In last edition of Guardian Travel, in collection of articles and notes titled “50 ultimate travel experiences” where various travel writers and tour operators remember their favourite travel moments, Sarajevo was chosen by Benji Lanyado, travel writer for the Guardian, as his favorite travel experience. This is an excerpt:

City tour, Sarajevo, Bosnia : A few years ago, while travelling through the Balkans, I met a man called Muammar, a punk rocker with hair down to his waist, in a bar in Sarajevo. We got chatting about his name (he was named after colonel Gadafy) and very drunk on rakia, and he promised to show me around the city the next day. He turned out to be the best guide I have ever had…

Read the whole article here

Cheap flights to Sarajevo from Stockholm  are to start on 21st of June 2008 .

The current timetable is displaying the Wednesdays and Saturdays flights, departing from Stockholm at 16.35, arriving at Sarajevo Airport at 19.25.

Flights from Sarajevo to Stockholm are departing also on Wednesdays and Saturdays with timming: Sarajevo departure at 19:55, arrival in Stockholm at 22.45.

New Sarajevo flights, which will begin in June 2008, are available to book now at www.flynordic.com

In article, titled ‘ Landscape After Battle’ Joshua Hammer, writes about his travels to Bosnia:

The Sunday brunch is a well-practiced ritual these days in the Old Town of Sarajevo. On a dazzling morning, my friend Senad Slatina is escorting me to his favorite weekend restaurant through a throng of pedestrians on the main promenade. Australian backpackers, Gypsy beggars, Islamic women swathed in head scarves, uniformed European Union troops, and young, well-dressed, secular Bosnian Muslims wander past turreted and domed European edifices from the nineteenth century. Beyond the cluster of ice-cream shops known as Sweet Corner, the street narrows to a cobblestoned passageway barely twelve feet wide. Abruptly we pass from a slice of Hapsburg Vienna into the Ottoman Empire: teetering, red-tile-roofed houses; brassware makers; Turkish coffee stalls; stone minarets and mosques. Slatina leads the way to the Asdz bakery, a hole-in-the-wall. Minutes later, the specialty arrives on our outdoor table: two cottage cheese–stuffed pastries called sirnica, each as wide as a small pizza, baked underneath a charcoal-topped lid and served piping hot…

Read the whole article

The article, titled ‘That’s Sarajevo – Bosnia-Herzegovina, Europe’ introduced readers to writer’s first ever arrival to Sarajevo and her impressions about the city and Bosnia & Herzegovina - Here is an excerpt from the article:

Welcome to Sarajevo, was the predictable announcement from the smiley British Airways flight attendant. His fixed grin was genuine and also genuinely understandable, this being the very first direct flight of British Airways’ new service — London Gatwick to Sarajevo in just three and a half hours — and he being of Bosnian decent, proudly conducted his bilingual announcements in Bosnian and English.

As the plane descended into a dramatic valley amongst the rugged Dinaric Alps, a new excitement replaced the usual blasé. It was already obvious to me that this wouldn’t, at least not yet, be a Milan, Barcelona or Prague, where Terravision coaches or their equivalent local transport affiliate wait for the cheaper-than-a-train-ticket flights to land. This was my first time in Bosnia-Herzegovina…

Read the rest of the article here

The article begins with paragraph ‘If you plan to stay at home all summer, you don’t need to read this. But if you think some sort of holiday might be an idea, you do. Because laid out below are 100 of the best trips that 2008 has to offer’

Under the ‘Walking and riding’ section, at the 90th place, Bosnia is featured for ‘one of Europe’s finest high country’:

‘In all the coverage of the Balkan conflict, the reporters forgot to tell us how beautiful Bosnia is. Understandable, perhaps, but after 12 years of peace, we’re only just discovering some of Europe’s finest high country. Enter Walks Worldwide (01524 242000, www.walksworldwide.com), which is stepping out through the primeval forest and traditional mountain villages, up the 7,828ft peak of Maglic, then down past ancient mosques and churches to the cities of Mostar and Sarajevo. The 10-day hikes, departing on June 15 and September 14, cost £1,095, including most meals. ‘

Following recent The Independent’s article which listed Bosnia among the best of 2008 emerging European destinations , this is another good news about travelling to Bosnia.

Read the whole article

If you are going to fly to or from Sarajevo in period from 7th January to 30th April 2008, and if you buy your ticket before end of February, Croatia Airlines is currently offering special prices.

