2022 in Bosnia (Sarajevo and Mostar)

On October 3, 2022, the Balkan bus tour brought me from Serbia to Bosnia and Herzegovina, for my 23rd unique country, visiting Sarajevo on the first day and Mostar the next day:

This made it my:

• 1st time in a Muslim-majority country
• 2nd former Yugoslavian constituent country (out of 6)
  • after Serbia
• 4th Slavic-speaking country
  • after Poland + Bulgaria + Serbia
• 3rd country using the Cyrillic alphabet
  • after Bulgaria + Serbia
  • however, Bosnia uses the Latin alphabet far more than Cyrillic except in Republika Srpska
• 2nd Serbo-Croatian speaking country
  • after Serbia

About Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina (most often just referred to as Bosnia) refers to just one country with Herzegovina corresponding to the southern third of the country. Herzegovina does not have any ethnic meaning, as it does with Bosnia.

To explain Bosnia would take far more than a paragraph due to its cultural complexity. The country has three presidents, one for each of its main ethnic groups - the Croats, the Serbs and the Bosniaks. It even consists of a Serbian autonomous region known as Republika Srpska.

The Bosnian "language" is essentially a variety of Serbo-Croatian; vocabularies and pronunciations will differ from person to person. 

The capital of Bosnia is in Sarajevo, also home to the 1984 Winter Olympics. It lies almost in the perfect middle of the country.

Bosnia has an interesting currency known as the "convertible mark" (konvertibilna mark, with a symbol of KM, not to confuse one with the lowercased "km" for "kilometres"). The adoption of this mark happened during the late 1990s when Bosnia abandoned the Yugoslav dinar in favour of a currency which pegged itself with the German mark.

Visit

The tour bus went west from Belgrade to the border town of Loznica. We crossed the river Drina into Šepak. On the other hand, I saw what looked like Russian flags flying, but they were not Russian flags. They were flags of Republika Srpska, an autonomous Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina!

Sarajevo

We would arrive in Sarajevo where we saw the:

• assassination site of Franz Ferdinand
  • his murder became a primary cause for World War I in 1914
• Sarajevo City Hall
  • with its modern but ornate architecture
• Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque
  • first time ever hearing an Islamic call-to-prayer from a minaret
• Baščaršija
  • Sarajevo's central bazaar market
• Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures
  • where the city went from looking like Baghdad in the east with its mosques, to looking like Belgrade with its Orthodox churches

I had the opportunity to enjoy their čevabi (kebab) as well as non-alcoholic beer from a gas station (they also served alcoholic beers as well!)

Mostar

The next morning, the bus trudged on along winding roads to the town of Mostar. I had seen pictures of this on an issue of National Geographic magazine in the 1990s, totally destroyed with bullet holes and its famous bridge completely destroyed. I never thought I would ever visit this place.

Yet, in 2022, I saw the city already sprung back to life with its bridge rebuilt and markets bustling with commerce and tourism once again. Divers from all around the world would literally jump off the Old Bridge into the river Neretva.

Many of its war time damage, however, still appeared to remind both visitors and residents of the deadly wars of the 1990s. I also saw a statue of Bruce Lee, for some odd reason. The joke went that the city could not agree to come up with anything for a monument, but they all agreed to put up a monument to someone that had nothing to do with the city!