Sniper Alley and What I Found There

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue."

Woke up nice and early. Everything over the last few days was working very nicely. I was making my buses. I was having the time to see what I wanted to see. A few snags waiting for keys or with finding rooms, but nothing too nagging. In Sarajevo, I got eight hours of sleep, woke up, armored up and went out.

It's a big city with distinct flavors. There's the Baščaršija, the old market in the old town, and there's big, modern Sarajevo with its Olympic and war memorials. It's all mostly in a straight line, but it's a long straight line. Miles of things to see. I chose to extend that even more by visiting a cemetery on a hill I had seen yesterday.

My cozy room was closer to the old town, and I planned to pop back there for breakfast. I had to catch that bus to Zagreb at noon too. So.. for whatever reason, the plan was to see the cemetery and old town, eat breakfast, go back out to the modern city, close to the bus station, then go back to the apartment and get my bags, and take a cab to the bus station.

Some backtracking there. Not the most efficient plan, but it's what I did.

There was no one around. It was 7am. Misty. This is a city of stray dogs, and if you thought the stray cats were sad. Dogs have visible emotions and seem so much more vulnerable. I hated to see them wet and dirty and sad looking. Hungry. I didn't have anything for them.

And yet, they played with one another and chased one another in little packs. Some had little tags on their ears. There must be some sort of plan for them. Crossed the river and made my way to the cemetery. It was way up on a high hill. The houses in the hills were colorful and clustered together like a cubist painting. They looked like spaces on a game board.

An old man in a long black jacket came out of a doorway and walked by me without speaking. In the cemetery, a woman was visiting a grave. The newer headstones looked like fence posts or coffee stirrers. The older ones looked like pumpkin but were, in fact, turbans.

I walked through the quiet space and watched deep-throated birds going about their birdly business. I noticed slowly and then all at once that almost all the death dates on the tombstones were the same. 1994, 1994, 1994, 1995, 1994, 1996, 1995, 1994. Reading them like that, I just started sobbing. I leaned against the wall of a tomb and wept.

It was very different than the feeling I got in the Polish cemeteries (where all the death dates were in the 1940s), because, maybe, the world has done a lot of analyzing of the Holocaust, a lot of culture and discussion around it, so I was a little more...prepared for that, I guess.

These were from the 90s for fuck's sake. Our lifetime. Not some black and white History Channel bullshit. These people were shot while I was renting videos. They had to be buried at night, because the people burying them would otherwise have been shot themselves.

Can you imagine? Having to put on black clothing and drag your brother's corpse up a hill just so you could bury him without being yourself murdered. Terrified and digging. Crying. Digging. Waiting for your turn.

So, very sobering, and I guess I needed the release. There was a lot of surprise emotion there. Headed back down and dipped into the Old Town. The hill was a lot to climb, and it was getting closer to breakfast time. I couldn't help but stop for some Burek, though, which is the local dish. It's, like, mincemeat wrapped in phyllo dough. I'd had a version of it in Croatia, but this was the real thing.

It's kind of like a corn dog, I guess? No. It's like a tubular meat pie. I don't know. It's good. It was a good breakfast at a quiet little diner. Coffee is a hassle here. There's something called Bosnian Coffee, which they warn you not to drink. They talk about it the way Thai people talk about the spicier range of their foods.

It's like, "oh, you can't handle it, little boy." It's supposed to be a big, thick, slug of mud. I didn't try it. Your options in Europe in general are either powdered mix or something crafted by a master jeweler who doesn't think you deserve it and which you're expected to take all day appreciating.

So, this Bosnian blob coffee seemed interesting, but I just got some water. Like a person!

The town was starting to come alive. The pigeons had returned to Pigeon Square, and the rug dealers were starting to flap out their rugs. Passed the bead shops and the copper shops and the evil eye shops and made my way, like a good hobbit, to second breakfast.

My host wasn't there, but the table was all set for me with a proper European breakfast, which is toast and a million things to spread on toast. Jam, cheeses, butters, chocolates. I made room for an orange and a nice jammy slice of bread.  I wrapped up a bunch of bread a cheese for later. I would want it on the bus.

