After Tito died in 1980, things went downhill in Kosovo as anti-Muslim sentiments flared. In 1989 the new leader of the Serbian Communists came to power—Slobodan Milošević—and as the Berlin Wall fell in the next year, the Serbians attempted to block attempts to break up Yugoslavia. For many Serbians, Yugoslavia had always represented a sort of Greater Serbia, a concept which was deeply resented by the Croats. When Croatia declared independence in 1991, the Serbs led an all-out assault on them.

           Bosnia and Herzegovina remained mostly calm during this time, governed by 3 parties: the Muslim Party of Demo-cratic Action, the Serb Democratic Party and the Croatian Democratic Union. [Time for shorthand—the country is abbreviated as BiH, ‘i’ being the word for ’and’.] Bosnia’s population was 40% Muslim, mainly secular and very pro-Europe. They feared that rule by either Croatia or Serbia would leave them nationless.

A TRIP TO SARAJEVO with the Colorado Quartet

by Diane Chaplin

 

SUNDAY, November 26, 2006

           The heaviest travel day of the year – the Sunday after Thanksgiving – wasn’t our choice to embark upon a trip to Sarajevo, but with an early start we avoided the traffic and were at JFK three hours before the flight. The excessively long check-in time for me and the cello was a harbinger of similar problems to come: cellos, not having passport numbers, need to be on the same reservation as their schleppers, and mine was not.

           Taking off an hour and a half late only delayed us a half-hour landing in Vienna, an airport none of us had ever transferred at before. We were flying on Austrian Airlines, and all of their planes had “MOZART 2006” emblazoned on the sides in celebration of Mozart’s 250^th birthday. How great to be in a country that lauded a classical composer!

It was also completely normal for them to see cellos and violins; not once did anyone ask us about them.

           After breakfast we still had plenty of time to drag our carry-ons and instruments across the airport to make our connection. We got on the plane, and then we got off the plane. It turns out that Sarajevo had been fogged in for two days, and not even the wishful thinking of a fully-loaded plane could make it lift. I miserably heaved my things off the plane, begged for an elevator and finally gave up and dragged backpack, heavy roll-aboard and cello one-by-one back down the 2 flights of stairs, only to find that my colleagues had vanished. I spent half an hour in the wrong ticket rebooking line until an airline ‘bunny’ found me and took me through passport control to rejoin my buddies in an even longer line.

           The rebooking and recheck-in process took about 2.5 hours, start to finish. We ate lunch while it was going on and then waited some more; Julie and I, conscious of a concert in 24 hours, serenaded the waiting passengers with practice mutes on.

           Eventually we took off and landed in Zagreb, also heavily banked with fog, but equipped with modern devices which enable planes to land when the pilots can’t see. Then more waiting: a driver had been dispatched from Sarajevo, 5 hours away, and would pick us up around midnight. Our wait in the Zagreb bar (no food to speak of; tiny sandwiches on the plane made do for dinner) was considerably lightened by two American lawyers who work in Sarajevo and Kosovo and were also waiting for a driver. They gave us tips on the culture and helped us learn a couple of words. (I had already been learning to count during some of the interminable waiting in Viennese airport cafés.)

           Our lawyer friends clarified a question we had about the language, which is that all the countries which used to be Yugoslavia still speak what used to be called Serbo-Croatian, but is now called Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, etc., depending upon which borders you’ve just crossed. Some words are different, and the accent varies, but just look at the variety of language and accents usages in the US and you’ll get the idea. The only really big difference is that Serbian is written with the Cyrillic alphabet.

           When we got kicked out of the closed café at 10:30pm I crashed on the stone cold floor under a pile of coats; meanwhile Marka decided that a bit of finger maintenance was in order. Our driver finally arrived at 12:15am.