Passengers travelling to Sarajevo from international destinations (served by Croatia Airlines) are offered the special price of 139 EUR for return flight.

The prices include the airport taxes.

Check Croatia Airlines site.

An interesting article about Backpacking through Bosnia is recently written by Scott in his Travel Blog.

Scott visited Sarajevo and Bosnia and has some useful tips to say  – Here is an excerpt from the article:

So what is the first thing you think about when you hear of Bosnia? When I told my friends that I was planning a trip to Bosnia, they thought I was crazy. Unfortunately, when people think of Bosnia they still think of horrible images that they may of seen from the war that happened years ago. The truth is far from this stereotypical image that many people seem to have. I am convinced that Bosnia is one of the most beautiful places in Europe. It is also much safer than many people tend to think. Unlike many other parts of western Europe that people generally don’t associate with crime (like Paris), I never felt unsafe when I was there (for more information about crimes in Europe you can read my article about personal safety in Europe or my article about common scams). If I would have listened to my friends, I would have probably missed what turned out to be one of my favorite places in Europe to travel…

Thanks Scott for nice introduction to Bosnia and Sarajevo!

Read the whole article : Backpacking and traveling through Sarajevo Bosnia – Is Bosnia safe

For the past several years, Europe, particularly London, Paris and Rome, has become less and less affordable for travelers, while the “undiscovered” cities, like Prague and Budapest, are becoming cluttered with tourists.

This report, by SmarterTravel reporter RaeJean Stokes, reveals the new European hot spots and cheap destinations across the continent.

“Over the past ten years, traveling to Europe became more and more popular and, at the same time, more and more expensive,” said RaeJean Stokes, reporter, SmarterTravel.com. “This list offers a variety of different cities across the continent that are new and exciting to American travelers and are still an affordable vacation.”

SmarterTravel’s report, “Ten Under-priced and On-the-rise European Cities” consists of cities the site has designated as a “must-visit,” including:

“Even with all the usual, popular spots, Europe still offers hidden gems that are reasonably priced, without lots of tourists,” said Anne Banas, executive editor, SmarterTravel.com. “These cities offer history and culture, as well as a vacation that fits into a traveler’s budget.”

SmarterTravel’s full report is available at http://www.smartertravel.com/advice/advfeatures/advice.php?id=332877

About SmarterTravel.com : SmarterTravel.com is the most comprehensive travel resource site available offering consumers up-to-date expert advice and information for their every travel need. Created by an unbiased team of dedicated journalists, the site’s goal is to help travelers better manage every aspect of their travel experience by making researched, informed decisions. Unlike other online travel resources, SmarterTravel.com brings together all the best content in one place, giving consumers the tools they need to ensure a great travel experience.

Source: www.SmarterTravel.com

Borovac said that this recognition also gives us the commitment to further improve the image of the City.

“Internationally Sarajevo is known for three events: the Sarajevo assassination which was one of the causes of the I World War, the 84 Olympics and the longest siege of a capital. However, we in Sarajevo need to turn towards the future and our natural potentials, especially the Olympic mountains, tourism”, Borovac said.

In its latest edition of the Cities Book, Lonely Planet authors gave Paris the number one spot, New York is second, Sydney third, Barcelona fourth and London fifth.

With its 43 spot Sarajevo has come ahead of Dubrovnik, which is at 59, Ljubljana at 84, Bled at 90, Zagreb at 125 and Belgrade at 143.

source: http://www.fena.ba/

The taxi stops at the sign for the de-mining project. Thirteen centimetres of fresh snow obscure the ground. Fikret, my Bosnian guide, leads me past blown-out houses, trenches in the woods, splintered bunkers, a Habsburg-built tower from the 19th century reduced to a ruin by war.

Then we are on the promontory looking over barbed wire down upon the city. Fikret points out the Kosevo Stadium, now nearly surrounded by cemeteries. Over there is Trebevic, he says. Once it was the site of the bobsled races. Now the mountain is divided between Bosnia and the Serb Republic, salted with mines, the run chipped with holes where the snipers once squinted over their rifles. Only from the hills does one grasp how pretty this city is, and how nakedly exposed it was.

It’s easy to see, too, where the battle lines were set during the Serbs’ 1400-day chokehold on Sarajevo during the 1992-1995 war that convulsed the country.

