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.

I headed down one of these side streets, right in the heart of the city. Rows of anonymous, Austro-Hungarian buildings, three-storied and dirty with age, towered above me, as they did in much of this part of the city; in one of them, though, a strange frontage occupied part of the ground floor. Wooden panels covered the façade, and its narrow door was recessed into a porch from which hung an elaborate golden clock.

I stared into it, curious. The doors were open; a warm, incandescent glow was pouring out onto the street, and I could see only that the narrow building tumbled deep to some indeterminate point, unseen and cavelike. I headed in. A waiter in a white, straw cowboy hat passed me in the opposite direction, grinning; I headed into the heart of the cave, and took a seat. I tried to establish what sort of place I was in, but looking around brought more questions than answers.

My table was topped with a rectangle of glass, under which had been slid souvenirs by past guests; banknotes were stuffed next to business cards, old ticket stubs next to coins. Opposite me sat a huge armchair, upholstered in a dense, luxurious pile, at the same table as a bar stool and a carved mahogany caquetoire, incongruous at first and yet somehow harmonious.

Behind them, the walls were a jumbled mess of wood panels, carved balusters and recesses, into which were stuffed all manner of oddities: in three such nooks, televisions were playing, all on different channels, all muted; on a shelf, a pearl necklace was draped over an antique candlestick. On a plinth, a glass urn containing a live goldfish was illuminated from above by the tungsten glow of a lightbulb; in front of it, on a lower plinth, was a huge bowl of fruit.

The bathroom managed to be somehow more surreal. Just past the antique, rotary dial telephone was a tiny, black-and-white television showing a French channel; on it, a dog was running through a field to a sparse piano soundtrack, seemingly endlessly. The room, like the rest of the bar, was full of trinkets, stuffed into every available alcove. It was mesmerising; not disturbing, but simply bizarre.

I headed back to my seat, next to the goldfish, and watched the evening go by over a few beers. The clientele was predictably eccentric; well-heeled twenty-somethings mixed with bearded eccentrics, all attended to by the waiter in his cowboy hat and surrounded by the insane décor. Everything was carved, stained, antique; it was like an insane inheritance, as though a madman had attended the auction of an eccentric’s estate and, without thought or discernment, bought the lot. It was wonderful.

In the crumbling city’s half-abandoned theatres, though, people were watching films; enjoying—and, indeed, consciously flaunting—a touch of civility in an inhumane situation. Thirty-seven films were screened, from fifteen countries, and despite the difficulties of the siege 15,000 people flocked to watch them.

It was the first Sarajevo Film Festival; from those humble beginnings, the festival has become the most well-attended and well-respected in the region, one of Europe’s foremost film events, attended by hundreds of thousands including cinema figures of real integrity. The competition element has become genuinely well-contested; the 2001 winner, Danis Tanović’s No Man’s Land, for example, went on to win Best Foreign Language Film at the 2002 Oscars, and other winners have been similarly successful elsewhere.

I headed down to the National Theatre early on Friday evening, to see the opening of the festival—not out of any punctuality, you must understand, but rather out of disorganisation, not having had any idea at what time proceedings were supposed to start. When I arrived in the Trg Susan Sontag, the square in which the theatre sits, I was almost the only person there. In front of the theatre, some technicians were setting up hot-lights and camera equipment, while a handful of curious office workers, presumably journeying home, were milling curiously about; otherwise, though, the place was deserted.

And so I waited, and watched as the square slowly filled; a trickle at first, and then a flood, all under the watchful gaze of the theatre itself. It was an imposing structure, two-storied and white-painted, awash with columns and balustrades; a balcony jutted out from the central frontispiece, from which further columns reached up towards a many-corbeled cornice that spread around the perimeter of the whole building. The whole structure dominated the otherwise empty square, casting a shadow that gradually enveloped the whole space.

That day, though, the façade was augmented by the trappings of live TV broadcasts, of pomp and of ceremony. Rolled out from the steps that led up to the main entrance was a large red carpet, flanked by metal barriers and manned by a couple of bored-looking security guards, their cheap suits shiny in the low sunlight. Above, a gazebo ran the length of the carpet; not even rain, it seemed, would ruin the hairdos of the dignitaries due to arrive—though the crowd would not be so lucky. Dangling from the uppermost point on the centre of the façade was a row of shimmering fairy lights, barely visible at first but glowing ever more orange as the sun dipped below the buildings.

