back from Sarajevo
I have really been slacking on travel writing. I didn't write anything about the journeys to Sardegna or Finland this year, or Norway in any year. Basically academic writing takes up all my energy. This trip, however, was particularly interesting, and I got lucky - I had to burn 90 minutes at 5 am at the Sarajevo airport. It was too early to read and too close to the flight to nap. The only thing to do was get a coffee (!) and write it all down while it was still fresh. In the future I'll make sure to do this for every trip.
The essential charm of Sarajevo lies in its history, which is so, so evident in its architecture. You don’t have the scattered medieval ruins you find in some cities in the Old World, although some of the churches and mosques claim to go back to the medieval period (and in the former case, late antiquity), the oldest part of downtown remains built in the Ottoman style, and feels like a proper souk, mostly one-story rustic buildings that fall out of themselves into stands peddling handmade wares and cheap eats, with a minaret always in sight. (Sarajevo panoramas are riddled with these spires, which themselves tend to be dotted with small lamps to illuminate the night.) From the Old Town one strolls into a proper commercial zone built during the brief rule of the Hapbsburgs, a delightful mélange of pastels and Jugenstil, housing galleries, embassies, and university buildings along with department stores. Finally, one hits the stark Bauhaus of the Tito years. No comment (never a fan of Communist architecture, my building in Copenhagen excepted [I discovered this summer that I had just moved into the former headquarters of the Danish Communist Party]). As you walk around the city, you really cannot help but recall the clichés you have read about Bosnia-and Sarajevo in particular-as the Eastern border of Catholicism, the Western border of Eastern Orthodoxy, and the North-Western border of Islam. (The latter has become meaningless, of course, in light of migration to Northern Europe from the Muslim world.)
Bosnia’s vivid and, more recently, tragic history could occupy post after post. If you want a guide to the problems that came out of the Dayton Accords, Gen. Wesley Clark (remember him?) wrote a nice piece on this last May:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/opinion/dayton-ended-the-killing-but-bosnia-still-needs-fixing.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1349810650-Ko4IWz64OCl6aQQt1uFZjw
I’ll leave all that here, although at some point I might write something on the historiographical problems it presents (Bosnian history furnishes the young historian with a great crash-course in weighing the value of sources based upon the first, second, or third-hand nature of the report, the bias of the reporter, the history of the document, the polemical and personal biases of modern authorities-including apparatuses ranging from Serbian dictionaries to Wikipedia-etc.) Although I rarely eat this early in the morning (unless it is still rather a “late night”), I thought I would start off by writing about food. I enjoyed Bosnian cuisine very much. It’s been over a year since I stopped eating meats (fish not-included! Seafood forever) as a regular thing (exceptions are made, which rolls out to some beef or pork on my plate once or twice a month), and I love it-I feel and look better than I did when still imbibing the wares of the slaughter-icehouse industry. But N. advised me to drop it, if I could, when in Bosnia. “There aren’t many vegetarian options. They’re there, but you will get sick of them quick. Moreover, you like to eat good food, and the meat there is good. It tastes like something-Bosnians abroad always complain that the local meat has no taste. It is pretty much always fresh, and from the local farms.”
So I ate a lot of meat dishes (for me, at least-4 or 5 a week?). The most memorable is the famous ćevapi, which is the Bosnian equivalent of a hamburger: spiced beef served in grilled bread (Lepinja, yummy), usually with a spread of Kajmak (a cream that comes across more as a cross between lard and boursin, all delicious) and a side of raw, diced white onions and perhaps cabbage. The meat itself is cut into little sausages, although there is a variety that serves up a patty. Ćevapi are ordered by weight-the smallest you can get is 100 grams of meat with the rest. I could barely get through that, which tells you something about how I eat (my usual Copenhagen breakfast is a couple of slices of gravlaks with shoyu and an orange), but also how much Bosnians like to eat. A friend of N.’s used to work at the king of Sarajevo čevapi restaurants, and bragged (with a bit of shame) that he used to order and eat 40 ćevapi (800 grams-so over a pound and a half) when watching soccer games. Whoa. They love meat in Bosnia, and the association of masculinity with the consumption of (red) meat-familiar to many of us Americans-is very intense. Men are expected to eat a lot in general. On the few occasions where I ordered food myself, it was clear that I was wimping out. I love to eat-I do-but not like that…there’s one way I’ll never be a real Bosniak.
Another Bosnian classic is pita, which you can purchase at most any bakery (pekara) but also specialty shops (obviously superior). These are sort of baked pastries made with phyllo dough and various stuffings-I tried the spinach, cheese, potato, and meat (bekara) varieties, and they were all delicious. They are not lacking in an oily quality from their pans and the stuffing, but don’t pack quite the wallop of čevapi.
Other edibles worthy of note: not much tea in Bosnia, I’m afraid, although there is one terrific tea-shop in Sarajevo at which I plan on spending a small fortune should I return (akobogda-on which, see below). During the cab ride to the airport this am, I drank a Kefir-priceless. Like a sour ayran. Great for the stomach. (Also, it is close to the Arabic word “kafir”-“heretic, unbeliever”-whose root means “to cover” (see comments for a correction of my original post below) Tasty!)
When we pulled up to the airport, we saw that it was closed-five minutes before five. The airport here is not open 24-7. “Only in Bosnia,” sighed the driver. I recognized this. There is a pervasive sense of despair amongst Bosnians that is not to be confused with the traumatic wounds inflicted by the Yugoslavian Wars of the ‘90s. It is socio-economic, but eclipses that of other Europeans and Americans during these tough times, as do the troubles of the Bosnian economy-during my stay, it was reported that Bosnia-Herzegovina “won” the runner-up to the dubious “unemployment championship” of Europe, with a 43% unemployment rate. (Kosovo came in first, with 45% For a sense of perspective, I had read last week that Spain has also hit the 40th-percentile, and gone over 50 for its 30-and-under age category; two days ago, American unemployment dipped below 8% for the first time since 2009, and I believe Germany hovers around 11%.) Here as abroad, people here know they are getting a (very) raw deal from their leaders. The big political problem remains ethnic division (there is no single leader for the country. Rather, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats each elect their own leader, and these guys take turns at the presidency), but the big economic problem is corruption, which afflicted Tito’s Yugoslavia in the preceding decades.
This despair is coupled with-compounded by?-a laissez-faire attitude towards everyday life which has been enshrined as a national virtue, ćeif, which could be translated it as “taking it easy,” although perhaps "contemplation" is more dignified. Bosnians know how to spend an afternoon sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes. N. theorizes that they are incapable of making and keeping appointments-it is routine to be late or show up “whenever” (this is good for someone like me who is chronically, neurotically-tardy). Plans are made and broken, there are often “technical problems,” and nobody gets too upset about it-that’s life. “Insh’allah” is often invoked in the Bosnian language-“akobogda,” and while it supposedly does not carry the same connotation of flakiness as it does in the Middle East (“inshallah” often means simply “yeah right,” if you ask me), there certainly is a prevailing attitude that, well, this is just The Way Things Are, amounting to nothing less than a sanctified Fatalism. This sense undergirds an important Bosnian concept-“nafaka,” which is essentially destiny, or karma-that which lies before you. Unlike in some Compatibilist models of free will (Stoicism, St. Augustine, Calvin), nafaka is completely determinist. Your destiny is not your options or your opportunity, but your path. It is tempting to chalk it up to the dominance of Islam (not too friendly to Compatibilism-Allah sees, knows, and wills all-that’s what “inshallah” is all about) but I could prove no such thing (how would one do it? Trace the use of “nefaka” in Bosnian literature and see what pops out, I suppose).