Bosnia – wanderwarbler

August 24, 2019

Sarajevo, Mon Amour

Yesterday, the star-studded 25^th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival ended and with it a week of joyful partying for the entire city. And what a party it was! While director Alejandro González Iñárritu, actors Isabelle Huppert or Gael Garcia Bernal, to name just a few, strutted down the red carpet in front of the National Theatre, local youth volunteered as ushers, and the rest of the town joined international movie-goers not only in the movietheatres, but at parties and clubbings that boosted Balkan popmusic through the city center until the wee hours.

The Heart of Sarajevo at the Bazar in the Ottoman quarter of town

The “Heart of Sarajevo”, the festival’s logo, a delicate heart shape designed by French fashion designer Agnès B., could be found at every street corner: dangling from the street lights in the elegant Habsburgian part of the town, from the shops at the bazar in the Ottoman part of the town, and even illuminated at the bus stops in the concrete jungle of the realsocialist Tito era.

Little reminded of the beginnings of the Sarajevo Film Festival 25 years ago: Admission to any one of the 37 films shown from October 25 to November 5 1995 was one cigarette. Portable generators provided power to the projectors. Directors Alfonso Cuaron and Leos Carax made their way over the surrounding mountains in armored cars. Film canisters were lugged through a tunnel dug beneath the airport. Sarajevo was under siege.

Sarajevo, hitherto a symbol of religious tolerance and joie de vivre, was besieged by the Serbian army for four years, from 1992 till December 1995. Snipers zooming in on city dwellers while asleep in their beds, while preparing dinner in their kitchens; shrapnel killing children on the playground or on their way to school; land mines blowing up men, women searching for fire wood, in need of food or medication. The Balkan War, an ethnic conflict which led to the Bosnian genocide and the break-up of the Yugoslav Republic, resulted in the death of at least 130,000 people.

The Sarajevo festival was launched in 1995 as an act of defiance, Mirsad Purivatra, the festival’s founder remembered in an interview with “The Wrap” on the occasion of the festival’s 20^th anniversary in 2014:

Sarajevsko Beer at the Sarajevsko Brewery. During the siege, the brewery was the only source of fresh water in the city. The people queued up with plastic canisters, risking their lives. The Serbian army had snipers set up on the mountain tops surrounding the city.

“For the first six months of the war, to survive physically was the main goal,” he said. “After six months, we started to think about how to survive mentally, and film was the way. During the war, there was no communication. You never knew who left the city, who stayed, who was killed. Coming together to see movies became the main cultural event in Sarajevo.”

Diary entry from during the Siege, at a War Exhibition in Sarajevo

The first screenings where held at a basement, then relocated to a Jewish Synagogue. 15,000 people – an utterly unexpected and overwhelming number – showed up to watch the films in war torn Sarajevo. The second festival, in 1996, ended on the same day the Dayton Agreement ended the Balkan War, and Purivatra started thinking about turning the screenings into a real festival. The rest is history.

The Sarajevo festival grew into the most prominent film festival of South-East Europe, attracting more than 100,000 people annually on all programs and screening hundreds of films from 60 countries. This year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has awarded the Sarajevo Film Festival the status of the Academy Award qualifying film festival in the Short Film category.

The scars of war are still visible in the city. The “Sarajevo roses” indicate where bombs killed more than three people in the streets; facades still pock marked with bullet holes; buildings damaged and never rebuilt; and of course the memories of the people of Sarajevo.

But the scars are fading. And with the festival the spirits are rising and at least for ten days a year Sarajevo becomes once again the symbol of tolerance and joie de vivre it has always been.

One of the winning films of the 2019 Festival. The festival focuses on the South-Eastern Europe, this film of Georgia tells the story of a gay love in a patriarchal society

August 24, 2017February 9, 2021

Travnik: I Live to Love You

Today, Travnik is just a little town in central Bosnia. Once, it was a capital city. Once, it was hometown to Ivo Andric, the novelist awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1961, who set his most important novels there.

“Between the fear that something would happen and the hope that still it wouldn’t, there is much more space than one thinks. On that narrow, hard, bare and dark space a lot of us spend their lives.”