On the east side of the square was the VIP section, a cluster of tents ringed by a fence and guarded intently by security guards. Its red-badged guests came and went with an air of effortless superiority, to the palpable envy of the unbadged proles—myself included—that ringed the area, jostling and craning our necks to catch a glimpse of whatever VIPs might deign to grace us with their visibility. After straining for a few minutes, I suddenly realised that, for all I knew, I could have been surrounded by celebrities that I wouldn’t have recognised; the festival is visited by global celebrities, of course, but so many are either local or film insiders that I wouldn’t recognise them if they came up and bought me a drink. And so, dejected and still badgeless, I returned to the red carpet.

Suddenly, there was a commotion. The security guards had opened the gates at the entrance to the theatre: the guests were arriving! Forgetting my previous conclusion about my pathological inability to recognise celebrities, I hustled for a spot right near the entrance, and watched as a torrent of unrecognisables filtered past from their limousines to the red carpet, to the polite applause of the assembled multitudes. Like a herd of sheep crossing a road, they eventually passed and the gates were closed once more. A palpable sense of disappointment went up among the crowd when they realised that there would be no more well-frocked A-listers passing them by; they began slowly to disperse, spreading out from the square to Sarajevo’s bars and cafés. The festival, though, was opened: bring on the next week!

Though Koševo is ordinarily the home of FK Sarajevo, I had come to watch FK Željezničar, the other Sarajevo team, who play their Champions League and UEFA cup games in the larger of the two stadiums. Their opponents were Hapoel Tel Aviv, the current Israeli champions; the winner would progress to the third qualifying round of the Champions League, though there was little hope for Željo who went into the game 5-0 down on aggregate, having put on a dire display in the first leg.

The spirits of the fans were not dampened, though. On the south stand to my right were Željo’s ultras, the “Maniacs”, the most hardcore fans who normally occupy the south curva of Željo’s Grbavica stadium. From before kickoff until after the final whistle, they became a seething mass of jumping and chanting, relentless, appearing as one huge organism that had spread across the curva. This was not the choreographed tifo of Italian ultras, but organic; the only organisation was the continuously beaten drum that kept the rhythm of the ceaseless chants.

Even the poor quality of the football on offer could not dissuade them. Though Željo came close to scoring twice in the first half, the result was never in doubt; if the tie had not been dead at 5-0, then it was surely killed by Hapoel’s 76th minute goal, a scrappy bundling from a shoddily defended indirect free kick. But still the ultras sang, their spirits as undiminished as they had been at kickoff. The chants seemed to lack the sarcastic putdowns of their English equivalents—though that might simply have been a consequence of the foreign opposition—but instead brimmed with self-confidence: if you weren’t convinced Željo were the best before the match, you surely would after 90 minutes of deafening persuasion. The result? What did the result matter?

The news sent shockwaves through the Bosnian and even the international press, transforming Visoko overnight into a media circus with Osmanagić its ringmaster. Experts were consulted; studies were commissioned; trenches were dug. The claims became more and more outrageous: there was, it turned out, not just one pyramid, but two, then three, then four; tunnels were “discovered”, allegedly bearing ancient writing.

That the consulted experts found Osmanagić’s theories to be riddled with inaccuracies did not dissuade him. Nor did the fact that Bosnia was in an ice age 12,000 years ago, the time when the pyramids were supposedly built. Nor, either, did the fact that Bosnia’s inhabitants at the time were itinerant hunter-gatherers, who built no permanent structures—let alone huge monoliths. Five years on, the archaeological digs continue unabated, and the tourists arrive in droves.

The pyramids have taken over every aspect of the town; they have become its identity. Stepping out of the bus station when I arrived in Visoko, looking for the way into town, I found a cluster of roadsigns; all of the local Visoko ones bore on their left side a stylised pyramid, yellow on white. Crossing the bridge into town, I saw what used to be the Motel Hollywood; now, inevitably, it has become the Motel Piramida Sunca. Local restaurants serve “pyramid pizza”. The town is gripped with pyramid fever.