MONDAY, November 27, 2006

           This day is supposed to start with us waking up refreshed in a lovely Sarajevo hotel. Instead it begins with a terrifying all-night ride in nearly blinding fog at 140 km (roughly 80 mph). For the first part of the trip, on a nicely paved 4-lane highway through Croatia, we zoomed along easily. As soon as we hit the border into Bosnia and Herzegovina, the ‘highway’ became one uneven lane in each direction, no shoulder.

           We worried that the driver, asked on the spur of the moment to do 10 straight hours of driving, would fall asleep at the wheel. He had no snacks, no drinks, no radio and he made no pit stops. We couldn’t carry on a conversation because he spoke virtually no English. Riding shotgun, I alternated between closing my eyes and trying to sleep so I wouldn’t have to stare into the fog and keep vigil, and trying to move around and look animated in a be-like-me effort to stimulate the driver into staying awake behind the wheel. There were a couple of scary swoops away from the edge of the road, but we did eventually arrive in one piece. The time was 5:00am—we had traveled for 33 hours to get to our hotel.

 

TUESDAY, November 28, 2006

           Now we’re really in Sarajevo. Some of us get up and grab breakfast before heading back to bed, some sleep until noon, and I get up and stay up, although I will take an afternoon nap. Our hotel, the Astra Garni, is in on the edge of the old town, with its picturesque oriental flavor. This area was the center of life during the Ottoman rule from the late 1400s until 1878. There are still little squirrelly streets, low-roofed shops and lots of handmade goods. A somewhat touristy aura overhangs the place, although Bosnians probably do buy hammered copper coffee articles here. We wander around in a bit of a daze, getting our bearings.

           Unless we’ve planned a Major Expedition, we tend to pair off: Julie and Lydia, Marka and I. The two pairs spy each other in mid-afternoon as J&L are awaiting platefuls of little lamb sausages, served with puffy pita-like bread and chopped onions. Marka and I had just finished lunch at a cafeteria sort of place—she had the meat plate, including Bosnian stew, and I had the vegetable plate which included little eggy vegetable dumplings; we also had lovely puffy flat bread. All of it was yummy!

           That evening we discover, much to our delight, that the concert hall at the Bosnian Cultural Center is in a renovated, converted Turkish bath! The sound is a bit like ….. playing in a bathroom, but actually is fairly normal when the audience is in. The building is an artful mélange of new and old—as much of the ancient baths as they could retain is still extant, with archways and supporting structures built around it. Because of the nature of the baths, there are many small rooms linked together. The Center houses a wonderful collection of old Ottoman Empire treasures: many priceless pieces of furniture are scattered around without so much as a rope to keep us off them, and each room holds display cases of articles. We are promised a full tour in a day or two.

           The concert goes very well, despite a couple of jet-lagged brain/finger constipations from each of us. After all, we did arrive at 5:00 this morning. We start with Debussy Quartet, which we are told is never played here. Actually, considering how few concerts they have and what a small percentage of them are given by quartets, it’s fair to say that most quartet music is almost never played here! When we stop after the first movement of the Debussy, we are struck by the complete silence and immobility of the audience—they are literally frozen with anticipation and listening concentration. Big smiles greet us when we finish and bow, and then we come back onstage to play Shostakovich’s Quartet #11. On the second half we perform the Beethoven Quartet Op. 59#3, which we love playing and which has the rousing conclusion the audience is waiting for. We beg off from post-concert eating and socializing (we have been scarfing thick espresso—kafa—and fabulous halvah during the concert and aren’t hungry in any case) and go home for our first full night of sleep in two days.

WEDNESDAY, November 29, 2006

           We are up early and out of the hotel at 8:20; we take a taxi to the bus station and get on the bus for the 2.5 hour trip to Mostar, the heart of Herzegovina. Photos shown alongside the next several paragraphs are of the road trip on the only highway connecting the two major cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina—note the fog. We squeezed past a rockslide, and at one point had to go around the outside of a tunnel on

a chewed-up narrow lane. While you look at these pictures, I’ll try to answer the question: What is Bosnia and Herzegovina?

