Sarajevo's underground lifeline

Advantages: An important piece of recent history, interesting, enlightening
Disadvantages: Not a great deal to see so for the really interested only

...In the mid 1990s I watched television news bulletins transfixed at the pictures coming from the besieged city of Sarajevo. For over four years the people of Sarajevo were trapped in their city, often cold, usually hungry as missiles rained down on them. In spite of many months of fierce attack plucky Sarajevo managed to defend itself ? thanks mainly to an 800 metre tunnel that connected the city with ?Free Bosnia?. How the exact location of the tunnel was not discovered by the Serbs is a miracle. The tunnel runs under Sarajevo Airport which, although it was designated a neutral zone, was often closed due to heavy shelling. The Serbs knew roughly where the tunnel was but were never able to pinpoint it exactly. The tunnel was no secret; everyone knew of its existence, Serbs included. Food, fuel, medical supplies and arms ? all were...

fizzytom 30.09.2009 (01.10.2009) · Read review
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Review of Sarajevo Tunnel Museum, Sarajevo

Sarajevo - simply sublime

Advantages: Plenty to see; good value for money;
Disadvantages: No budget flights yet (but also a good thing!)

...In 1984 Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics; just over a decade later, the world watched as Sarajevo burned and the sites of the games became cemeteries for those killed in the siege, at four years the longest in modern warfare. Before the war Sarajevo was often described as the ?European Jerusalem? in reference to the mix of cultures who happily lived alongside each other; today an invisible line divides the city separating Bosniaks from Bosnian Serbs. Although I remember both the Olympic Games and the Siege of Sarajevo very well, it was an earlier event that ignited my interest in Sarajevo: a postcard from a family friend, who was in Yugoslavia on business, captured my imagination and I suppose this was the start of my ?Yugophilia?. The postcard showed a famous wooden fountain that stands in Ba?Äar?ija square; it was damaged during...

fizzytom 18.10.2009 (20.10.2009) · Read review
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Review of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Welcome back to Sarajevo

Advantages: Historic, beautiful, cheap
Disadvantages: Not easily accessible, war damage

...My announcement that I would be spending my summer in Bosnia met with bemused silences. "But why?", they asked - "Be careful" or "Good for you". My neighbour told me "be sure to take a headscarf with you, it's a Muslim country y'know." So many concerned family members asked me if it was safe, that I began to have doubts. After watching the film "Welcome to Sarajevo" and reading graphic books about the conflict in an attempt at researching this forgotten corner of Europe, I felt even more unsure. My worries were to prove unfounded. The hijab I didn't pack proved to be unnecessary, and ironically, I felt safer in Bosnia than I do at home in Birmingham. I discover a country that is simultaneously familiar and foreign. Glamorous young people frequent the city bars, but one Bosnian girl tells me "we can only afford one coffee...

MissDirect 16.12.2004 (30.10.2007) · Read review
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Review of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Sarajevo, Famous for the wrong reasons!

Advantages: Smart and quaint city. Peaceful now
Disadvantages: Still being fixed after the war

...My first visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia was a few years ago,- to think this place is twinned with Coventry! At the time, it was hardly a tourist desitination, and I made a Lada Riva shift like a Ferrari as my skin tone turned a whiter shade of pale due to the onslaught of bullets falling around me. Fortunately, I, and said Lada made it out of there in just about one piece (The exhaust fell off as I hand break turned around a corner to come face to face with an IFOR truck full of Germans) In latter years, certainly since the end of the war, the City has cleaned up a bit, and you can walk freely without stepping on a corpse, or indeed, joining the corpse on the floor courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood sniper. Sarajevo is the capital city and largest urban center of Bosnia, It is also the capital of the Federation of Bosnia...

gt5952 20.11.2007 · Read review
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Review of Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Sarajevo Serenade

Advantages: Very evocative, thrillingly suspenseful, great characterisation
Disadvantages: None

...One of the cruelest events of the siege of Sarajevo was the shelling in 1992 of a group of civilians as they queued in the street in the hope of buying some bread. Twenty-two people lost their lives. Not long afterwards a musician living in an apartment overlooking the scene dragged his cello out onto the street and there he played Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor at a different time each day for twenty-two days. Sometimes a small crowd would gather to listen, often bringing flowers to lay in front of the cellist or in the crater caused by the shelling. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" is a fictionalised account of this event, told from the points of view of three unrelated citizens of Sarajevo. Dragan has been living with his sister and her family since the time came when his apartment was no longer safe to live in. He had already managed...

fizzytom 28.01.2009 · Read review
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Review of The Cellist of Sarejevo - Steven Galloway

