In April, we made another short trip to Bosnia to visit Diana’s sister, Alice, in Zenica. Another Ryan Air flight that always starts off cheap but ends up being quite expensive. Since we were traveling onwards to Africa we had a lot of stuff in our carry on and we find there is a 10kg limit to carry on bags. We were over 13 kg so we have to reshuffle things and purchase the check in of one bag.
We arrived to a cold and drizzling Sarajevo evening. The smell of coal smoke in the air immediately took me back to my youth in Staveley where we had similar smells - how nostalgic.
The new toll road to Zenica is excellent and in less than an hour we were in Zenica. Nothing has changed at Alice’s apartment. Nothing ever changes at Alice’s apartment. It has the same furnishings, same utensils, same pictures on the walls from the time when Alice’s parents lived there.
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| The Bosna River |
Nothing exciting happened during our stay in Zenica. The Bosna River was in full flow. I have never seen it so high and fast flowing. Spring was in the air and all the trees were in bud and new leaves were popping out.
When walking around Zenica we often bump into old school friends of Diana’s. It is a relatively small city (population of around 100,000), and somehow a lot of people stayed around despite all the troubles in the war.
We had an interesting encounter while buying a new bed for Alice’s apartment. After visiting every bed shop in the city, we decided on one particular bed and when giving Alice’s name, Alice Spusic, and address for then delivery, the sales person says she has a cousin in the same building called Alice Sehalic. That is Alice’s maiden name. The salesperson is Diana’s distant cousin who was born after Diana left the city. It was all quite emotional for everyone - lots of hugs and kisses.
The Lamela Building, Zenica
On Sunday morning we had coffee with some of Diana’s relations at Caffe Europa, below my favorite building in Zenica, the brutalist Lamela apartment building that dominates the center of Zenica. One of Diana’s relations, Darko, was trained as an architect and he told me about the building’s architect, Slobodan Jovandic. Slobodan, a Zenica local, designed over 2,000 apartments in Zenica and Lamela is one of the most famous.
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| Hotel Internacional, Zenica |
Another of Jovandic’s buildings in Zenica is the Hotel Internacional. Built by the steel company during its heyday as the largest steel plant in Yugoslavia. It has been closed since the 1990’s war and it is looking a little derelict now. Hopefully someone will be able to save it but it will need a lot of money and that is in short supply.
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| Vandruk Fortress |
On Sunday afternoon, we drove over to the nearby village of Vandruk where there is an old 14th Century fort. Vandruk sits above the Bosna river as it cuts its path through the mountains north to the plains of Serbia. In the 14th century this modest little fort was able to control the route through the Bosna river valley. It sits atop a hill overlooking a bend in the river. The modern day village below it is still very small - no shops, maybe a school, just a scattering of small houses. The modern road cuts through the mountains nearby and enters a tunnel through to the other side of the mountain. An even newer road is being built and an even longer and bigger tunnel is under construction nearby (courtesy of EU funding I believe).
Zenica Steel Works
6Driving around Zenica we took an old road above the steelworks which provided a good view of the current activity at the works, or rather lack of activity. The steel works that once provided employment for 20,000 workers, now employs just over 1,000 people. The Indian owners, Mittal, had just that week sold the enterprise to a Bosnian company who are now trying to find a way to keep the works open and avoid further loss of jobs in the region. Good luck on that.
We made a trip to Belgrade to visit some friends of Diana’s for a couple of days. It is around a 4.5 hour drive to Belgrade. There is a couple of hours driving the slower smaller roads through the mountains of Bosnia before entering Croatia and a nice toll road to the Serbian border. Across the border in Serbia there is another nice toll road all the way into Belgrade.
It is remarkable to observe how Bosnia is captive of its geography. The narrow mountainous valleys of Bosnia have little flat land that can be cultivated and that impede transportation. The plains of Serbia are flat as a pancake and are covered in very fertile soil.
Belgrade is a huge city these days (over 2 million population). There are many modern buildings and the flavor of the city has really changed - much to the chagrin of many of the older residents and myself.
Diana had some pension business to take care of which apparently went off quite well. She had to present herself in Belgrade each year to prove that she is alive and eligible to receive her pension from when she worked there. It appears now that they have removed that requirement. Whether that means our annual trips to Belgrade will end remains to be seen.
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| Diana’s student apartment |
We dined with some of Diana’s friends in the evening. On the way to the dinner Diana showed me the building she lived in as a student. An impressive old building where she rented a room from a lady who was a part of the old Yugoslavian Royal Court. A nearly blind lady who had many stories to tell of the old Yugoslavia post World War I.
We dined in a nice old restaurant in the old part of Belgrade, Na Cosku. The food was great and the restaurant even had a Michelin recommendation. We started the meal with an aperitif of slivovich, quite nice but not a habit I need to get into.
