War and More War

Photo Stream at end of Posting 2:

We traveled to Bosnia last weekend for a 3 day field trip with the students.  The first city we headed to was Mostar, Bosnia. On the way we stopped at our first Turkish town Pociteli, which is also a 9th century walled village but it was very different from the coastal town of the Dalmatian coast. It was our first view of Turkish architecture, with a mosque and slate roofs.

We climbed up to the fort on top and had a beautiful view of the Neum River. In Mostar we saw the 9th century bridge that connected the Islamic side of town to the Christian side of town. It was blown up in 1992, but rebuilt in 2004, using the same technique they used in the 9th century.  We also had a first hand look at the war damage, as many buildings were skeleton ruins, or covered with pock marks from shell hits. We went inside a mosque and climbed to the top of the minaret.  We spent the night in a hotel, and set out for Sarajevo the next morning.

Bosnia is almost all mountains, and there are no highways. We had 2 vans, with 3 seats across, so the middle seat person bounced around on every hairpin curve. Sarajevo is set in a mountain valley and hosted the winter Olympics in 1984. It has since seen a lot of war, with 10,000 deaths in Sarajevo, 1500 of them children.  It has very interesting architecture, a mix of Turkish Ottoman, Austria-Hungarian, and new modern Islamic buildings, with a mosque every few blocks. We started out in the old city Turkish Souk, which was crowded with Saturday shoppers. I took a group photo of my students in front of a Islamic water fountain, and Bill noticed a young man in a t-shirt sitting in front of the students with his girlfriend.  His T-shirt was from The House of Guitars, Rochester, NY.  He was from Slovenia. Small world.  

I bought some examples of "trench art", which are hammered decorated vases made out of bomb shell casings.  You can buy anything in the Souk, much like a Moroccan souk, with narrow alleys and wares piled high.  Eating was tough in Bosnia for vegetarians, they are big meat eaters. Not much English is spoken here, so it was hard to figure out what to order. Maya did well as she survived on kabobs and civapis (lamb sausage in flat breads). We saw the Assassination Bridge where the Archduke was assassinated and WWI started, and went inside a Serbian Orthodox cathedral. 

The next day, we took the rode less traveled, 5 hours of hairpin turns to get to a National Park and the last remaining virgin forest in Europe. There a huge monument stands to honor the WWII battle (Sutjeska) where 3000 troops died fighting the Germans in a battle that was the turning point of the war. Back in the van for another 3 hours of bouncing around, going through Serbian part of Bosnia, where Zoran said we couldn't even stop for food. Why? Because if they see the Croatian licence plate, they will spit in our food. There was a concentration camp at Bileca, where many Serbians died at the hands of the Croatian.  We are all getting a little weary of war, imagine a history where there is no war. When we finally arrived back in Dubrovnik, it felt like home.