The inextinguishable light of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Mohammed points grimly to a floral-shaped splatter of red paint on the pavement. It’s a “rose of Sarajevo,” he says. It marks the spot where 36 people were killed when a mortar shell hit this busy shopping street.

There were at one time 200 such ‘roses’ in the city, although some have now been paved over. “We pretended that we had a life,” Mohammed, who was a child during the war years and is now a tour leader for Intrepid Travel, recalls. “But it wasn’t a life. It was just survival.”

During the Seige of Sarajevo and the Bosnian War in the 1990s, the citizens of Sarajevo struggled to preserve the pretense of normalcy. You took your life in your hands every time you walked in the street, Mohammed says. School continued for the young in makeshift classrooms located in basements and other out-of-the-way places, as did art shows and classical music concerts. 

There was even a flourishing, if illicit, party scene that continued in the face of nightly curfews. “Keeping all these things going was our way of showing that we could not be defeated,” Mohammed says.

It reminds me of the similar spirit of defiance in Ukraine today. History does indeed seem to repeat itself.

I arrived in Sarajevo in October, the day before a pivotal nationwide election. The global media was reporting rising tensions in  Bosnia and Herzegovina, a mountainous country at the heart of the Balkan peninsula. 

But if the impending election was making locals nervous there’s little sign of it in Sarajevo, where locals and tourists alike thronged the streets and sidewalk cafes on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I’m here on a press trip co-sponsored by Intrepid Travel and the American aid agency, USAID. The two organizations engaged in a joint venture to promote sustainable tourism in Bosnia and Herzegovina as one part of a bigger push toward stability and environmental protection. 

What little I knew about the country prior to the trip came from watching TV images of Sarajevo under siege during the bloody breakup of the former Yugoslavia. For three years in the mid-1990s, round-the-clock shelling transformed Sarajevo into a veritable realm of hell. Access to water, food, medicine, gas and electricity were mostly cut off. Whatever limited supplies made it into the embattled capital were either flown into the airport, which was controlled by UN forces, or carried through a narrow tunnel (now part of a museum) dug under the airport’s runway, a critical lifeline that miraculously escaped detection.

Much of Sarajevo was destroyed during the Bosnian War, including mosques dating back to early Ottoman times and pastel-colored government buildings constructed during the region’s rule by the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Several ancient monuments in the old town have been rebuilt with hand-hewn stones and now look virtually indistinguishable from their earlier incarnations. But many buildings remain riddled with bullet holes or cratered by shells, left deliberately unrepaired as graphic reminders of Sarajevo’s prolonged nightmare.

During our short walk through the center of Sarajevo under Mohammed’s guidance, we pass a bewildering variety of mosques, churches (both Orthodox and Catholic) and synagogues, a reminder of why Sarajevo has been called ‘the European Jerusalem.’ We stop at an otherwise nondescript street corner by the Miljacka river in the center of town. This is where Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were assassinated during a motorcade, the event which sparked World War I.

Tourism helped a lot. It really opened the country up. Nowadays nobody really cares what your name is, or what religion you are.

- Mustafa Kevelj

It’s a sobering glimpse of a city that has seen more than its share of violence and war. But if we had any doubts that Sarajevo’s light reaches far beyond its dark past, they’re dispelled later that evening when we visit the home of Mustafa and Mersiha Panjeta for a home-cooked meal.

Mersiha demonstrates how to prepare the region’s favorite street food, the burek. Burek is a spiral-shaped pastry that can contain meat, cheese or spinach. She tells us how her mother used to keep her busy with the laborious task of rolling the dough fingernail-thin to ensure that she would stay safely indoors during the siege. During those years when food was scarce and the family often went hungry, she learned the importance of saving every last bit of the trimmed dough and other food scraps. It’s a lesson that remains in practice, I notice, as she remains quite a careful cook. 

The couple started their business, Bosnian Cooking Lessons, in 2018. “Not only do visitors enjoy a home-cooked meal,” says Mustafa, “but when they come to the house where you were hiding when you were growing up, it’s no longer just something that they read about. It brings our history close. It’s something that has a big impact on people.”

Since the war, tensions have gradually eased, Mohammed says. This seems especially true amongst Gen Z—many of whom were not yet born when the fighting ended. Sarajevo rose like a phoenix from its wartime ashes, thanks in part to a booming tourist industry. Bosnia and Herzegovina currently has the third-highest tourism growth rate in the world. 

“Tourism helped a lot,” Mustafa says. “It really opened the country up. Nowadays nobody really cares what your name is, or what religion you are.” While many of their friends have left the country in search of employment in more prosperous parts of Europe, the Kevelji’s flourishing cooking classes have allowed them to remain in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The economic benefits of the tourism boom are plain to see in downtown Sarajevo. The district is crowded with shops selling traditional crafts like hammered copper coffee pots, pointy house slippers and hand-woven rugs, as well as pens and other trinkets fashioned from spent bullets. It seems to me to be the local version of the Biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares.

But many also see tourism as a powerful force for bringing Bosnia and Herzegovina’s diverse ethnic groups together into a shared national enterprise. 

It was a theme that we saw repeatedly during our weeklong tour. The people we met who work in the tourist business have a semi-religious zeal for expanding their industry, which they hope will help to unite locals—even heal the wounds of war that still fester below the surface of collective life here. 

Still, it seems overly simplistic to equate tourism with peace.

Significantly, increasing numbers of visitors to Bosnia and Herzegovina in recent years come from Serbia and Croatia, nations that were previously at war with Bosnia and with one another. This increase in regional travel bodes well.

