Driving through the snow-covered mountains which encircled Sarajevo, it was hard to imagine this bea
Driving through the snow-covered mountains which encircled Sarajevo, it was hard to imagine this beautiful area as a war zone, even less so one that had existed in our lifetimes. Yet the scars leftover from the war were omnipresent; they were in every bullet hole-strewn building, in every road surface struck by a mortar, in every man who hobbled past us on wooden crutches. We had arrived in Bosnia & Herzegovina with the intention of seeing beyond its past, but found it quite impossible to ignore.Perhaps most poignant of all the lingering remnants of war were Sarajevo’s abandoned Olympic venues; the bobsleigh track once filled with spectators, now a crumbling relic; the angular lump of concrete that was Hotel Igman, whose rooms had not been filled since the siege began. Most chilling of all perhaps, were the former Olympic ski jumps, located on the buffer zone across Igman ridge, laced with mines and used as a site for executions.As our boots crunched through deep snow only the eerie silence in the air betrayed the area’s dark history. We’d spent the night at Hotel Igman, although not as its designers had intended; we’d camped up in what would’ve been its car park, or so we had presumed as it was buried under a foot or so of snow. Having woken up to find the bobsleigh track and surrounding pine trees painted white the previous morning, it gave us an enormous sense of comfort that the mountains on the opposite side of Sarajevo were also covered. This would be the last snow we’d see for many months, dusting the communist concrete structures and turning them into things of beauty, the snow and infinite forest of pine trees muffling all sounds as we slept beneath a blanket of white.But now the snow was melting, icicles dripping all around us and soaking into our boots as we explored the remnants of Sarajevo’s ski jumps. It seemed metaphorical almost of our time in the Balkans; simplistically beautiful, all too brief and now slowly coming to an end.We had just a few more days in Bosnia before our compass would point us North, and we would make our reluctant return into Western civilisation. -- source link
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