Day 120: Bugojno - Sarajevo

Aug 1 - Our bus leaves after 14:00 today, but our host Dinka is gracious enough to let us occupy the room long after the standard checkout time. I have not mentioned yet that our host family is Bosniak Muslim, and possibly the most hospitable people we’ve encountered in our trip thus far.

I venture out for my third trip haircut. There is a place about 5 minutes away and they are not so busy. My communication on the matter, albeit really simple, is all done in Bosnian. It is helpful that much of the words I used in Croatia are the same as here. The cost is about $4, and I give the guy another $1 tip.

We’ve noticed a lot of cemeteries in the last day, notably more than I would normally expect. There are two types, always in separate areas: Catholic and Muslim.

There are a number of abandoned houses around town, more or less randomly placed. Arwa told me that many of these are homes owned by ethnic Serbs, abandoned during the war. Homes like these, belonging to Bosniaks, are present in the area now called Republika Srpska. A map of the country, showing distribution of ethnicities both before and after 1992-95, show just how extreme the shifting of human geography concentrated like people together, and ethnically ‘purified’ entire regions. If anything can tell the story of a country destined to failure, it would be the isolation and concentration of like groups of people. It is guaranteed to eliminate cross-cultural understanding.

The bus station is quiet, ours being the only departure during our half hour wait there.

The name Sarajevo can certainly conjure up a lot of images from the 1992-95 period. This sprawling city held over half a million inhabitants in 1990, and lost over 20% by the end of hostilities. It underwent the longest siege (1,425 days) of any city in modern warfare, by the Army of Republika Srpska. The scars show clearly as the bus passes through much of the city before stopping in a dilapidated bus station. Some city blocks still have the standing shells of destroyed structures, now covered with large glossy billboards. Bullet marks are evident everywhere in the plaster of multi-story buildings.

The room we are staying is a long way from the station, and due to the limited tram routes, we take a taxi. The driver wastes no time trying to tell us about how much trouble the Serbs are, speaking loudly in Bosnian. The cab smells strongly like spices, and again I feel a sense of being transported just slightly out of Europe. The apartment is straight up the hill from the historic district.

As a parting gift in Bugojno we received some burek, which we now eat for dinner. Then we head down the hill to the historic market district of Baščaršija. It is a full-on Middle Eastern street market, upscaled for tourism. Stores crammed with copper and brassware, hookah bars and baklava pastry shops. Cobblestone alleys wind back into a smokey haze of pungent odor. It is the most un-European thing I’ve seen on this trip.

One point of commentary people seem to have most often in BiH is why are so many people Muslim? Given that Europe, long prior to Islam, was well on its way to being Christian in one form or another, it seems unlikely that Islam would gain a foothold in the relatively late Ottoman times. After all, Ottoman dominance in Greece for hundreds of years did nothing of the sort.

The answer seems to be deeper in the historical record. First, I have noted that the BiH terrain is mountainous and underpopulated. Back in the early centuries of Christianity, this terrain hampered conversion of pagans simply because it was too difficult to get there. As the Orthodox church (from the southeast) and the Roman Catholic church (from the west) attempted to gain adherents in the Balkans, BiH remained a problem. As might be expected with self-sufficient people living in rugged physical spaces, the inhabitants were not particularly amenable to outside force. By force, meaning the way in which the early Christian church ‘converted’ people, which was typically by violent means.

As a result, the Bosnians came up with their own version of Christianity, the Bosnian Church. Few records remain of it, so it is difficult for scholars to study it in detail. Naturally, it was considered a heresy by both Catholic and Orthodox Christian authorities. Nothing is worse than fellow Christians who aren’t obliged to pay you!

When the Ottomans invaded and toppled the Bosnian Kingdom completely in 1463, their conversion strategy was different. As they had done in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, there were no forced conversions or terror imparted to force compliance. Rather, it was more of a list of incentives. Non-Muslims living within the Ottoman Empire paid a special tax that Muslims did not pay. They also were not allowed to rise above certain levels of power in the governmental administration. There were other hinderances as well. As the Bosnian Church was a local entity, without a great power center to fall back on, over the years the adherents of this church fell away, many converting to Islam and thus getting full Ottoman citizen benefits.

So, after hundreds of years of this, and even after the expulsion of the Ottomans in 1918, the religion remained.