Fikret Kahrovic was in the militia defending the city, but he does not offer much about the war in a way that makes me think he could say plenty. He used to be angry all the time, he says, but not any more. “It was,” he says, “like a very old and very bad movie that you watched once upon a time.” His voice seems flat, affectless.

Then, as we stand looking over the city, Fikret says this: “One day it was 1992, August. I come to my home, was so tired, I laid on my sofa near my balcony and five or six kids played table tennis on the street below. They were making so much noise – I was almost crazy! And soon there was an explosion. I ran to the balcony. They were all dead. I saw a child’s brain on the asphalt. How do you make sense of that?” Then, as casually as if we had been discussing our lunch plans, Fikret stands me beside a war monument for a photograph.

In the picture I am squinting, confused, sharing the frame with the gilt names of the dead, unsure where to put my hands. It is my first full day in Sarajevo, in this country where history is never buried and where moving on is a very complicated affair.

Two decades ago the Winter Olympics were held here in Sarajevo. Those 13 days in 1984 were grand. Sports Illustrated called the games “the sweetest Winter Olympics of them all”.

Just eight years later, the country lay in shards. For Serb nationalists trying to carve an ethnically pure country out of the former Yugoslavia, multi-ethnic Sarajevo was an obstacle. In 1992 the powerful former Yugoslav army, headed mostly by Serbs, encircled Sarajevo with heavy weapons, inaugurating a siege that was longer even than the torture of Stalingrad. Fighting and shelling killed about 11,000 people in the city, including more than 1500 children, before NATO air strikes finally ended the horror.

Ten years after the Dayton Peace Agreement of 1995 ended the war, this famously picturesque city of 388,000 people, now the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, has slowly begun to lure tourists again. In 2004 Paddy Ashdown, a former British MP and the country’s then-top civilian peace administrator, even toured Europe touting Bosnia-Herzegovina as the continent’s last great undiscovered tourism destination.

“Sarajevo and Bosnia are definitely not the Sarajevo and Bosnia that people think of,” Nick Hawton, a Sarajevo-based Balkans correspondent for the BBC, told me when I was there early in January. “It’s not the place of terror and vengeance and blood and war that it was several years ago. It’s come a long way, a very long way. Three and a half years ago most buildings had some kind of war damage. Now there are new buildings, new banks, trendy new clothes and shoe shops, a new tram line has been laid, new footpaths.”

Bosnia’s street crime rate is comparable to that of Lausanne, Switzerland. “Here,” said Edis Kolar, proprietor of the Tunnel Museum, the terminus of the 800-metre tunnel dug by hand under the airport during the siege to transport supplies and soldiers, “our country is full of war criminals, but you can feel safe.”

All of this is true and all of this makes the city a fascinating destination – exotic, safe, shockingly inexpensive by European standards, stuffed with history. And yet, even to see the place is to know it is hardly the whole story of Sarajevo today. As Hawton cautioned me: “There’s a lot of pain just under the surface – a lot of pain.”

The Ottoman Empire founded the city in the 1440s and Sarajevo can rightly be said to begin at pigeon-cluttered Sebilj Square in Bascarsija, the Turkish quarter. One morning I began a day-long walk from there, fuelled with a bag of 30-cent pastries. Bascarsija is a bazaar of wooden shops along pink-stone medieval alleys that feel plucked whole from old Istanbul, with names that reflect the trades that once defined them: bookbinders, coppersmiths, silk tailors.

A window showed Prada handbags and Chloe clutches of sketchy provenance. But I followed the tink, tink sound of small hammers onto Ulica Kazandziluk, an alley of one-room shops displaying traditional Bosnian coffee sets and the tall water jugs that are Sarajevo’s symbol. And ordnance. From the countless shells that had rained on Sarajevo, the craftsman had stamped flower vases. Bullets had become ballpoint pens that read “Bosnia”. In a few shops men still hunched on stools over virgin copper platters, slowly adorning them in ways little changed from when the pasha had governed here.

It was late morning. Smoke rose from Bascarsija’s ubiquitous cepavi joints. Soon people would begin to crowd in and, for about $3, fill up on loamy, slightly charred pitas stuffed with small grilled sausages that are this city’s favourite fast food, and wash them down with glasses of cool yoghurt. Among the war’s many small cruelties was how it forced residents to loathe their beloved hills; the snipers watched from those hills. Now the city has its views back.

