Bosnia Herzegovina and Serbia

Well after Croatia I've now been through Bosnia Herzegovina and am in Serbia. I went to a place called Mostar in B-H which was at the forefront of fighting during the 1992 -1995 war. It has a mixed Islamic and Christian population separated by a river. The two populations lived side by side albeit with a fair degree of tension for hundreds of years. However when the Serbians began bombarding them during the war the fragile peace was shattered.

The old bridge in Mostar was built in the 16th century and was particularly significant to the Bosnian Muslim population. It was famously bombed by the Christian (Bosnian Croats) in the war and came to symbolise the hopelessness and confusion of the conflict. Especially when you consider the Bosnian Croats (Christian) and Muslims were previously allied against the invading Serbs before turning on each other.


Somehow the Christians ended up dominating the muslims and putting them in concentration camps. There were a lot of graveyards around and a lot of bombed out buildings and it was hard for me to believe fifteen years after such upheavel things could just go on as if it never happened. Regardless the bridge has now been rebuilt and hopefully peace restored for the future.

From here I travelled across the mountains to Sarajevo and spent a couple of enjoyable days there. It's a very Ottoman influenced city with lots of mosques and Turkish culture alongside the Christian churches. I met some cool people here from all over and we went on a tour to some war places like the tunnel the Bosnians built to shift supplies while besieged and some sniper bunkers in the hills.


I left Sarajevo yesterday (after getting a bit lost looking for a bus-stop to get to the small bus-station in a nearby Serbian town. It took me a bit longer than I thought due to the lack of English or our alphabet and also my poor sense of direction. Anyway I ended up arriving in Belgrade, Serbia at about 11pm after an 8 hour busride.

The travel was made a lot more enjoyable as I met a really nice old Serbian man who spoke good English and took me under his wing. He used to be a diplomat and had travelled all over the world from Algeria to Singapore and anywhere you could imagine. He was a lovely old bloke and after I loaded my luggage on I lost him and so boarded and got a seat upstairs. He followed me up ten minutes later and invited me to sit with him and an old Serbian lady in a seat they'd saved. They were both really lovely and although the woman could speak no English she was very protective of me at the bus-stop when we arrived fairly late at night. At one point she was pointed to herself and said 'mama'. I think the old dear was worried about me arriving alone in a big city and was trying to say she didn't want to leave me to go off on my own. It was very sweet.

I made it to my hostel which I had cunningly booked 100 metres from the bus station and soon after went to bed. All in all it was a pretty good day. I should be in Istanbul in Two days after spending another night in Belgrade and one in Sofia - Bulgaria.