I headed towards the “Pyramid of the Sun”, the most overtly pyramidal of the four claimed pyramids and the closest to the town. Heading through the winding streets of the old town, I eventually climbed clear of the town and onto the forested road that led up the mountain. A large white sign welcomed me to the “world’s largest complex of pyramids”, and a perspex box filled with coins invited donations to help fund further research.

The owner of a souvenir kiosk signalled the route to the summit, and I ascended the wooden steps that had been carved into the side of the mountain. Groups of tourists were filtering down past me, and when I reached the site of the current architectural digs the area was bustling with guided groups and curious onlookers.

Inside the trenches, Malaysian archaeologists carefully probed the ground, scraping the soil from what looked simply to be ordinary rocks. To the side, a large section of hillside was fenced off, its exposed stone on display to the world: made up mostly of breccia,1 it looked perfectly natural, and did not have even the illusion of design about it.

As I prepared to ascend again past the dig site and to the top of the pyramid, the official guide approached and asked what I was interested in. I mumbled something awkward about the pyramids, but also mentioned Visoki, the ruined medieval fortress that sits atop the so-called pyramid and which was central to the medieval Bosnian state. “Visoki? You don’t want to go there,” the guide snorted. “All it has is some old walls and views of the valley. You must go to the tunnels; to go to Visoko and not see the tunnels would be madness!” He insisted that he drive me the two kilometres in his car—for €10, of course—but I declined; I had wanted to see Visoki for far longer than I had the pyramids. Visibly frustrated, he left me and headed back to his tourist group, and I resumed my ascent.

The route was treacherous, and barely a path at all; the forest grew more dense the higher I went, and the loose, sandy loam beneath my feet offered little traction. In places, the hill became near vertical, and its ascent more a process of rock-climbing than of hiking; I thought with bitter amusement of the idea that this colossus had been crafted by human hands.

Eventually, bursting through a thicket, I found myself on a loose stone wall, its cement crumbling. Was this Visoki, I thought? Surely it would have some notice, some fence surrounding it? But it was; I was standing on one of the outer walls. Climbing further up, I eventually summited the hill and saw the rest of the structure. The sandy rock blazed yellow-white under the early afternoon sun, and as I walked further I saw the remains of one of the fortress’s towers, covered in a plastic wrapping but otherwise neglected. There was no fence, not even a notice warning of the site’s importance; it was thoroughly exposed, to the elements and to human interference.

Looking around, I saw why its location had been chosen: the fortress offered its defenders an unimpeded view of the whole Bosna valley, and approach to it was restricted to the shallower side of the hill. I thought of the bustling groups of tourists I had seen at the mock archaeological sites, barely metres away from where I stood; none had thought to ascend the hill any further, to see Visoki.

This seems to me the tragedy of the pyramid hoax. I can understand its motivation: Bosnia is not a rich country, and in the wake of the “discovery” the increase in tourist visits and revenue to the otherwise-overlooked Visoko must have been a welcome relief. But Visoko has real history, real wonder, that is being neglected and ignored in the hurry to capitalise on the fame of the Bosnian pyramids. Osmanagić has shown himself to be a canny operator, able to mobilise and orchestrate the press with ease; that he felt the need to do so in promoting a false history of his own making—rather than the rich history to which Visoko was already legitimately home—says much of his ego, and is far less than Visoko deserves.

In the 13th century, under Tvrtko I, the medieval kingdom of Bosnia reached its zenith. Deftly negotiating at least tacit Hungarian approval, Tvrtko took ruthless advantage of weaknesses in the Croatian and Serbian empires to rapidly and substantially expand the Bosnian kingdom. By the time of his death, it stretched from Slavonia in the north to Dalmatia in the south, and from Zadar in the west to Mileševo in the east; in other words, almost all of modern Croatia, all of modern Bosnia, much of modern Montenegro, and the Sandžak region of modern Serbia.

The heartland of this empire was what was known then simply as Bosnia: the central region of the modern country, with Travnik and Visoko at its heart. In those days, Visoko was both a bustling trading town and the political capital of the Bosnia; even greater history, though, can be found just across the Bosna from Visoko, in Mile. At the time of Tvrtko I, who was both crowned and buried there, it was perhaps most famous as a seat of learning—its university was famed in the region for both its theological and secular teaching—but it was also a religious centre, home both to the earliest Franciscan monastery in Bosnia, established in 1340, and the Church of Ss. Kuzme and Damjan, administered by the heretical Bosnian Church.