           Bosnia and Herzegovina, two regions divided by mountains, were ruled by the Ottoman Empire and then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This all fell apart during World War I, and Yugoslavia was created by joining together the two states with Croatia, Slovenia and the Kingdom

of Serbia. Some of these areas had large Muslim populations, which began to identify as Muslim Serbs or Muslim Croats. There was a lot of tension throughout the 1920s, with Croatia and Serbia vying for power, and Bosnia and Herzegovina had very little opportunity for cultural enrichment. By the end of WWII, Tito and the communists were in power.

           Tito’s secret police, the Department for the Protection of People, systematically murdered 250,000 Croats, Muslims and Serbs; many more were persecuted and religions were suppressed. But by the fifties, after Stalin expelled Yugoslavia from the union of communist states,  

living conditions improved and some religious freedom returned. The question of Muslim national identity took some time to resolve and was fiercely opposed by the Serbs; in the late 1960s Muslims were granted full nationhood.

           Unknown to the peaceful city dwellers, heavy artillery and tanks had quitely surrounded Sarajevo and other cities during 1991. In March 1992, after 65% of Bosnians voted to create their own country, BiH declared independence. That same day, the Serbs attacked Sarajevo. Freedom for BiH was greeted with a genocide that had not been seen in Europe since WWII.

           The concert organizer, Zemira, told us the war story of her family, a secular Muslim family in Banja Luca. She answered the phone one day, someone asked if this was the Maslesa family, she said yes and they said “you have no phone.” Next the TV relay was changed so they could only get Serbian channels. Soon all the Muslim families were fired from their jobs, and their names highlighted in blue on the mailbox.

Her father disappeared for a while, and after they succeeded in getting him back, the family was able to get papers to cross Croatia and come to the US, where they now live in Las Vegas (yes, odd). We sat there looking at this totally normal, exhuberant woman telling us a story of gradual oppression, one that is still happening around the world. It was chilling.

           By the end of 1992 over 70% of BiH was occupied by Serbian forces and over a million Bosnian Muslims and Croats had fled the country. There were reports of concentration camps and mass rapes and killings.

           In 1993, the Bosnian Croats attacked Muslims in several villages, and began an 11-month siege of Mostar, which they intended as the new capital of the “Croat Community of Herceg Bosna.” International attention and aid forced the conflict to an end. Sarajevo, however, remained under siege by the Serbs. A 700-meter tunnel was dug under the UN-controlled airport, and all food, ammunition and supplies were brought into the town through there. The people of Sarajevo lived without water, electricity or easily accessable food during 1,200 days of constant sniper and artillery fire. 10,000 were killed in Sarajevo alone, including 1,500 children.

           The UN had stepped in years earlier, ostensibly to establish safe zones, but under their protection, 7,000 people were massacred at Srebrenica in 1995, in addition to the Sarajevo killings. After years of diplomacy, America began to assert more pressure to end the conflict, and after weeks of negotiations in Dayton, a peace deal was struck. 49% of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina was given to the Bosnian Serbs and 51% to the Croat-Muslim Federation.

BiH is today governed under this framework.

Remnants of war in Mostar, Herzegovina

           Mostar, a key trade center during Ottoman rule, is infused with Turkish character. Like Sarajevo, it has an old section which retains much of the feeling of a bazaar. After we arrived at the bus station, we walked through part of the modern town, down the street which had been the front line during the recent conflict, and which you can see above and to the left. Herzegovina had traditionally been quite a poor region, and once lagged far behind other states of Yugoslavia in modern amenities. It was unclear to us whether the destroyed buildings remained so much in view as a way to remember the conflict, or whether there simply weren’t the funds to raze and rebuild.

