I had meant to go to the National Museum on Saturday, but by the time I sauntered down Maršala Tita, up the museum’s front steps and to its main entrance, I discovered something I should probably have known already: on a Saturday, like a perplexing number of things in Bosnia, the museum is open only for a few hours, in the morning; it was only just one o’clock, but the place was deserted.
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.
