In November 1992, Sarajevo zoo made international headlines, for perhaps the first and only time in its existence. The first winter of the siege was working its frigid, numbing fingers into the very bones of the city; the zoo sat in the far north of Sarajevo, barely metres from the quasi-settled frontline between the besiegers and their captives, thrust unwittingly into the conflict.
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.