           All of the bridges which spanned the

Neretva River, which divides the town in two,

were destroyed during the war. One in particular, the Stari Most, or Town Bridge, remained from the Ottoman Empire and was about 400 years old when it was bombed. It has been lovingly rebuilt, to within a couple of centimeters of the original. The bridge is surfaced with shiny marble tiles—quite slippery!—and has raised bars of marble set across it so people don’t fall off. The scenery on and around the bridge is truly breathtaking: the gorgeous river, with quaint towns built up around the high sides, spanned by gracious bridges.

           A few more things about the day trip to Mostar. As we drove there, we went alongside the filthiest river I’ve even seen. It had a lot of trash and ripped up clothing along the banks, with the clothing in particular hanging from low branches. Shortly after we started seeing this trash we came upon a village which just didn’t exist anymore—shells of buildings dotted the area. Two things occurred to me: there just aren’t any citizens around anymore to clean up the river, and the trash is probably the remains of their lives that used to be here. BUT, we also saw sheep and quaint country life, and apartment buildings with satellite dishes next to drying clothes on balconies. And the haystacks!! Prehistoric pods, and they look like they’re going to get up and walk away.

WEDNESDAY, November 29, continued

           I’m going to talk about all the days of wonderful food so far. Because of FOOD—yes! Eastern Europe (or at least this part of it) has ceased to be the Land of  Cabbage and Potatoes. 

           A few national dishes have become favorites of ours, with the top of the list probably being Burek, a traditional meal since Ottoman times. Burek is the perfect

thing for dinner—filling yet simple, and fun! It is made of filo pastry wrapped in a tube around choices of fillings: potato, spinach, cheese (and meat, but we haven’t had that). It comes in different shapes—sometimes spirals, and tonight we had it in long strips.

           Another winner is the bread, mentioned many paragraphs ago as puffy pita bread. It is much more bread-like that what we think of as hard, dry pitas (that’s what we tend to have in the US), and of course is fresh and doesn’t last until the next day.

           Sweets are always our downfall, and there is no lack of them here. The Turks have left a wonderful heritage of baklava, Turkish delight and other exotic desserts, all of which are wonderful (we have a special penchant for halvah), and the Bosnians are no slouches in the dessert department either. Today we were treated to a meringue cake—tall and gooey, and very sweet. Along with the cakes we have innumerable cups of espresso—there’s a café on almost every corner, and a fine appreciation for a good cuppa joe.

           Other special meals have included fresh river trout (uh, I just realized that I went on about the trash in the river…..well, it was just normal trash, not chemical plant run-off!) while sitting on a balcony overlooking same river.

           Zemira, our organizer and guide, took us to a ‘typical’ restaurant, which Marka and I had been pleased to discover the day before. Teeming plates of food were served up from many tureens in a hot table. You can point and choose or just let them give you big helpings of everything. Despite warnings that vegetarians would have trouble here, I have been eating wonderfully well (eating fish helps). My colleagues feasted on Bosnian stew and meatballs.

           A lot of shopping has taken place in between stops for eating and kafa. Our most notable purchases were in a rug shop in Mostar, pictured at left. Julie, Lydia and I went in and out of the store three or four times (we decided we needed coffee to fortify us for this major purchase) before deciding upon four rugs. One of the rugs I purchased is 40+ years old, which appeals to my recycled/vintage philosophy and style. We are particularly trying to buy goods made in Bosnia and Herzegovina—there are lots of imports from the middle and far east here, at cheap prices. Our rug dealer, shown below with the rug both Marka and I considered but did not buy, told us his family had been in the rug business, making and selling, for generations right there in Mostar.

           You’ll notice that we’re wearing our coats a lot of the time, even in indoor shots. It is COLD here—the fog creates that cold, damp feeling we associate with London. We had expected it to be warmer, and find ourselves with limited warm clothes, worn day after day.

           Most of our purchases so far have been in the textile line, both because they are easy to transport and because the handiwork appeals to us. We’ve bought scarves and small woven things, ornate pillow covers and sparkling table toppers, linens and even a bit of clothing. Also abundantly for sale are hammered copper plates and coffee sets, many touristy things, and pointy Turkish shoes.