Little remains of Mile today. It is not even known as Mile any more: crumbling and decaying, it was abandoned and, much later, resettled as Arnautovići. The monastery still remains, though, albeit in updated form: it is now a sprawling complex of buildings, dominated by a palatial Austro-Hungarian building, three-storied and dominated at each ends by cross-topped towers. The painted facade was crumbled and peeling, and bore the scars of machine gun fire, but it was still an impressive sight; I opened the gate and, finding no one around, wandered inside.

Behind the main building, the complex spread out and I discovered that, as well as a monastery, the grounds also held a Catholic school—odd, I thought, in 96-per-cent-Muslim Visoko. The rear of the complex opened onto carefully tended agricultural land; as I wandered around, the smell of fresh tomatoes and peppers, growing under plastic tunnels, filled the air. Around the corner, a statue of a pained Christ, hands extend, sat in an otherwise deserted courtyard, surrounded by flowers, staring out accusingly.

Everything was silent: I hadn’t seen a single soul since I first stepped into the gate. It was an eery silence: was I allowed to be here, I thought? Perhaps it was just that it was the school holidays, but this didn’t feel a place for visitors, and I made my way back out, closing the screeching gate behind me.

On 6 July, the Serb forces launched an offensive aimed at finally capturing the town that had eluded them for three years. Dutch UNPROFOR soldiers, ostensibly there to protect the civilian population, retreated into their base or surrendered into the custody of the Serb attackers; even in the first days of the offensive, there were reports of Bosniak homes being burned down. By 11 July, the town had fallen completely. General Ratko Mladić, still on the run from the Hague tribunal, took a now infamous triumphal march through the eerily quiet city streets that was filmed in its entirety by a Serb news camera. “I stand here in Serb Srebrenica,” he told the camera. “I claim it for the Serb nation.”

Chaos ensued following the town’s fall. 25,000 civilians crammed into the Dutch UN base in the old battery factory in Potočari, just north of Srebrenica; when it could hold no more, they filled the fields and streets around it. Serb soldiers were everywhere; the UN peacekeepers did nothing as men were seized from the crowd and executed, women were raped, children murdered—just a prelude to the coming days’ events, in which 8,000 people would be murdered. There was seemingly no escape: Serb forces had the town and the surrounding area completely encircled.

Late in the evening of 11 July, though, a column of 15,000 Bosniak men including some 5,000 soldiers decided to take a risk. Rather than face certain extermination by remaining in Srebrenica, they decided to form a column and try to break through the encirclement, concentrating themselves on a tiny section of the Serb perimeter to the north. From there, they could trek the gruelling distance—45 miles as the crow flies, almost 70 accounting for the terrain—to the territory controlled by the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

5,000 of them never made it to Tuzla, as the column was hounded by Serb ambushes and artillery attacks. Reports of those who finally made it describe an ashen army of shambling, ghost-like figures, their feet bloodied and wrapped in plastic bags or paper, reduced to eating slugs and leaves, hallucinating from exhaustion and thirst and terror.

In 2005, to commemorate the marchers and the thousands of others murdered during that bloody July in 1995, the inaugural Marš Mira (“Peace March”) was held. Tracing a route from Nezuk in the north to Potočari, the site both of the original Dutch UN base and of the cemetery for the victims of the massacre, it symbolically reverses the path taken by the original column: a return, if you will, on behalf of those who can never return to their towns and villages.

I leapt at the chance to go on the 2010 march. I hadn’t expected it to be a happy experience, of course, but I had not prepared myself for quite how physically and emotionally draining it was. 68 miles is a long distance to walk; spread it over a mere three days, though, and set it in the rugged, mountainous terrain of eastern Bosnia, and it begins to look like insanity.

By the end of the march, I was exhausted. The soles of my feet burned with every step I took, covered in blisters and aching from every upturned rock that jabbed through even the thick soles of my boots. The sun was blazing, drenching me in sweat and delighting the mosquitos that had covered my arms and legs in myriad, itching bites. Suddenly, limping, I crested a hill and saw below me an unmistakable sight: the uniform white rows of the cemetery at Potočari.

Nothing filled me with more relief than that view. I surged forward on a second wind, descending the hill faster than I had walked for days. When I finally collapsed onto the pavement outside the cemetery I felt more exhausted and drained than I have in my entire life, barely capable of cogent thought, let alone physical movement.