Dinner in Belgrade
The most noticeable difference in a Serbian and Bosnian restaurant is the complete acceptance of smoking at the table - before, during and after the meal. Three of the six people at dinner were smokers, and not just occasional smokers, heavy smokers. Lalo, the other male at the table, must have had three or four cigarettes before the meal. At the end of the night my clothes smelled so bad.
Nighttime Belgrade
After dinner we walked through the streets of old Belgrade. They have some wonderful old buildings and many are renovated. There are others that are a bit dilapidated and there is a bit of a graffiti problem with these buildings.
The next morning we went to visit the Museum of Yugoslavia and Tito’s mausoleum. This was at the so-called House of Flowers in a park setting on a hill in a beautiful old Belgrade neighborhood.
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| Tito’s Grave |
We first visited Tito’s grave - a quite simple grave covered by a massive piece of granite. His wife’s grave lies adjacent to him.
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| Tito in his Partisan Days |
He was certainly a great figure - he fought in World War I, he was a member of the Communist party and it’s leader before the Second World War, a resistance fighter and leader of the Partisan movement during the Second World War, and the leader of Yugoslavia in the post-war period until his death in 1980. He held the disparate national and religious identities of Yugoslavia together while he was alive but he didn’t prepare well for his succession and things just fell apart in the worst possible way after he died.
Adjacent to Tito’s mausoleum there is a museum of Yugoslavia. Quite interesting for me and very interesting for Diana as she lived the latter part of the Yugoslavia period.
It was a beautiful sunny and warm day. We sat and had coffee in the sun at the museum and were joined by Lalo and Zejka one more time before departing Belgrade.
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| Iranian Embassy, Belgrade |
We had unknowingly parked our car next to the Iranian Embassy and as we left we saw that the flag at the Embassy was at half mast, and there was a poster of some 50 or so children who have died in the conflict with the USA. A reminder of what a time we are in. That very day, Trump had vowed to eradicate Iranian civilization from the world if they didn’t comply with his wishes.
Trucks waiting to access Croatia and the EU
It was a pleasant drive back to Bosnia. As we approached the border with Croatia, an EU country, we encountered a long line of trucks waiting to cross the border. It must have been 3 or 4 kilometers long. We asked a couple of drivers how long they had been waiting and it was up to 2 days. This is the gateway into the EU and obviously it is a bottleneck. After we crossed into Bosnia, there was a similar long line of trucks waiting to move from Bosnia into Croatia and the EU.
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| A new Orthodox Church in Republica Serbska |
Inside Bosnia, we noted the Republica Serbska signs and flags in northern Bosnia reminding us that the Bosnia/Serbian conflict is not quite over. The area of Bosnia to the north is primarily Orthodox and calls itself Republica Serbska and wants to be joined with Orthodox Serbia, leaving Bosnia primarily Moslem and diminished geographically.
Walking around Zenica these days you see quite a few women with moslem head dress. A lot of headscarfs, a few veils and the occasional full on burqa. Diana says that this was never the case in her youth. Yugoslavia was pretty much an atheistic society - the Communist Party was their religion. After Tito died, things stayed the same but then after the war mosques and orthodox churches were built, female Islamic clothes were to be seen more and more.
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| The Busovaca House |
On our last day in Bosnia, we drove over to Sarajevo from where we were catching a flight out the next morning. On the drive we stopped in Busovaca to look at the old family summer home. Diana and Alice had given it to a cousin in the hopes that they would be able to renovate it and bring it back from the hopeless condition it was in. They had started working on it - clearing away the undergrowth, putting locks on the doors, etc but they have a long way to go. The wall that was falling into the neighbor’s yard had deteriorated even more. I hope they have the energy and resources to complete it.
In Sarajevo we stayed with Diana’s friend, Biljana, a friend from her childhood days. In the afternoon we walked around the city admiring the old 15th century Moslem market area (the Bascarsija), the fine old buildings of the Austro-Hungarian period, and the shiny new buildings of the present day.
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| The Olympic Museum, Sarajevo |
In Sarajevo we stayed with Diana’s friend, Biljana. We walked into the city in the afternoon and visited the Olympic Museum there. In 1984 Sarajevo, then a part of Yugoslavia, hosted the Winter Olympics. It is remarkable to think of that relatively small city hosting a world event like the Olympics and then a mere 6 years later, after Yugoslavia had split into separate states, they were involved in such a brutal war. Sarajevo itself was laid to siege for 4 years. During the siege, Biljana’s brother was shot and killed by Serbian snipers whilst waiting for a bus.
We had a fine meal in the old Bascarsija area at the restaurant Dveri - excellent goulash. Then it was off to bed for our 4:00 wake up and early flight out to Vienna and then on to Cairo.
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