Sarajevo is long and thin, running along a river at the bottom of a valley. It gets older as you go east: grim Yugoslav apartment blocks, Austro-Hungarian palaces, and then the Old Town, an Ottoman bazaar full of chatter, metalworking, and the smell of frying meat.
All the way along the bus route from the airport, buildings are pockmarked from bullets and shells. There are regular memorials to the 1992-1995 wars, usually with couples taking selfies. This is us at the Monument to Murdered Children, this is us at the Eternal Flame, this is us at the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide... it was so romantic! If you climb to the little Yellow Rampart, you can look down and see three separate cemeteries -- Muslim, Serb, Croat -- full of new white grave markers.
My little hotel is a hundred metres from the little street corner where Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were assassinated. The nearest building to the site is now a little museum displaying the gun Princip used, the trousers he wore, and a cute little striped bag he was apparently carrying. There are also wax statues of the murdered couple with loopy, stiff expressions, and pictures of them in their last moments, pootling along in a little open car -- a popular activity among prominent political figures down to 1963 or so -- with no notion they were fated to inspire one of the best Scottish rock bands of the 2000s.
A man in a Mickey Mouse costume in front of the cathedral seems to be doing good business with tourists who -- want to throw themselves into every experience the city offers? Don't want to have to admit they went to Sarajevo and didn't meet Mickey? Are drunk?
Across the river, there seems to be a funicular. No one said anything about there being a funicular. It turns out it just opened a week earlier, having been built to replace one that broke down in the 80s and was then destroyed in the war. It's a spectacular, silent ride up. And it ends very close to the start of the bobsleigh track from the 1984 Olympics. Amazing luck, because I genuinely wanted to visit the bobsleigh track, and it's otherwise a grueling hike; and I genuinely didn't want to undertake a grueling hike.
The track is eerie. The best way to explain its strangeness is to say that it's a ruined bobsleigh track in the middle of a forest. The start gate is a concrete ruin covered in broken glass; the track itself winds down the slope, the banking turns covered in graffiti. I walk down it. A popular thing with idiots is reportedly to go down it on mountain bikes, but I don't have a mountain bike.
The lips are covered in moss, the bottom with brown pine needles. Wrapping the outside is rotten, rust-coloured insulation. Nothing can be heard but the singing of birds. I stroll all the way down, wondering idly whether I'm going to be killed by a mountain biker or not. The winning times in 1984 were around 3m30s; it takes me half an hour, but then, I misjudged turn 7. At the bottom are the curious ruins of the refrigeration plant: another tagged jumble of concrete and smashed tiles, with an old stray dog that stares at me for an uncomfortably long time. A small tour group pulls up in a minivan, and I go back up, sitting on the track edge for lunch and wondering whether it's the oddest place I've ever eaten a sandwich. My first question for every possible future destination: what can you do for me in terms of abandoned bobsleigh tracks?
There's more to the area at the funicular station: a little Austro-Hungarian bastion (the fortress-lover has nothing to complain of anywhere in the Balkans) and a 'scenic lookout' that turns out to be truly scenic, after I squeeze past an old couple who block the way with spiked trekking poles like a couple of Swiss Guards who aren't convinced you have an appointment.
At the funicular exit back down in the city, a mountain biker is waiting. In the station, they're playing 'My Way' and using an angle grinder. Outside, the call to prayer is sounding.
Under an Olympic complex by the river is a crypt-like mall, another subterranean Balkan exercise in retail despair. People who don't want to forget they're alive shop above ground, in the markets that seem to pack every space not otherwise spoken for. Away from tourist areas, there are bazaars everywhere: under overpasses, in empty squares, down alley. They sell all manner of things -- like the days of the Ottoman Empire, when camel trains laden with cheap bras and cell phone cases swayed across the deserts of the old world. They're crowded with sellers, but not with buyers. It seems like a kind of subsistence retail; something people do for lack of anything better. (Under the overpass, tourists are out of place. You get looks of bemusement that turn to thoughtfulness: if he's dumb enough to be here, what might he be dumb enough to buy?)
With not much to do on the day I left, I wandered over to the train station. It seemed like (but wasn't) a good idea to make sure the train to Mostar was really running. Train routes in the Balkans exist in a state of possibility, constantly popping into and out of existence and leaving traces of themselves on the internet in the form of ghost schedules and rumours.
The station is half-abandoned, with a couple of cafes doing a thin business and a grimy, derelict upper level. The ticket office is a long row of dusty booths cluttered with adding machines and stamps and paper tickets. All are empty. A woman eventually appears in the one at the end, which is marked 'Information'. She speaks English, and confirms that there really is a train to Mostar, and that tickets can be bought here, but her information doesn't extend to the whereabouts of the people who sell them. She yells back through the door, and a deep smoky voice answers, but even their combined efforts are no use. If I come back in ten minutes? The seller never does appear, so I go away and just come back a bit before the train leaves. The ticket is peeled out of a booklet, filled in by hand, stamped, and stapled.