Each night, in villages along the route, as I had nursed my feet from the day’s walk and relaxed in the generous hospitality of the families who had put us up for the night, I had thought of the original column. When I did, my heart filled with a mixture of gratitude and shame: gratitude at how comparatively easy my experience was, and shame at how difficult I had found it. How dare I complain about my blistered feet and aching muscles! How dare I imagine my experience was difficult, with its first aid support and its food stations and its plentiful water!

As I sat there in Potočari at the end of my journey, I watched as a column of people assembled in silence. Standing side-by-side in two rows facing each other, they formed a long line that snaked from the old battery factory, across the road and into the cemetery. Then, slowly and methodically, they raised their hands and passed along above their heads a procession of green-draped coffins, each numbered individually.

I sat in silence, watching the numbers progressively increase. 50, 100, 200, 300. Not a word was exchanged by the members of the line: their deathly consignment said more than words ever could. 400, 500, 600, 700. I had known, of course, just how many victims had been murdered in Srebrenica in July 1995; the figure of 8,000 is burned indelibly on my mind. But seeing the coffins pass by, all 775 recently identified victims, hit me on a visceral level that no book ever could. There, right in front of me, were the victims of the crimes about which I had read so much, held aloft in remembrance by their relatives and their former community, before my very eyes.

I felt suddenly as though I was imposing. This was not my grief to share: how could I possibly stand here in sadness, as though I had even the beginnings of an understanding of what these people were going through? How could my presence possibly help assuage these unhealed wounds? What was I doing here?

My presence couldn’t help, of course. I could not heal the wounds of this tortured place, nor did I in some misplaced arrogance seek to try. No, the point of the march and of the ceremony was not healing. Only time can heal wounds as deep as these, and time’s advance is inexorable; with it, the pain will, gradually but unavoidably, grow less agonising. The danger, though, is that with a dulling of the pain comes a dulling of remembrance—that events which do not live so vividly, so sharply in our collective consciousnesses are apt to be forgotten. For as long as 10,000 people are prepared to march 68 miles in commemoration, though, and for as long as 50,000 people are prepared to attend the memorial ceremony, it seems that Srebrenica will never be forgotten.

More of my photos from the march are available here.

The giraffes were the first to go; it stands to reason, I suppose, that they were least able to find cover. The wolves followed, and the eagles with them; soon, through starvation and sniper fire, only a single brown bear remained of the erstwhile menagerie. The militiamen fed her, cautiously and irregularly, as often as they were able to dash across the open ground from their base to her enclosure, but it was too little; in November 1992, she finally succumbed to starvation. The zoo was empty; it had been defeated.

From the ashes, though, it slowly reemerged. The land mines that littered its hillsides were cleared, the half-destroyed enclosures demolished. Animals were donated by zoos around Europe. The absurd sums of money necessary for its transformation were, somehow, raised.

It was a herculean effort; I must admit, though, that before my visit I had not raised my expectations too high. There had been a funding crisis as recently as last year, when the zoo’s general manager feared it might close; together with mental images of the zoo at its wartime nadir, I had expected to find it a forlorn vision of grubbiness and disrepair, the sort of place more likely to appear in television adverts for animal charities than in glossy tourist brochures.

I set out in the early afternoon; the sun was at its searing zenith, the dusty streets emptying as people fled for cover in cafés and under awnings. I tramped up the Patriotske Lige, growing increasingly uncomfortable, before finally stumbling upon the zoo. Its entrance was unassuming; just a gate, some uneven and overgrown flagstones, and a small ticket booth. I paid my 1,50KM to get in—about 96 US cents—and headed inside, my preconceptions at the forefront of my mind.

It was like entering an oasis. Well-tended flowerbeds flanked the path left and right, and as it wound onwards a thick canopy of trees grew up and crossed it, sunlight streaming through the leaves and flecking the path with pools of light. Before long, I came to the stream that runs through the centre of the park, stone-sided and clear-running, its soft burbling mingling with the sound of children in the playground on the other bank.