“Nobody is going to do tourism in a war zone,” says Ina Merdjanova, a sociologist who has written about the intersection between religion and politics in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “The influx of tourists is a sure sign that things are becoming more stable.”

It’s better to be poorer here, but to have a higher quality of life than to earn three times as much somewhere else.

- Dragan Glavaš

Merdjanova adds that the Byzantine political structure hammered out in the Dayton Peace Agreement—which ended the Bosnian War and now divides the country into 14 semi-autonomous “cantons” created along ethnic lines, each with its own prime minister and parliament—will need to be replaced by something more workable before Bosnia and Herzegovina can achieve “a completely sustainable peace.”

Dragan Glavaš, a 32-year-old tourism official, agrees. Glavaš works in the stunningly beautiful mountain town of Jajce, the seat of the last kings, and the place where anti-fascist resistance fighters from various Balkan countries met during World War II to form together the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Jajce boasts the largest natural lake in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and arguably its most spectacular waterfall is just a stone’s throw from the city center. “It’s better to be poorer here, but to have a higher quality of life,” he says, “than to earn three times as much somewhere else.” But he admits that many of his young friends have left because “they don’t want to be enchained by the political issues that have been festering for 30 years and not getting solved.”

Ironically, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s weaknesses have helped to keep some of its remarkable cultural strengths intact. People rely more on their social network for support, Dragan says, adding that there is a warmth of personal relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina that is increasingly rare elsewhere. “People are more present to one another here,” he says.

It’s something that I noticed even on my first day in Sarajevo. Fewer pedestrians in the streets were fiddling with their smartphones than is typical in New York City, my hometown. Many walked arm in arm, or were enjoying a cup of strong coffee and a sweet together at a sidewalk cafe. There was an Old World graciousness in the air. 

Another plus, Glavas notes, is that the relative lack of industrial development during the Communist era and the subsequent war years has had the effect of preserving much of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s unspoiled natural landscape.

Over 65 percent of the nation remains forested. The mountain air is clear (except in Sarajevo, where the surrounding ridges trap a ubiquitous layer of smog). Bosnia and Herzegovina also boasts the largest karst cave systems in Europe, populated by rare species like olm (Proteus anguinus), a bizarre-looking albino cave salamander that reputedly can live for years without eating or moving. Swift-flowing mountain streams run through every town, sometimes issuing spectacularly out of caves in the mountain, as the Buna river does. A Sufi monastery, Blagaj Tekke—which clings to the cliff face above the Buna’s subterranean source—is a justifiably popular tourist attraction.

But it’s not just a lack of industrialization that has preserved nature. Locals are famously attached to their local waterfalls and rivers, which are often the subject of poems and popular village folk songs. They can also be fierce in protecting them. 

A Bosnian woman named Maida Bilal was awarded the Goldman Environmental Prize (also known as the ‘Green Nobel Prize’) for defending the Kruščica River, a small stream that you can practically jump across, together with a team of other local men and women. The villagers sat down at a dam construction site in shifts for more than 500 days and nights in 2017-2018, preventing heavy machines from crossing a small wooden bridge.

They saved their river from the dam. Others, however, remain under threat.

In late June, German ecologist Ulrich Eichelmann, the CEO of the Vienna-based group Riverwatch, gathered 50 scientists on the Neretva (Bosnia and Herzegovina’s longest river) to study the endangered ecosystem and lobby for its protection. The Neretva runs through a series of majestic white rock gorges, as we learned while rafting on its upper reaches. But plans are afoot to build a major hydroelectric dam upriver that could end this boisterous stretch of white water. 

“The only remaining crystal-clear wild mountain streams and rivers that are alive in Europe are in the Balkans,” Eichelmann says. He has partnered with environmentalists in Bosnia and beyond to protect this watershed which he calls “the blue heart of Europe.” 

The economic incentives for keeping Bosnia and Herzegovina’s wild rivers wild are evident. Rafting, canyoning, water-sledding and kayaking have become popular with locals and tourists alike. The town of Banya Luka in Republika Srpska hosts an annual international canoeing competition on the River Vrbas. Yet Eichelmann says that hundreds of new hydropower dams are currently planned that could potentially cripple the country’s thriving water sports industry. 

It isn’t only in water sports that the region excels. It is also a haven for hikers and climbers, boasting arguably the wildest and most scenic portions of the Via Dinarica project, a 1,250-kilometer (776-mile) system of trails that links the country with Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Albania. The route, which is furnished with mountain huts and small lodges for overnight stays, draws thousands of backpackers, especially during the summer months.

Bosnia and Herzegovina lacks the long and scenic coastline which has made neighboring Croatia a top international travel destination. But precisely because it’s not yet overdeveloped, Bosnia and Herzegovina can still avoid some of the blights of mass tourism that have transformed the charming old city of Dubrovnik into a congested and overpriced caricature of itself. 

That’s the thinking behind the USAID project, which aims to encourage small-scale, low-impact and sustainable tourist enterprises. They are working with growers in the southern Bosnia and Herzegovina region to develop a wine tour. They’re also enlisting beekeepers, cheesemakers and even a donkey owner to share their economically-imperiled activities with travelers in an effort to encourage farm tourism and boost the rural areas that have lost so many of their young people in recent years.

There are clearly tough choices ahead. By aggressively safeguarding the natural environment—and resisting the temptation of unrestrained development—Bosnia and Herzegovina could become a model for sustainable eco-tourism. Granted, a little over a week in the country is hardly enough time to get a grasp on what its future might hold. What I do know is that Bosnia and Herzegovina is an uncommonly beautiful place.