Sarajevo has spent the last fifteen years slowly rebuilding itself after the devastation of the siege. At first the rebuilding process was precisely that: rebuilding and repairing damaged buildings, restoring the city to its previous state. In the past five years, though, entirely new building projects have been undertaken, on a grand scale: the BBI Centar, the Hotel Radon Plaza, the Avaz Twist Tower.
The self-styled leader of this regeneration project has been Fahrudin Radončić, the controversial media magnate. He seems consciously to style himself on Silvio Berlusconi: he is running for the Presidency of Bosnia in the coming elections, for example, and his daily tabloid Dnevni Avaz has, in the absence of reliable circulation figures, probably the highest readership in Bosnia. When it became clear that Avaz needed a new headquarters, then, Radončić made the project the flagship of his regeneration campaign.
The result was an impressive, blue glass tower that spirals gently and elegantly, as though some celestial hand had reached down from the heavens and, in some surreal, Python-esque practical joke, twisted the whole structure 45 degrees. The effect is striking, and more intense the closer one stands to the building; from directly below it, the building seems to buckle impossibly, as though wrenched by some unseen force contorting its form.
I headed into the express lift, having paid my 1KM entrance fee, and pressed the button marked “35″. I was suddenly launched upwards; from the window at the far side of the lift, I saw Sarajevo quickly disappear beneath me as I soared nearly one hundred and fifty metres above it. Once at the top, I climbed the extra set of steps to the viewing platform, and went outside.
As I stepped out onto the platform, the city opened up beneath me. I was looking west, first, towards the newer parts of the city, but the platform curved gently around almost the whole building, offering views of the whole city. No other building in Sarajevo comes close Avaz Twist tower’s height; it stands half as tall again as the next tallest structures in the city, the Bosmal City Centre towers that were built in 2001, and it is almost twice the size of the UNITIC towers that were for 25 years the city’s tallest.
From 36 stories up, the city became an abstraction; I could see it, of course, but I became suddenly aware of my separation from it. Sounds drifted up from all over the city, incapable of being located: car horns, the rumble of diesel engines, a dog’s bark, the call to prayer. Above it all I floated, visible from the whole city, the whole city visible to me, but from a distance that rendered each a mere speck to the other.
As the sun slowly came to rest behind the hills, the lights below flickered on one by one. Whole roads lit up suddenly, slashing vast, sodium vapour-yellow swathes into the darkened city; the Put Života and the Zmaja od Bosne were the widest, snaking roughly parallel from east to west where they constrained and demarcated the city’s business district—the area that, filled with skyscrapers, bank buildings and insurance company headquarters, was supposed to symbolise Bosnia’s bright new economic future.
The scene became flecked with tiny, sparkling orbs as the residents of the hills around the city turned on their lights. Directly below, the new US embassy building glowed a fierce orange, its huge compound surrounded by a ring of light; it sat stark against the rest of the city, as though its lights had combined with its tall, bombproof walls to separate it from the city in which it stood.
In the distance, Igman and the other mountains of Sarajevo faded blue into the sky, then disappeared as the last gasp of light was suffocated from the sky and was replaced with pure black. Cold and windswept, despite the day’s heat, I took my cue to leave and headed into the express lift, looking out of the window once more as I was shuttled from my celestial promontory, back down to earth.
