A witness to Sarajevo’s wounds
As dawn was breaking, we made our way down into Bosnia & Herzegovina, driving along rivers that flowed through the valley of the mountains, eventually descending into Sarajevo. We found a spot for an al fresco breakfast amid the morning hustle and bustle in the Turkish quarter of the old town. People in suits were rushing to get to work while shop assistants were cleaning their window displays, washing the steps and sweeping the streets by their doorsteps to get ready for the day ahead.
Hundreds of thousands of identical white granite gravestones have been erected to commemorate all the lives lost during the Yugoslavian war between 1992-1995. Sprawled across the town and overflowing up the sides of the mountains as far as the eye could see, the magnitude of the white obelisks expressed the monumental loss suffered during the genocide. It was a solemn sight to see.
The river running through the town was red in colour; it unintentionally seemed to represent the blood and memory of the lives lost in the town during the war.
The town was beautiful, but we couldn’t ignore the obvious remnants of the Yugoslavian war: rows of buildings scarred by bullet wounds that had never been repaired.