Then doubly fortified, I headed back out. It was starting to rain.

The guide book, so helpful everywhere else, got kind of vague here with references to "the road," and using nicknames for places instead of street names. I didn't want to ask anyone where "Sniper Alley" or "Runner's Street" were.

Man, I saw a big ol' buncha tombystones up there on the hill up yonder. Where'd they all get shot at? I want to take a pitcher!

Winged it and saw some interesting things. A sad memorial to dead children that looked like a half-finished sand castle, an eternal flame, and one of the "Roses of Sarajevo."

When the city was being shelled, it messed up the pavement, and they filled in the holes with a red resin. They were all over the place, but there's a movement in recent years to forget about them. People are picking out the resin. I saw plenty of spattery pot holes where it had been picked out, where the "roses" had been "plucked."

I see both sides. You need to remember, but you also don't want it to define you.

It was cool to walk around in a city that wasn't catering to tourists. I saw all sorts of real stuff. Two men huddled around the same newspaper, one reading aloud to the other. A man struggling with files in a briefcase, an actual briefcase. It was all so beautiful and real.

Giant Communist-era statues flanking city buildings. Mosques and churches and Times Square-style buildings with electric billboard walls. Near the Holiday Inn where all the Western journalists holed up during the war, I made a left and hung out on the Woodrow Wilson promenade, a beautiful tree-lined walk along the river.

My goal was to find a large ironic statue called the Monument to Canned Beef. Found it!

But it had been badly vandalized. Probably by the same people who picked the resin out. I've read that the Siege of Sarajevo was an old-fashioned style attack where they surrounded a city and tried to starve them. The only way for food to get in or out was for the UN to airdrop canned beef in at night and hope the people collecting it didn't get sniped.

It kept people alive, so I can see wanting to memorialize it, but I can also see younger people not wanting to have a giant can of SPAM standing in for their bravery.

Rain was hard now, and I'd seen everything on my list. A really interesting place, and I was glad it called to me and glad I came here. Croatia had its charms, but they seemed like fantasy. Bosnia was beautiful in a much more human way.

Ducked into a bank and had an amusing struggle to transform a bill into coins. I wanted one of each coin and there was a language barrier, but the teller was in a good mood, so it all worked out. Long walk back to the apartment, short goodbye with Edith (thanks for the bread and cheese, Edith!) and into a cab.

There was a bad traffic accident up ahead and the rain was bad, and it took forever just to get moving. The bus to Zagreb was leaving in thirty minutes, and the station was fifteen minutes away. We sat without moving for ten. I decided to let myself get nervous.

This has certainly been a city of emotions. They all came out in Sarajevo! The driver finally cut across a bunch of back alley stuff to get me to the church on time. I was grateful. Five minutes to buy a ticket and get on the bus.

A gypsy was like, "Argle bock," and I just gave her some coins, then I was terrified I'd given her the coins I collected from the bank. But no time!

Giant line at the ticket window, and unlike everywhere else, they don't let you into the bus area without a ticket. Most of the time, if you're scrambling you can just buy the ticket on the bus.

By some magic, four people in front of me were all together and bought their tickets at once. I had two minutes. The counter lady was like, "It is leaving now, you must have ticket now!" and I was like, "I sure know that," but... she wouldn't take my Kuna or my card. She would only take Convertible Marks.

I was like... uhhhhh, and she was like, "Cash machine!"

And I ran out and prayed my card worked, and the card worked. Tore it out of the slot, scraped my bag back in there, pushed the old woman who had taken my place aside, and grabbed my ticket. Thank god the card worked.

Ran ran ran through the checkpoint. Flew flew flew for the bus. Made it.

I gasped and heaved in my seat, and we took off. Eight hours later, I was going to be in Zagreb, a choice which would, in effect, end the trip. Had I known, I might not have been in such a blind panic to get on that bus.

It will soon be told.