THURSDAY, November 30, 2006

           Today we set out at 10:00am with Zemira, who is consistently lively and full of energy. We are on a pilgrimage to see the religious shrines, because this is one of the striking things about Sarajevo—four major religions living in harmony.

           We are used to all living peacefully together in the US, but in even in our country there are pockets of different ethnicities and religions who really keep to themselves. Lydia observed on our first day here that we’ve never actually been to a Muslim country, and as commonplace as it may be to see women with covered heads in New York City, that’s not the same thing as being in a place where there’s a mosque every few blocks and many stores catering to a different kind of people than us. We have heard the muezzin calling the observant to prayer at different time of day (it’s usually a recording), and all peoples mingle together in the streets.

           It was fitting that we went first to Gazi Huzrev Begova Mosque, as our guide Zemira (pictured above at a mid-morning coffee stop) is from a Muslim family. The mosques are gorgeous inside, with delicate curlicue paintings on every surface. We had been to a ‘sample’ mosque in Mostar, pictured below at right, which was more like folk art in its designs. This one in Sarajevo was erected in 1530, but rebuilt several times, most recently in 1879. We took our shoes off and covered our heads with scarves or coats to enter. There was no furniture, the floors being covered with carpets for prayer. A few details seemed similar to churches and synagogues: the raised platforms for readers/leaders in particular.

Our next stop was the old synagogue, now a Jewish museum. It was built in 1581; Jews had been  gradually coming to settle in Bosnia throughout the centuries, especially after the expulsion from Spain in 1492. At the picture on the right, you can see the dark wooden ark on the wall—the Torah scroll is inside it in a very old cover, as we saw when it was opened. Somewhat in front of the ark is the bimah, where the Torah reader stands. As this would have been a Sephardic synagogue, the reader’s desk is in the middle of the room. You can see the balcony at the right, where the women sit —the picture above shows the bimah from the balcony (at least the women had a good view!). I did ask about the walls, which are exposed pale stone; the curator believes that once they would have been plastered or decorated in some way.

           The old synagogue is only used once a year, at the High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Aside from the bottom floor, which remains set for services, the rest of the building houses artifacts from different eras. I was particularly struck by posters and banners for the Jewish Lyric Society (see below), a chorus that was active in the early 20th century.

           There is a functioning synagogue in town, which I visited later in the day—the Ashkenazi synagogue, built in 1902 and pictured above. I was able to get them to unlock the door for me, and was amazed at the decorative walls, very much influenced by the eastern culture of Bosnia, as you can see at left. Both Judaism and Islam share an aversion to graven images — in other words, there is no religious art depicting G-d or ‘heavenly beings’ of any sort. Synagogues are often rather austere because of this, and so it was wonderful to see the imaginative and vibrant decorations here. The entire room was covered—even the ceiling.

           Next on our tour of religions-about-town was the Catholic cathedral,  completed in 1889 when the Austrians were in control of the city. The Pope led mass here in 1997. Well-seasoned travelers that we are, we have been in a LOT of cathedrals, in Spain, Italy, France and elsewhere, so we were not as taken with any novelty here, and certainly as edifices go, we’ve seen more beautiful churches. The front doors are worth a mention, though, with their unusual red tree/tendril ironwork.

           The Serbian Orthodox church was NOT a familiar place for us to visit. Although quite a majestic structure, it was very dark and cold inside, and we were a bit surprised to discover that it is used several times a week for services. The original church was built in 1540, but several fires and reconstructions have occurred over the centuries. The pictures taken inside were without flash, which heightens the golden-mystical glow of the place, chock-full of saints and icons. Serbian Orthodox is an off-shoot of Russian Orthodox (you may recall from above that the Serbian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet). We were fascinated by the candles, which are lit by worshippers as in Catholic churches, but here they are placed in tiered sand boxes—it looks very much like birthday cake in the photo.