I headed left, to a tall enclosure surrounded on all sides by wire. In it, excited coatis, small, long-snouted and ring-tailed mammals in the raccoon family, were leaping and dancing across the ropes and bars that traversed their enclosure at every angle. Several were foraging on the ground, squeaking and grunting their territorial announcements. Children watched from the other side of the fence in rapt wonder; occasionally, one of the animals would snuffle up to the fence in curiosity before retreating at a pace with a loud squeak when the child reciprocated.

I crossed the stream to the bear enclosure, a high-fenced concrete rectangle with a raised, moated island at the centre. It lay empty: I wondered if the zoo perhaps hadn’t replaced its bears, and after a few minutes I turned to leave. Only then did a snout emerge from the dark inside the concrete bunker, sniffing tentatively. A tired-looking bear followed it out. Suffering in the pounding heat, it slipped into the moat with an enviable relief; soon its partner joined it, only staying long enough to cool down before, with a shake of its huge fur coat, heading back into the shade.

Joyed by seeing the bears—they were what I had most been looking forward to—I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the zoo’s winding paths, sitting periodically in the shade of its innumerable trees, and generally revelling in the placid serenity of the place. I tried to imagine that there had been a war here so recently, tried to imagine the trees razed, the hills mined, the animals gone, but I simply couldn’t; it was too calm, too perfect, too permanent. I had expected to find a halting recovery, well-intentioned but incomplete: I could scarcely have been more wrong.

Dejected, I kicked my heels for a while, before setting off to explore the surrounding buildings in search of some alternative interest. Just to the west, I came across an ugly, disproportional building, a top-heavy mass of concrete whose huge, square upper floor jutted out from its glass-fronted base, its visage tainted by weather stains and bullet holes, a portrait of brutalism at its worst. The steps leading up to its front door were cracked and caved, and the concrete skirt that flanked its flat, open veranda was covered in graffiti. It looked interesting; without a second thought, I was inside.

It was, it turns out, the Historijski Musej: the Historical Museum, perhaps the second or third most famous in Sarajevo. It too, I discovered, was supposed to close at one o’clock, but the friendly staff—enjoying a coffee in the foyer—waved me in with no more than a glance at their watches—”dobro, dobro, možete”. I headed upstairs, to the exhibits from the siege of Sarajevo.

The siege was, as the oft-quoted fact goes, the longest siege of a capital city in the modern era. Lasting from the start of April 1992 to the end of February 1996, it was almost twice as long as that of Leningrad, with winters almost as cruel and with the whole city surrounded by natural snipers nests, vantage points, and artillery platforms. Visions of the everyday survival of Sarajevans—dodging sniper fire as they queued for bread, huddling behind UN armoured personnel carriers for cover simply to cross the road—saturated media coverage of the conflict; it became the most powerful lens through which to understand the conflict, and provided the most obvious evidence of a simple, “good guys/bad guys” narrative that the media so craved in this complex region.

The museum is filled with artefacts from the siege. Homemade weapons feature prominently; throughout the wars of the 1990s, the whole region was subject to an arms embargo that grossly favoured the Serbs, who obtained weapons from the Serb-controlled JNA, and the Croats, whose borders with the non-Yugoslav world enabled it to smuggle countless truckloads of weapons into the area. The Bosniaks, then, were forced to rely on homemade weapons: they welded scaffolding pipes, car parts, whatever they could get their hands on, into crude impressions of firearms; it was with these weapons—these toys—that they were expected to defend themselves against professional armies, armies with automatic rifles, and machine guns, and rocket launchers, and tanks. The fledgeling Army of BiH’s uniforms, which hang in a museum display case, are no more than tracksuits with cobbled-together divisional patches safety pinned onto them. The impression is that of a deeply tragic Dad’s Army: that the city went uncaptured for four months is a miracle, never mind four years.

The siege of Sarajevo seems to me a far more evil crime than simple murder. It takes a particular, calculated cruelty to reduce a city’s inhabitants to starving shadows of their former selves, their nerves shot, fearful of walking too close to their own windows, terrified of leaving the house; to obliterate safety and security as concepts, to make everyday tasks a nerve-shattering ordeal for four long years. This injustice seemed, for those years at least, to resonate with the world, to make them realise the degree to which they themselves took that fundamental security for granted. They have forgotten now, of course; perhaps, if they visited Sarajevo and saw the too-fresh reminders on the walls of almost every building, they might remember once more.

