Once all part of the socialist Yugoslavia, countries in the Balkans are so different from one another that you feel the changes instantly as you travel through them. I did just that this summer, crossing the border between Italy and Slovenia, then headed to Croatia and eventually down to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The more southward you go, the poorer those countries are, but difference is not only economic. You can see culture, environment and people changing kilometer after kilometer. It’s not surprising that after the fall of the socialist regime, they all felt the need to seek independence which drove them to the bloody wars of the 90s.
Ljubljana
Slovenia was the first country to secede from Yugoslavia. It didn’t take them much time to gain recognition, as the war against the central government based in Serbia lasted just ten days. If you go in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital city, you may understand why they were the first ones seceding: they were the richest.
When you walk in the city center you will see German-style palaces and beautiful churches. Everything there is clean, and while I was there I was told that this country has always been known for being the Balkans’ Switzerland. Later, in Zagreb, capital city of Croatia, K., a Croatian sculpture student, explained the origin of this name. “Much of the savings of Yugoslavians were in Slovenian bank accounts, their region was powerful, and after they gained independence they took all the money”.
Slovenian integration process with the West was hard. “They went on their own way and when Croatia struggled for independence, they didn’t help, they left us alone. My father, then a soldier in Croatian army, kind of hated them for this thing, he lost friends in the war, like the one after whom I’m named”. I can trust K. for his truthful view of Slovenians just wanting to go on their own, but at the same time I don’t know if I can blame them, what would I have thought if I were Slovenian and war lasted few days and not years as elsewhere? It’s pretty difficult to judge them. Ljubljana doesn’t show any wounds from the past, life goes here as nothing happened, and the warfare is just something you can look at memorials or museums, like the middle age castles, not on the streets or on the eyes of people there.
Zagreb
In Zagreb, Croatia, you can feel the war much more and the Socialist regime as well, all the way down the city river, the Sava. The castles are harsher, made with grey stone and somewhat decadent. But tracks of the war decadency can be found in the city center as well, even if the tourist industry wants to hide it. The Lower Town in the city center is pretty Germanic, as Ljubljana, but you can see there’s not the same care about aesthetics.
The Upper Town is like a jewel, with astonishing spots like St. Mark’s Church, on whose roof there are heralds of Croatian historical regions, or the City’s Cathedral, with its Gothic style spires, heavily damaged by an earthquake that took place in 2020. But yet, even in the Upper Town war takes the stage, as if you enter Radiceva Ulica rom central Jelacic Square, you will see a tunnel, called Tunel Gric, opening its doors on your left side. Used by civilians during the war for shelter, today it’s open for tourists, but you can still see vestiges of the past with the word Voda written, which means water.
If you lose yourself in the tunnel, there are many exits, and some of them are covered outside by graffiti, made by local artists. I actually met one of them. L.P. teaches K, the sculpture student. We met him on the street and he invited us to his studio. As I saw his visual art I soon recognized in them the style of a piece of graffiti art I saw hours before.
I asked him about the art scene in Croatia and he told me that it is really free because basically there’s no market for art, so if you want to be an artist you can live by teaching at academy and be completely free to express your creativity everywhere else.
I felt his need to express himself freely in the big canvases he showed me, sometimes abstract, other times not. His biggest theme was motion and this is pretty much the best way to define Zagreb as well, always moving, never firm. I went to a major exhibition with paintings hanging like in an XIX Salon. Everything is always in the flow, on the top of a wave of creativity that dates back from the Yugoslavian era, when Zagreb was the center of a Cartoons’ studio, known worldwide, that mingled local eastern and simple graphics to a smart storytelling. Simplicity and creativity are the best words to define the city, which is not elegant like Paris, but one that’s growing instead towards a brighter and brighter future.
Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina
Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina could totally deserve an entire book or a saga. The country›s recent history is pretty sad. Being a crossroad of cultures, Islamic-Bosniac, Serbian and Croatian, the country was the hardest hit by violent nationalism during the war that lasted here from 1991 to 1996.
The country was the stage of the largest attempt at genocide since the Holocaust. Serbian military invaded the country, laid siege to cities, committed mass rape and killings of Islamic-Bosniac people, with Srebrenica manslaughter (1995) being one of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed by an army. In order to find a balance among ongoing ethnic conflicts, the Dayton peace agreements shaped an odd form of government for the country, which is divided in two republics, the Serbian Srpska Republic and the Federal Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in three communities, representing the three ethnic groups mentioned above.
Each community has a president, and all the three of them are the heads of the Bosnia-Herzegovina state. When you cross the border from Croatia, after pretty serious document inspection, you can see how national pride is still a thing in the Srpska Republic, where there are Serbian flags almost everyplace. In recent months the Serbian president raised claims for the Republic to have its own army, now deployed at federal level, and he expressly posed threats of secession.
You may never know here when things are going to escalate. The roads towards Sarajevo are long, and makes its way across mountains, where there are speed limits which almost no one cares about, despite the canyons and really narrow roads. The freeway starts just one hundred and a half kilometers away from the capital, and when you arrive there the first thing you may notice are palaces with large holes on their facade. “Those were made by grenades and bullets,” says the cab driver as he drives through Zmajaod Bosne avenue, once populated by snipers shooting at everyone crossing the road.
Now those streets are the main area where government buildings and embassies are which is somewhat astonishing. You can still see on the ground red resin covering holes made back then by bullets and grenades, creating sort of a conceptual art work commonly known as “Sarajevo’s roses.”
As you get closer to the city center you can see Sarajevo changing shape from a Socialist-style capital to an Ottoman Muslim town. Indeed here most of the population is Muslim, being in the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. There are mosques everywhere, with the oldest and most beautiful ones dating back mostly to the sixteenth century, when the city was an important trade and political spot in the Ottoman empire.
As you go deeper into the narrow streets of the central market near Sebilj fountain you kind of feel you’re in the Middle East. That’s not what most Europeans are used to, it’s like another world. I realized that since the first night, where during a gig of local music I meet D., an Italian guy that has lived here for a couple months and has has told me lots about the city.
“There is no neighborhood where I felt unwelcome here”, he says. “Here they’re Muslim but till 30 years ago religion was not really strictly followed. After the war they’ve become more and more religious as a reaction to Serbian nationalism and as a way to assert their own identity. Now they even greet each other using the typical Muslim salut Salam Aaikum, which was pretty uncommon years ago.”
Identity, it’s such a tough word here, where wars have been done in its name—as I was in Bosnia-Herzegovina there were clashes at the Serbia-Kosovo border. But yet you cannot deny how beautiful each identity is, from the Orthodox Serbian churches to the crowded smoke-friendly Bosniac music clubs, passing through Croatian marriage ceremonies in the countryside with tens of flags displayed.
Everything here is staggering not just at first sight, but always. As a Turkish girl, B., told me during my stay in Sarajevo, the cool thing here is to meet local people, talk to them, hear their stories and not just stop yourself at the surface of things, because you need to go as deep as you can, as in Sarajevo streets or on the surrounding mountains, cause it’s the only way to get yourself at the top of them and take a look at the whole city, and with your fantasy of the entire Balkans, with all their history, with all their wounds, with all their astonishing and fantastic people.