Gabon is the forgotten name of the fortress of Travnik, seat of the Grand Vizier

For 400 years, Travnik was the capital city of the Ottoman province of Bosnia. The Grand Vizier, the governer, lived in a fortress overlooking the city, then a lively, multicultural trade hub: different ethnicities and religions lived peacefully under Ottoman rule.

In 1878, fourteen years before Andric was born, in 1892, Bosnia became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Travnik lost its standing as capital city.

Since then, Travnik, like the rest of Bosnia, has lived through a more than turbulent succession of varying regimes and violent conflicts. Ethnic wars seemed to be at the core of each chapter of its blood soaked history – yet it was not an innate adversity against each other that led to some of the most horrible genocides and war crimes in recent history. Ethnicities and religious groups were played against each other, became pawns, fall guys, for the strategic war fares of the great powers. An entanglement that started with the Habsburgian take-over of 1878 and saw its tragic climax during the Balkan Wars of the 1990ies – hopefully the last chapter in this brutal story. The scars are still visible in Travnik, and the rest of the country. But there has been, and still is, hope of reconciliation, of lasting peace.

Nowadays yet, in times of rising nationalism and war mongers, Ivo Andric is claimed as a representative of Croation, Serbian, and Bosnian literature. However, exactly because he was born in Travnik, he belongs to all three equally. His most famous book is called the Bridge over the Drina. Building bridges is key.

Boys arouse the pigeons’ attention while feeding fish at Plava Voda, Blue Water, a gurgling stream flanked by restaurants. In the old times, almost every Travnik household kept pigeons. Today, the city prides itself for its own pigeon breed, the Travnik short-beaked pigeon.

From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad.

April 23, 2017May 14, 2017

Sarajevo Roses

25 years ago, on April 5^th 1992, 24 year old Suada Dilberovic, a Muslim student at the faculty of Medicine, participated in a peace rally in Sarajevo. Up to 100 000 people of all Yugoslavian ethnic groups had gathered for this march, held in response to repeated attacks of Serbian paramilitary groups on multi-ethnical Bosnia and Hercegovina. As the marchers crossed the bridge over the Miljacka river, they were ambushed by Serbian snipers. Suada and her 34-year old catholic compatriot Olga Sucic were shot and killed: the first casualties of the siege of Sarajevo.

By the end of April 1992, the Serbian Army had encircled Sarajevo, positioning their tanks on the mountain tops surrounding the city, where a mere eight years before the Olympic winter games had been held. The Olympic bob sleighs and the ski jumping hills turned into killing fields from where mortars and artillery were fired. Machine guns aimed at bedroom windows and at the living rooms of the city below.

13,954 people died. The siege only ended on February 29 1996, a mere forty years after the horrors of WWII and the holocaust, and the world said: “Never again!” again.

25 years after the siege of Sarajevo, the scars are still visible. Some shrapnel grates were not repaired, but colored red, as a reminder, a memorial, a warning of what nationalism, war and hate do to people. They are called “Sarajevo roses”.

Visiting Sarajevo is not a fun holiday in the sun. It is an encounter with history and culture, impressive, thought-arousing, and captivating. Visiting Sarajevo means learning of history and human nature. And of the human capacity to overcome and reconcile: In 2007, Suada was awarded a posthumous Doctor of Medicine by the University of Sarajevo.

April 18, 2017April 25, 2017

Sarajevo Blues: So beautiful it hurts

Sarajevo is a scarred city. There are craters from mortar attacks in the streets, and bullet holes in the facades of residential buildings. There are cemeteries at every corner it seems, most are Muslim, some Jewish, some are Orthodox, some Catholic, for faith could not stop bullets, neither during the Siege of Sarajevo 1992-1994, nor during WWII, nor WWI, which began in Sarajevo in 1914.

Sevdah is the traditional music of Bosnia, stemming from the time of the Ottoman Empire. The name Sevdah comes from the Arab word for melancholy, Sawda: Sad poems telling stories of love forbidden or lost, of grief and loss, of heart ache and pain, traditionally sung by women in the Arabic modal systems of Hijaz, as are the muezzin’s calls for prayers.

“Sevdah will be sung after any war,” Zaim Imamovic said, before he died in 1994 at the age of 74. He was to Sevdah music what Carlos Gardel is to Tango. Everybody in Sarajevo knows the words of the Sevdalinkas, the songs, and they cry as they sing, as they dance.