Stepping out from the museum, I headed south onto the Vilsonovo Šetalište. Sandwiched between the river and the main east-west highway that leads into the city centre, this leafy avenue is closed to cars in the evenings and weekends; then, it is transformed, from a mere street to something much more. Bicycle rickshaws are peddled lazily down the middle of the road; dogwalkers mingle with joggers, and almost every bench is occupied by a young couple seemingly oblivious to their surroundings. As I walked westwards, sunlight filtered, diffuse, through the trees that line both sides of the route. The only sounds were the river’s steady susurrus and the quiet murmur of conversation; the city had melted away.

It is a timeless place, without cars or shops to date or disturb it; it is old, and like many places in Sarajevo it has changed names almost as often as the city has changed rulers. It was Kajaleva Promenada under the Austro-Hungarians; with the fall of the empire following World War I, it was renamed Vilsonovo Šetalište, after Woodrow Wilson. Then, following the Axis occupation in World War II, it became Musolinijevo Šetalište, or Mussolini Promenade; but when the Axis too were defeated, it became Vilsonovo Šetalište once more—only for Communist fervour in the 1960s to transform it into Omladinsko Šetalište, the Youth Promenade. Finally, for the third time, it became Vilsonovo Šetalište once more: and so it has remained, throughout the turmoil of the last twenty years, an oasis of calm in a bustling, ever-growing city. Long may it remain.

Around three quarters of the way up, exhausted from the hill’s steepness even when travelling the hairpin roads that switch back and forth up its face, I came across a cemetery and headed inside. It is not through some morbid fascination that I find myself constantly in Sarajevo’s cemeteries, I assure you; it is simply that, with the city’s hillsides crisscrossed with houses built almost on top of one another, cemeteries seem to be the only places where it is possible to gain an unobstructed view of the city.

This view, I must say, was a particularly fine one. The cemetery jutted out on a curved promontory, sloping downwards steeply from its outermost point and offering a truly panoramic view of the city. To my right was Hum, with its television tower sceptre thrusting upwards from the crown of the hill, its silhouette instantly recognisable. In front of me, the whole city spread out across the valley floor: the Avaz twist tower, crowned with the red logo of the newspaper, loomed over its tiny neighbours; everywhere, minarets and church towers poked up from the tumble of roofs and gables. In the far distance I could see Mt. Igman, colossal and snow-browed even in this 35º heat.

Over my right shoulder, the sun was sinking below the mountains; the lights below flickered on, one-by-one; seen through the waves of heat drifting up from the city below, the whole scene gained a shimmering, impressionistic quality, unfixed and and unfixable, never quite settling.

The sound of yelping and barking, surprisingly close, snapped me out of my reverie; there in the graveyard, ten metres away, was a group of stray dogs, menacing, fighting among themselves; I took my cue to leave and headed downhill, back into that shimmering vision.

“Oprostite,” I asked. “BIRN—do you know it?”

“BIRN? I’m a journalist there!” He shook my hand, and we went up the stairs—the first to arrive for the week. Perhaps everyone was hungover from the previous week’s regional meeting in Montenegro—who knows? As it turns out nobody really knew, about me anyway. The director, with whom I’d arranged my internship, was in a meeting all day; and so I was left somewhat in the lurch. Everyone was friendly and made polite introductions, but they had work to do, and I couldn’t impose; and so, after being given some books and DVDs from which to learn more about BIRN, I was sent on my way, only an couple of hours after I had arrived. It wasn’t the most glorious start, but it was a start nevertheless.

After a day of research on Tuesday, Wednesday was my first “real” day—my first visit to the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where war crimes from the 1992–95 war are being tried. A short trolley bus journey from the office, the court sits in a squat, orange-painted building surrounding by plain but well-tended gardens; in its former guise the site was, in an appropriately ironic twist, a barracks of the Serbian-controlled JNA (Yugoslav National Army), the military force that had—in tandem with various paramilitary and mercenary forces—wreaked such havoc across the region in the 1990s.

The court lies ringed by a tall, metal fence; entrance to it is via a small security outpost, manned by unfailingly jovial guards and containing an X-ray machine and metal detector. Somewhat disconcertingly, I set off the metal detecter every time I went through it, but each time I was waved through with a smile. Perhaps it was the press badge; perhaps there is no real threat. The court has, after all, been running for five years now without serious incident, and if anything the public’s interest is waning: even the most controversial trials attract crowds only to sentencing, and the others do not even attract media coverage. In every trial I went to during my first week, BIRN—who cover every trial as a rule—were the only media organisation present.

