Sarajevo

I cannot begin to describe Sarajevo, except with adjectives that evade specificity (incidentally, those favored by students when they don’t really know what they mean: adjectives like complex, confusing, and unpredictable).  Remember those books for kids that have panels? You start with the bottom half of a flamingo and the top half of a flamingo, but you can turn the top pages so you get a giraffe’s tail under the flamingo’s head, or vice versa. These hybrid animals are the best metaphor I can muster for Sarajevo. 

I was standing at the corner of the Latin Bridge, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was famously assassinated. Looking up, there were rugged peaks, green with some craggy stone bald spots.  A whimsically elegant Austro-Hungarian library sat at the base of the mountain, across the street from the bridge with its white stone-working and arches. 

I looked down to the river, expecting to see the deep green water so characteristic of European towns.  Instead, it was the giraffe's tail: yellow and one foot deep, below ten feet of bullet-peppered and graffitied walls.  An empty bottle of baby oil was stuck bobbing in a dizzyingly circular current, until a dead cat floated by and tapped it with a still paw, releasing it on its way.  They both sailed down the tepid waters together.

Apparently Sarajevo’s the only place in the world besides Jerusalem where you can stand in a central spot, and see the spires of a Mosque, a Synagogue, a Catholic Cathedral, and an Orthodox Church.  I wish we lived in a world where this trivia wasn’t so impressive, where such a skyline didn’t remind me of a fantastical, impossible animal.

A student once told me that she remembers the smell of the United States.  That it was the first thing she noticed when she got off the plane from the Dominican Republic, at eight years old.  Countries have their own smell? I asked, struck by her poeticism.  She looked at me like I was an idiot.  Of course they do. Sarajevo has its own smell.  Rich, enticing at first but then a touch toxic: it seems to be a combination of baking bread and of auto oil. Perhaps this is exactly what it is, or perhaps it’s some other strange dichotomy of welcome and warning.

At ten p.m., I stood in front of a gay club and listened to the thumps of Rihanna mingle with the singing of prayer at a Mosque down the street, like some sort of trendy, politicized mash-up. 

Maybe if I was a better writer, I could have conveyed these contradictions with mere adjectives, the kinds that are easy enough to conjure about most cities. To feel at home in Somerville, for instance, you need to be idealistic, crunchy, and a little self-serious, as these are the characteristics of the place itself.

I think Sarajevo draws me in because it seems anyone could fit in here. After all, there’s no human being who isn’t incongruous, confounding, improbable.

I tell a local my name.  He responds, “we have a Sarajevo Rose.” During the war in the ‘90’s, Serbian grenades would land in the street and create floral patterns in the concrete – the center a crater from the initial impact, and an array of petals carved by pieces of flying shrapnel.  “After the war,” he explains, “we painted some of them red.  That’s a Sarajevo Rose.”