Sarajevo 101

Wow I’m bad at keeping this blog up. I have no real excuses, except that I’m lazy about it, and my goal of posting at least every Sunday is somehow too much for me to manage.  Maybe I’ll make this a New Year’s Resolution. 

Well I’ve found a place to live, it took 6 weeks, but I found a place! I’m renting a room in an apartment with a widow (who is super sweet and makes me food!!) in the center. For those of you who know Sarajevo, I’m right next to the national theatre, and only 5 min from Bascarsija, the Turkish old town. For those of you who don’t know Sarajevo, here is a quick 101. 

Sarajevo runs east-west along the Miljacka river, with the older parts of town beginning in the east and then moving along towards the newer commie-condos in New Sarajevo and the immediate suburbs. The city is small, you can pretty much walk anywhere within 30min. The oldest section is the old Turkish section, Bascarsija, where you can find the oldest mosques, cobbled streets that are divided by craft (silver, gold, leather, copper and others) and caravanseri that are now coffee shops.  At the far eastern end you’ll also find the amazing national library that was mortared and burned down during the last war (http://i47.tinypic.com/2qldhg9.jpg  ) . They are finally restoring it, it seems, as last year when I was here is was open like usual but now scaffolding surrounds it. Along the river on this side is also where you’ll find the corner where WWI began, and there is a museum on the corner where Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated. I live about 2 blocks from there, on the same side of the river.  Moving west, you see more Austro-Hungarian architecture, the main catholic and orthodox cathedrals and the pastel ornate buildings of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  Keep going and eventually you’ll run into the rebuilt parliament building and the UNITIC towers where various international agencies, major banks and corporation are located. If you keep going from there it becomes commie condo residential areas. Overall Sarajevo is very small, at least it feels  very small, the metro area has 400K people compared with Seattle’s 3.4 million (but Seattle’s metro area is considerably larger).  While the main artery of the city is along the river, the residential areas are above in the steep hills which basically go straight up from the river. You’ll see white patches at the corners of the streets, cemeteries that if you walk through them, will for the majority have their last years between 1992-1996. I was first here 5 years ago in 2005 and there has been a lot more rebuilding. Along Marsala Tita street the facades have been repaired, the bullet holes not as noticeable as I remember from 2005. Sarajevo roses haven’t been refilled as the red cement has gone away (Sarajevo roses are the red stained cement poured into where mortar shells fell, the look like big red ink spots).  So the center looks better, but keep walking and you notice how it’s only a few parts of town that have been rebuilt with new facades. Near to where I work, you walk by ruined out building full of bullet and mortar holes, building with barbed wire around them because they are destroyed and the signs out in front making sure that everyone knows what government/agency is financing their rebuilding process. I’ll try to get some photos up soon, low fog and dreary skies make for bad lighting. 

So I walk about 20 min from my place in the center to the office, and my language tutor is right there, so really everything is very centrally located. I’ve been reading a lot, finding articles online (thankyouverymuch UW library off campus access system) and reading the book that Zilka (head of TPO) wrote based on her PHD research. I’m planning to start organizing interviews and focus groups for Jan so I’m still figuring out how I want to do things. I’ll have a lot of materials to work through once I’m done as well, so I’m trying to figure out how to arrange data and all of that. I’ve brought all of my field research books from classes with me so I’m reviewing those as well. While I expect to get most of my information from these sessions, I’m getting a lot of information from my experiences with people in daily life as well. Scratch the surface here and everyone has a story. Go out for drinks and find out how someone’s family had its members burned alive for being X or X. Sit down to eat some food, talk to the owner and they’ll spill out their frustrations, how many family members they lost, how many of the youth Bosnia is losing. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this of course, the last couple of years floating in and out of the region actually gave me great info for my thesis precisely through this way. But this reiterates that this is a society of trauma, everyone here has some sort of trauma, whether related to the war or just the difficult economic situation that keeps 40% of its population unemployed. It gets depressing. And it becomes disheartening. Through the seminars I’ve been to with TPO, it’s clear that women in particular face immense challenges but this is an economic and political system that is only going to keep the status quo, and these women will continue to face hardships and to try to deal with their trauma on their own with limited guidance and assistance.

This is a ton of information I’m still wading through, and I’ll have a lot more come this spring. Together hopefully I’ll be able to address the questions I came here with.