Sarajevo
detail from the monument for the eternal flame in Sarajevo.
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It seems very fair to say that most Americans associate the idea of Bosnia in their minds with a certain degree of tragedy. Walking around the city you are confronted with a certain conflicted appreciation for it. The history of Sarajevo seems as though it would force a broad historical perspective onto ones personal ideology on a daily basis.
plaque memorializing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and a logo from the 1984 Olympic games
In the few short hours we had in Sarajevo on Friday night June 17th and the morning of Saturday the 18th, we were reminded of this history at every turn. It begins with the worn bullet holes everywhere, then the graveyard in the hills… a forest of white headstones visible in the hills above the city from most points along the river Miljacka that runs through the center of town. From there you walk through the old town with it’s mosque and shops, the architecture a mix of Hungarian and Turkish styles reflecting the area’s shifting historical fortunes. Then, on to the modern city center with it’s various commemorations, including a plaque at the corner where Franz Ferdinand was shot by Serbian Nationalist Gavrilo Princip, sparking the first World War….. an Olympic logo on the side of a building in the town center commemorating the 1984 Winter Olympic games, another plaque in a market marking the massacre of 17 people in 1992 when a bomb was dropped by Serbian forces into a public market, the eternal flame for General Marshal Tito that still burns in this city of former Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo, a certain beauty and pride stand side by side with the tragic reminders of a violent history. This is an incomplete summary of the impressions gleaned from about a 1 hour walk through the city.
Memorial for the 17 people killed by the Serbian bombing of a public market in 1992
At the end of this walk the Kuda.org/NPR conglomerate eventually arrived at the opening of the “Lost in Transition” conference at the Goethe Institute where we met our two hosts from pro.ba and the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art, Amra Bakšić and Dunja Blažević among many others.
Amra Bakšić and Dunja Blazević
The opening was good, as good openings are, and we all ended up at a bar afterwards where several of our number spilled out of the bar itself and onto the street, gathering by the riverside.
Jon and LeE presenting NPR at the ‘Lost in Transition’ meeting
In the morning the conference began with an introductory discussion involving Amra, Zoran Pantelić of kuda.org, and the group STEALTH. They discussed transition ( a term that has come up more than a few times since we began traveling in this region), Amra began the talk promising not to “talk about the war”, though in the end, mention of the war that ended 10 years ago was inevitable. Much was theorized about the role of the creative community with regard to politics and what position was necessary in transitional times. This discussion was particularly interesting given the unique situation of Bosnia under UN control. Because we had to get on the road to Bergamo, we began our presentation wherein we emphasized the need for media and communication in general to be small and localized, to come from small groups with links between each other. We also talked about the utopian plan of breaking the world into small quadrants and dropping a small transmitter into each small section so that radio stations would only ever broadcast to very local communities. In minutes we said good bye to our hosts and were on the road to Italy.