All the way along the bus route from the airport, buildings are pockmarked from bullets and shells. There are regular memorials to the 1992-1995 wars, usually with couples taking selfies. This is us at the Monument to Murdered Children, this is us at the Eternal Flame, this is us at the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide... it was so romantic! If you climb to the little Yellow Rampart, you can look down and see three separate cemeteries -- Muslim, Serb, Croat -- full of new white grave markers.
My little hotel is a hundred metres from the little street corner where Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were assassinated. The nearest building to the site is now a little museum displaying the gun Princip used, the trousers he wore, and a cute little striped bag he was apparently carrying. There are also wax statues of the murdered couple with loopy, stiff expressions, and pictures of them in their last moments, pootling along in a little open car -- a popular activity among prominent political figures down to 1963 or so -- with no notion they were fated to inspire one of the best Scottish rock bands of the 2000s.
A man in a Mickey Mouse costume in front of the cathedral seems to be doing good business with tourists who -- want to throw themselves into every experience the city offers? Don't want to have to admit they went to Sarajevo and didn't meet Mickey? Are drunk?
Across the river, there seems to be a funicular. No one said anything about there being a funicular. It turns out it just opened a week earlier, having been built to replace one that broke down in the 80s and was then destroyed in the war. It's a spectacular, silent ride up. And it ends very close to the start of the bobsleigh track from the 1984 Olympics. Amazing luck, because I genuinely wanted to visit the bobsleigh track, and it's otherwise a grueling hike; and I genuinely didn't want to undertake a grueling hike.
The track is eerie. The best way to explain its strangeness is to say that it's a ruined bobsleigh track in the middle of a forest. The start gate is a concrete ruin covered in broken glass; the track itself winds down the slope, the banking turns covered in graffiti. I walk down it. A popular thing with idiots is reportedly to go down it on mountain bikes, but I don't have a mountain bike.
The lips are covered in moss, the bottom with brown pine needles. Wrapping the outside is rotten, rust-coloured insulation. Nothing can be heard but the singing of birds. I stroll all the way down, wondering idly whether I'm going to be killed by a mountain biker or not. The winning times in 1984 were around 3m30s; it takes me half an hour, but then, I misjudged turn 7. At the bottom are the curious ruins of the refrigeration plant: another tagged jumble of concrete and smashed tiles, with an old stray dog that stares at me for an uncomfortably long time. A small tour group pulls up in a minivan, and I go back up, sitting on the track edge for lunch and wondering whether it's the oddest place I've ever eaten a sandwich. My first question for every possible future destination: what can you do for me in terms of abandoned bobsleigh tracks?
There's more to the area at the funicular station: a little Austro-Hungarian bastion (the fortress-lover has nothing to complain of anywhere in the Balkans) and a 'scenic lookout' that turns out to be truly scenic, after I squeeze past an old couple who block the way with spiked trekking poles like a couple of Swiss Guards who aren't convinced you have an appointment.
At the funicular exit back down in the city, a mountain biker is waiting. In the station, they're playing 'My Way' and using an angle grinder. Outside, the call to prayer is sounding.
Under an Olympic complex by the river is a crypt-like mall, another subterranean Balkan exercise in retail despair. People who don't want to forget they're alive shop above ground, in the markets that seem to pack every space not otherwise spoken for. Away from tourist areas, there are bazaars everywhere: under overpasses, in empty squares, down alley. They sell all manner of things -- like the days of the Ottoman Empire, when camel trains laden with cheap bras and cell phone cases swayed across the deserts of the old world. They're crowded with sellers, but not with buyers. It seems like a kind of subsistence retail; something people do for lack of anything better. (Under the overpass, tourists are out of place. You get looks of bemusement that turn to thoughtfulness: if he's dumb enough to be here, what might he be dumb enough to buy?)
With not much to do on the day I left, I wandered over to the train station. It seemed like (but wasn't) a good idea to make sure the train to Mostar was really running. Train routes in the Balkans exist in a state of possibility, constantly popping into and out of existence and leaving traces of themselves on the internet in the form of ghost schedules and rumours.
The station is half-abandoned, with a couple of cafes doing a thin business and a grimy, derelict upper level. The ticket office is a long row of dusty booths cluttered with adding machines and stamps and paper tickets. All are empty. A woman eventually appears in the one at the end, which is marked 'Information'. She speaks English, and confirms that there really is a train to Mostar, and that tickets can be bought here, but her information doesn't extend to the whereabouts of the people who sell them. She yells back through the door, and a deep smoky voice answers, but even their combined efforts are no use. If I come back in ten minutes? The seller never does appear, so I go away and just come back a bit before the train leaves. The ticket is peeled out of a booklet, filled in by hand, stamped, and stapled.