Suspense in Sarajevo

Advantages: Highly evocative writing, well-crafted thriller
Disadvantages: Some characters not very strong

...Rosso is a senior police detective in besieged Sarajevo. You would think things couldn't get much worse for him. Like everyone else in the city he is cold and hungry. On top of that his wife is an alcoholic who has sold practically everything the couple own to fund her habit, his god daughter has taken up with one of the most dangerous men in Sarajevo and his job has become almost impossible as police authority over the city has virtually disintegrated. Then Rosso starts to investigate the brutal murder of a drug addict, a Serbian woman whose body is found in an apartment in a block of flats known as the Monkey House (a derogatory name used by the city's Bosnian population because the building is almost entirely occupied by Serbians). Rosso finds his enquiries thwarted at every step. First his junior officers try to dissuade him from...

fizzytom 21.01.2009 (25.01.2009) · Read review
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Review of The Monkey House - John Fullerton

Not a Scottish indie band in sight

Advantages: Packs lots into a small exhibition; reasonably priced
Disadvantages: None really but some might leave wanting more

...Poor Sarajevo; if ever there was a city beaten repeatedly by the bad luck stick, this would be it. Between 1992 and 1995 the city was under siege: by the time it was finished, over ten thousand people had died, most of them civilians, and virtually the whole city required rebuilding or major structural repairs. The siege was shocked people around the world, especially those who remembered Sarajevo as it was just a decade earlier when the city hosted the Winter Olympic Games of 1984. This was Sarajevo?s heyday: the eighties were a good time for the city and the hosting of the games was considered a success. However, that fact that the games went to Sarajevo at all, or, more correctly, that it was even considered as a candidate, was a contentious one. Many believed, certainly within Yugoslavia (and especially Slovenia) that there were...

fizzytom 24.10.2009 · Read review
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Review of Sarajevo 1878-1918 Museum, Sarajevo

Franz, Soph and Sarajevo

Advantages: They loved each other
Disadvantages: They were assasinated

...Ferdinand became the Inspector General of the Austo-Hungarian Army. With his strong ideas and tactics, he was very popular with his soldiers. In 1914, the Austrian ambassador in Bosnia-Herzegovina said that maybe he should take a visit to Sarajevo to advertise his army. So, indeed, Franz went in the summer with his wife Sophie. The rest is history Sophie Chotek Von Chotkova Sophie Chotek Von Chotkova was born in 1868 in Stuttgart. She was born into a Czech noble family. Her profession was to be the Lady-in-waiting to The Archduchess Isabella in Pressberg, but Isabella realized who she was in love with, she fired her because 'she had far more pretty daughters'! She first met Franz Ferdinand at a dinner party in 1888. It was love at first sight, but Franz couldn't marry a girl from a 'Bohemian' background, so they had to break up...

Lucien500 30.06.2004 · Read review
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Review of Everything that starts with F ...

I'm Tired Of Watching Foreigners Kill Each Other

Advantages: see review
Disadvantages: see review

...Welcome To Sarajevo pretty much proved its own point when it bombed at the cinema and again on its subsequent video release. Despite critical acclaim it never recieved one iota of attention from the paying public who were undoubtedly put off by having to sit through another couple of hours of footage devoted to the war in the former Yugoslavia. The public apathy to the movie highlighted its point about public apathy to the war in general and for that alone Welcome To Sarajevo is a movie which we perhaps all should have watched because it has a message for all of us. It rips into the news coverage of the war and the subsequent public apathy towards it with intellect and style. We were never shown the true extent of the human misery caused by that war because it would have affected ratings and therefore we got a sanitised version of events...

wampyrii 24.01.2002 · Read review
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Review of Welcome To Sarajevo (DVD)

Not my first choice

Advantages: serves its purpose - provides accommodation, good breakfast
Disadvantages: expensive

...I stayed in the Hotel Saraj in Sarajevo in November 2000. It?s situated on the hill but close to the city centre, so you would expect great views in this mountainous country? and the view from our room was quite pretty, it was beginning to snow at the time so we could admire those magnificent white-greyish mountains and also see a bit of the Old Town. But the restaurant was overlooking a cemetery!! I must admit, the breakfast was good, we had a choice of cooked or cold breakfast, there was plenty of fruit, but I used to lose my appetite at the site of that cemetery? And it set me thinking about that bloody war they had just a few years before? Why did they build the summer terrace facing the cemetery? God knows? The Balkans never fail to surprise me. The furnishings in the room were quite simple, we had satellite TV, a telephone...

Yelena 24.09.2003 · Read review
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Review of Hotel Saraj, Sarajevo