It’s hard to pick a highlight from my recent trip to Bosnia and Herzegovina—from the second I crossed into the country from eastern Croatia, it was clear this place was different.
It’s true that buildings were pockmarked from mortar attacks of the last decade, Cyrillic road signs were sprayed with the political graffiti of a rival alphabet, and towns were crumbling down beneath still-towering minarets.
But green hills and golden fields also greeted us, and people could not have been more welcoming, as my friends and I quickly discovered when we rolled up to a toll with no local currency and were allowed to pay in Hungarian forint and nervous laughs.
Over the next few days, we discovered the enchanting Ottoman charms of Sarajevo, the rightly famous bridges of Mostar, and, in between, one of the world’s great drives through Rakitnica Canyon and the Dinaric Alps. (And when you get very lost, it helps to be in spectacular--if deserted--surroundings.)
So as for the best part, I’m not sure. But I know the part that most affected me was visiting the Sarajevo Tunnel Museum.
The museum is located behind the airport, beneath and within the Kolar family home. The Kolars run the museum themselves; Bosnia does not yet have any official exhibit commemorating the 1992-1995 Bosnian War or the siege of Sarajevo, and the task has fallen to this family on a former front line. The Kolar house conceals one of two entrances to the 800-meter tunnel that was Sarajevo’s lifeline during the siege, and today visitors enter the cramped space to understand what a crossing was like.
Somewhere between the introductory video in which we watched all the buildings we’d just visited burn and the list of the 11,000 lives lost in Sarajevo alone, all the confusing parts of the conflict suddenly made sense to me—and didn’t make sense at all. That is, going into the tunnel, learning how and why it was built, seeing weapons left over from the siege, and examining illustrated maps, I finally understood who was fighting whom, and where. But I’m not sure anyone can ever grasp how a modern Olympic city becomes besieged overnight—and stays that way for four years.
I do know that this small museum provided some much-needed context to my trip, and I’d go so far as to say that any visitor to Bosnia and Herzegovina simply must go. For a small museum, it’s hugely profound.