Santayana’s famous remark—that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it—has become the most trite and overused of aphorisms, but it seems genuinely appropriate here: it is only fifteen years after this particular past, and already it is being wilfully forgotten. It an often well-meaning amnesia, of course. Why dwell on the trauma of history? Why resurrect the ghosts that seem finally to have been vanquished?

It is a dangerous attitude, though. Already there are adults, people in their twenties, who have no memory at all of the realities of the war, but who are subject to precisely the same rhetoric that began the conflicts of the 1990s. As Šešelj, Milošević, Tuđman, Karadžić, and their ilk appealed to a distorted false memory of the crimes of World War II, so nationalists now appeal to their own twisted truth of the 1990s in justifying further tension, further ill-feeling.

How, without truth, can we avoid the fatalistic and disgusting assertion that the Balkans somehow, inevitably, is subject to some fifty year cycle of bloodletting? This is why the court is so important: to smash the idea that their are three truths, truths to which one subscribes by means of ethnicity. It is also why BIRN’s work is so valuable; it is the only organisation that covers every war crimes trial, and among the tragically biased Balkan media it is the only organisation to maintain a rigid code of impartiality and objectivity. Even so, the twin organs of the judiciary and the responsible sectors of the media are fighting a losing battle; let us hope that they can do enough.

On 12 July 1995, a unit of the Republika Srpska special police travelled around the villages of the fertile Drina valley, in the east of Bosnia, near the Serbian border. Calmly and methodically, they rounded up those civilians who were Bosniak; they took them to Potočari, a small village north-west of Srebrenica. Those who had tried to flee through the woods were also captured, their valuables seized; they too were taken to Potočari with the others. There, the one thousand prisoners were herded into a warehouse, formerly an agricultural cooperative; it is not a large building, and there must have been little room. The police unit formed a semi-circle around the main entrance to the warehouse; several of its members moved to the back, surrounding it. Then, for approximately half an hour, they fired into the building, with machine guns and automatic rifles, sending bullet after bullet into the packed mass of prisoners. Any who tried to escape through the back of the warehouse were killed instantly. When the shooting subsided, hand grenades were thrown into the warehouse to ensure that all were killed; in the end, just over 1,000 people were murdered that day, buried ignominiously in two mass graves, killed for the sin of merely existing in defiance of an ethnically pure Serb state.

On Wednesday, I sat approximately three metres from a tall, stocky man, bald-headed and broad-shouldered, his arms thick as tree trunks, his body straining in his plain white t-shirt as he walked. He seemed too big for the room, let alone the female police officer who led him by his cuffed hands into the courtroom, and when he sat down his chair sank visibly under his weight. This was Željko Ivanović, commander of the “Skelani” platoon of the RS special police; it was he who, according to his indictment, led the search for Bosniak civilians in the villages around Srebrenica, who stood behind the warehouse and made sure none escaped with their lives.

It is a curious feeling, sitting so close to someone who has allegedly done such evil; breathing the same air as him, hearing the same conversations, exchanging glances before the proceedings began. I had expected—partly through my experience at the ICTY and through seeing photos of the defendants at this court—some vision of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”, a normal citizen swept up into a warped time and a warped system. Ivanović cut a more conventional figure, though; he looked a thug, one capable of violence, and I had no trouble imagining him committing the crimes of which he is accused; he was not, it seemed, a figure like Arendt’s Eichmann, merely incapable of understanding the consequences of his actions in a human sense; he seemed well aware of them, remorseless, cold.

As the prosecution continued to read out its list of material evidence linking Ivanović to the crimes—on the day I was at the trial, they had reached four hundred pieces with no sign of stopping—it seemed so unreal still. This man who sat here in front of me had committed these acts? Had been responsible for the deaths of a thousand people in a single day? A thousand? It defied comprehension. I still cannot conceive of it properly; it is destruction of human life on an intangible, unreachable scale. A thousand people killed, just part of a week of massacre in a single village that saw eight thousand murdered, itself just part of a war that killed 55,000 civilians and 45,000 soldiers.