GO BOSNIA:Croatia won the attention of tourists after the 1990s Balkan wars but Bosnia and Herzegovina also demands a visit, writes CATHERINE CLEARY
HAVE AT LEAST one thing in common with Bono and the British politician Paddy Ashdown. We all love Sarajevo. Ashdown, a former high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina described it recently as “one of the greatest cities in the world”. Bono has said that Miss Sarajevo is his favourite U2 song.
Tell your hairdresser you’re going on holiday to Bosnia and they’re likely to raise an eyebrow, if they’re old enough to have heard of its turbulent history. In the complicated fallout from the 1990s Balkan war, Croatia won the battle for tourists, becoming as routine a holiday destination as Portugal. But Bosnia is a different story.
I first flew to Sarajevo in the belly of a military plane just after Christmas 1995. The Dayton Peace Agreement had been signed. For the first time in almost four years Sarajevans had light, heat and food. On New Year’s Eve Bono sang in a damp cellar club. The terror was over and the long slow climb to normality was beginning.
In 2006 I came back as a (pregnant) tourist, saw a place that was ragged and crumbling, but finding its feet with bookshop cafes and busy bars. It was a city full of educated young multilingual beautiful people, with layers of difference, as elegant as Vienna in places, solidly Turkish in others and brutally eastern bloc in its bullet-spattered high rises. Its national library was still a burnt out shell.
Sarajevo tugged my heart strings then and now. I’m back in a press pack on a whistle-stop tour led by Mary McKeon, who is working with Irish company GCSI leading the EU mission to develop the country’s tourism. The hope is that Bosnia might be about to become Europe’s new Balkan destination.
And up in the mountains around Sarajevo the Termag Hotel looks like the start of a new chapter. The beautiful building, a 31-bedroom ski hotel, is an interiors magazine standard ski lodge that could be in Aspen or Chamonix. It’s in Jahorina, the area that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. We’re sitting around an enormous stone fire pit full of blazing timber in the hotel bar. Outside there is no snow, just cold thick fog. But it’s easy to see how wonderful it would be to sit with a warm drink and watch the ski lifts outside take their suited-and-booted passengers up to the slopes. And while the standard is high-chic, your ski pass will cost you about €70 for the week and double room with breakfast costs €78 a night.
A new wing with a further 60 rooms is being built. The Serbian government (because Jahorina is in Republika Srpska the Bosnian Serb area of Bosnia) has a €400 million 10-year plan for the region. They’ve spent €40 million on ski lifts and snow cannons, which make artificial snow.
Down in the city below small groups of young tourists are wandering through the old town part of Sarajevo, its stone-lined Turkish streets named after the crafts that are still carried out there, copper and leather workers tapping with hammers.
And in the Cafe Rahatlook owner Snjezana Nezirovic serves home-made cakes and jams in bespoke clay teapots and cups and saucers. We get hot drinks of salep, a soup-thick spiced tea made with flour from the ground tubers of orchids. It smells like Christmas in a cup. Nezirovic is fiercely proud of her enterprise. Her take-home tins have a flower and berry graphic that would look at home in any Avoca. At one table, instead of a chair, a wooden swing hangs from the ceiling.
On a city tour we get some of the layers of stories that live in this small walkable city. Painters on scaffolding are finishing the restoration of the burnt-out national library, the symbol of Sarajevo’s 1990’s siege. But the building was once the city hall where Archduke Franz Ferdinand spoke before he was assassinated a short distance away, shot by the 19-year-old Serb Gavrilo Princip, when the archduke’s driver took a wrong turn.
Princip’s wide-eyed sepia portrait is on the spot of the assassination, which sparked the first World War. We hear how the city was a test place for the tram system before the trams were introduced in Vienna, so Sarajevo had the new-fangled contraptions two months before they arrived on to Viennese streets. At the Catholic cathedral in the city centre the priest tells us they christened the son of an Irish army major a week earlier.
As a tourist destination Bosnia has had some breaks recently. National Geographic named it one of the top 10 adventure destinations, based on a mountain-biking trail along the old caravan route or silk roads. Driving from Sarajevo to Mostar you see the storybook beauty of the countryside, with its thick deciduous and pine forests on steep mountain sides.
There are signs for rafting centres. Every house seems to have a vegetable garden and a neatly-stacked wood pile. And finally you reach the valleys of southern Bosnia where lush wide valleys lie between dramatic stoney mountains. It’s a bit like the Burren with vineyards.
The south around Mostar has a Mediterranean climate. A savagely hot summer has (of course) broken as soon as the journalists arrive to torrents of rain. On a visit to the Vukoje vineyard near Trebinje we stand in the winery with its cool brick-lined cellar filled with huge oak casks and dusty bottles. “This is where all of our wines are leading their quiet lives,” Julijana Vukasinovic tells us.
Their 22 hectares (54 acres) of vineyards produce about 140,000 bottles of wine. The Vukoje family have been running a restaurant, and making wine for 30 years. Under communist rule they could only make wine for the family restaurant. In the 1990s war stopped the wine production. Now they are winning awards and hoping wine tourism will bring visitors back to this beautiful place.
Their speciality wine is made with the zilavka white grape, which has a light mineral Reisling like character that “smells like the rocks after the rain”. Visitors to Dubrovnik could drive inland to this region, with its year-round average of 17 degrees, in half an hour. In Mostar the tiny streets leading to the restored Mostar bridge are lined with tourist shops, everything priced in euros.
German coach tours regularly stop on their way to Croatia. The city has a Pavarotti School of Music (Pavarotti collaborated with U2 on Miss Sarajevo), bombed and devastated buildings and long history of entrenched division between its Catholic Croat and Bosnian Muslim populations.
The symbolic bridge has been restored and thousands cross it every day but few stay longer than the hour or two it takes to peer into the deep green-blue river from the high bridge above and follow an umbrella-toting guide back to the coach.
There’s a hammy old story that if you drink the water from the Sarajevo fountain it means you will return. You can sip at the fountain but Sarajevo hooks you in plenty of other ways. Hospitality and humour, culture, religion, heat, snow, history and a story at every turn make Bosnia a compelling place.
THE ESSENTIALS
GETTING THERE
In winter fly on December 15th returning December 22nd with Lufthansa and Austrian Airlines via Frankfurt and Vienna €333 each return. From March to October Aer Lingus flies to Dubrovnik and the drive to Sarajevo takes just over four hours.
STAY
Upmarket
The four-star Hotel Bristol is a new high-rise. A double room in December starts at €133 a night. The hotel has no bar and there is no alcohol in the minibar. Hotel Bristol Sarajevo, Fra Filipa Lastrica 2, 71000 Sarajevo.
Mid-market
A double room with breakfast from €78 a room (half board €99) at the Termag Hotel, Poljice, Bosnia and Herzegovina, termaghotel.com
EAT
Any street food vendors selling cevapi, a ground beef kebab. Or try Rahatlook, Ferhadija 41, 71000 Sarajevo.