for people to experience this kind of stuff first hand. It's important to take it in, and really try to understand what it means for a country or a people to survive in the worst possible environments. It's important to feel shitty about these things, and it's important to make sure that your privileged ass tries to prevent anything even remotely similar ever happen again.