I often heard Sarajevo’s residents say their city was more a village than a city – though they corrected themselves to say that it socialises with the stamina of a city. On a few evenings my guide to the night life was a habitue of the scene named Nerma Jelacic. Nerma is a hard-eyed, chain-smoking 28-year-old journalist whose family was chased out of their home town during the war. Today, Nerma writes about war criminals and mass graves and the importance of not forgetting. By night she keeps tabs on the city’s watering holes.

Understanding turbofolk music is essential to understanding Sarajevo and its night life, Nerma pronounces, firing up the first of many cigarettes. Turbofolk is the catchy pop music, songs of requited lust, mostly, sung by towering, silicone-ised Amazons from Serbia or Croatia with bleached hair. “When you are out drinking, the music always ends up turbofolk,” she explains. “Even the sophisticated people listen to it.”

After midnight Galeria Ko is thick with smoke and ox-browed men in black T-shirts and gold chains. Music soon explodes over the speakers. The singalong begins. A woman with a machine tan and a T-shirt hiked past her stomach grinds with another in high boots and a peacock chemise. Nerma is apologetic. “Usually the girls are more skimpily dressed.”

Nerma has told me that one of the most popular turbofolk singers is the widow of Zeljko Raznatovic, known as Arkan, who was accused of murdering thousands of Muslims during the war. (He was shot in 2000.) Another song comes on, and Nerma says of the singer: “She’s a Bosnian Muslim who became a Serbian nationalist. She used to sing songs to Serb soldiers and she was wearing a Serbian army uniform.”

Sarajevo’s population today is, by some accounts, at least 80 per cent people of Muslim background, known as Bosniak – many of whom were forced from their home towns in what was called ethnic cleansing. That means that these young people, now arm in arm, embracing each other, embracing this music, dance to a singer who once urged on to victory the very tormentors of their families, the tormentors of Sarajevo. And the singer herself is Bosniak. The scene becomes Beckettian.

The longer I stay in Sarajevo, seeing the daily resilience of the people and the hungry scenes like Galeria Ko, the more I think of the phrase “Sarajevo spirit”. I hear it several times, usually from people who have lived here much of their lives. “I don’t know exactly what it is,” Senka Kurtovic offers one day over coffee, “but maybe it started during the war, that we had a party almost every night.” Senka is now the chief editor of Oslobodjenje, the city newspaper made famous for publishing nonstop throughout the siege. Asked for an example of Sarajevo spirit, Senka recalls living in a front-line neighbourhood during the siege.

“I had to walk one hour to work,” she says, but “every morning I have to do my make-up. It was very important to me and my friends. You never know where you spend your night – maybe you get back to your house, or the hospital, or the graveyard. So you better look nice.”

I begin to think that the Sarajevo spirit is in demand nearly as much today as a decade ago. For war still shades everything – and not just the buildings scarred by machinegun fire or the half-finished repairs on others that can make it seem sometimes that the predominant colour of Sarajevo is plaster filler. The damage lingers in unexpected places, as in the people on New Year’s Eve who say they cringe at the bottle rockets that crack over the Ferhadija district.

I ask Senka if the war is still very much with her and she answers with a story about a conference she recently attended in Germany. A film was shown about the Srebrenica massacre to the north-east; more than 7000 men and boys were slaughtered there. During the film her nose began to bleed uncontrollably and she began to cry. Recounting this in the cafe she chews her lip, the tears close again. Her fingers worry a sugar packet, rolling it, unrolling it.

“After 3½ years you could not be the same person,” Senka says of the siege, “but I think I am a better person.”

She could be Sarajevo speaking – this worldly, wounded woman, wanting to be hopeful.

TRIP NOTES

Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a mountainous country in the central Balkans surrounded by Croatia and Serbia-Montenegro.

Getting there:

• Austrian Airlines flies to Sarajevo via Kuala Lumpur and Vienna for $2049 plus taxes. Phone Flight Centre, 131 600.
• Buses go to Sarajevo from Dubrovnik in Croatia as well as from Munich, Amsterdam and Brussels.
• Trains operate daily between the Croatian cities of Zagreb and Ploce via Sarajevo and Mostar. Trains also operate daily from Budapest, Hungary.

Warning: Unexploded mines are a danger in parts of the countryside, suburbs and war-damaged buildings.

Source: The Sun-Herald The New York Times