Sarajevo
Sarajevo
Sarajevo is one of my favorite cities in this region. We walked around the old town for a couple Bosnian coffees. It's served in a separate container and you slowly poor the thick coffee into a small ceramic cup. I think the traditional way to drink it is to bite a piece of sugar and take a sip of coffee. We just stuck the sugar right in. It's always served with a small sweet, typically a Turkish delight.
We went to the street corner where the assassination of France Ferdinand which sparked WW1.
We did a free walking tour at 3pm based around the Bosnian War. Sarajevo was under siege for 44 months, the longest in modern history. People tried to go on with their daily lives - people worked, children attended school - while entire apartment blocks moved out of their apartments and into the basement to live underground. People had to run from place to place when exposed to avoid being killed by snipers. The Serbs army killed 11,800 people over the course of the 44 months, almost 2,000 of which were children. There are "red rose" monuments all over the city where people had been killed by shelling. They painted the marks made by the shells in the pavement red.
We went to the canned beef statue, which was really a slap in the face to the UN. People said the canned meat was so bad cats and dogs would refuse to eat it. So it's a thank you, but thanks for barely providing edible food. Its ironic because now the UN building is directly behind where the statue was built. We went to Titos bar where you can check out old relics from when he was president and then ran up to the Yellow Fortress to catch the sunset.
We went to a music festival on top of Tbilisi mountain. We organized a taxi for 40 Marks to take us up to the Derelect Sarajevo Olympic bobsled track. Amazing graffiti all over the track from top to bottom. You could also see holes in the track where Serbian snipers had positioned themselves with the concrete track as protection with bullet holes surrounding their hideout. After the bobsled run we headed back into the city for the Serbenska Genocide memorial gallery. Incredibly powerful images and video of the genocide that took place in Bosnia during the war. The Dutch UN peacekeeping soldiers had set up a "safe zone" in the area for the Muslims protection but did nothing as the Serbians separated the men from the women and slaughtered the men in mass killing fields.
