Not quite betting Gabe's life on this one, either

Last day in Sarajevo so last day to write about it. I am woefully unqualified but here goes. A long time ago in the Balkans were the Romans. I forget when they came. In the 6th century the Slavs started moving in. In the 14th century the Ottomans started moving in and eventually controlled the whole peninsula (but with constant pressure from Russia and Austria and others) until their empire started to fall apart in the 19th century. During Ottoman times, Bosnia and Albania were the two places where a lot of people converted to Islam (I dunno why that was; I don't think historians really know, either). By the time Austria-Hungary kind of took over in the late 19th century, Bosnia was Catholic, Orthodix, Muslim, and Jewish. (A lot of the Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition came to the Balkans.) Gavrilo Princip shot Franz Ferdinand near the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo; World War I happened; World War II happened; Bosnia lost nearly its entire Jewish population; Tito ran Yugoslavia for about 40 years. When Yugoslavia started breaking up in the early 1990s, Bosnia was (and still is) a mix of Bosnian Croats (Catholic), Bosnian Muslims (aka Bosniaks), and Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox). Some powerful people thought that the Bosnian Serbs should be part of Serbia and that the Bosnian Croats should be part of Croatia and there was a nasty bloody war that lasted until 1995, with fighting especially bad in and around Sarajevo.

So here we are 15 years later. As per the Dayton peace agreement, Bosnia now consists of the Bosnian Federation and Republica Srpska. The Federation, which includes Sarajevo, is still a mix of religions/ethnicities, although with relatively more Muslims and fewer Serbs than before the war. Srpska is almost all Serb and includes East Sarajevo, which is still being built and developed on what was mainly nothing before and during the war. The only difference I can see between Srpska and the Federation is that the Cyrillic alphabet is used a lot more often (on signs and stuff) in Srpska. (The Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian languages are very similar, but Bosnian and Croatian use the Latin alphabet whereas Serbian uses Cyrillic.) Sarajevo is now majority Muslim. Most Muslim women here don't wear the veil; for the non-veiled women and all of the men, I can't tell who's who, so I don't know whether Serbs and Muslims eat dinner together very often. I don't sense simmering tension; there's no scary police presence or hateful graffiti. Still, as a foreigner you can miss a lot. Lola says that Serbs and Muslims have good relations now but, much as I like him, I recognize that no one can have an unbiased view of his own culture. (And, their relations are sort of infinitely better now than before. They're not killing each other.)

Lola showed me his house outside the city. Before the war, his neighbors were all Serbs. He didn't seem particularly happy when he told me that he's the only Serb left (well, plus however he counts his wife who is Dutch). But then he took me to have coffee with his Muslim neighbors. What a weird, complicated, beautiful, interesting, tragic place.


PS. Today was finally warm enough to take my harmonica outside. It was still a little cold and windy though, and my nose kept running, so I had to keep stopping to blow it, which made me feel pretty silly. I also just felt rusty; I kept making mistakes and forgetting songs that I've been playing for months. I'm getting better at not caring when I fuck up, though. The hard part is sitting down and starting to play; once I get past that it's not so scary anymore. I think that's progress.