The journey
Sarajevo roses, Ottoman bridges, Cold War bunkers, and the most complex city in Europe.
Bosnia-Herzegovina is the most layered country in the Balkans: Ottoman mosques beside Austro-Hungarian civic buildings beside socialist housing estates beside 1990s siege fortifications. Four religions, three languages, one country. The history is not in the past here — it is in the present.
Six nights allows time to understand Sarajevo properly: the Baščaršija bazaar, the Tunnel of Hope, the Sarajevo Roses in the pavement. Then south to Mostar, Herzegovina, and the extraordinary landscape of the Neretva valley.
Day by day
The itinerary
Sarajevo
Sarajevo — Layers
Sarajevo is the only city in Europe where you can stand on a street corner and hear the muezzin, the Orthodox bells, the Catholic bells, and the synagogue cantor simultaneously. Two days to walk it properly: Baščaršija, the Latin Bridge, the Sarajevo roses in the pavement, the Tunnel of Hope museum.
Herzegovina
Mostar & the Neretva
Stari Most, the Kravice waterfalls, the old bazaar at Kujundžiluk. One of the two days, a longer excursion to Blagaj tekke and Počitelj — the Ottoman village above the Neretva that time appears to have forgotten.
Central Bosnia
Konjic & the Secret Bunker
Konjic's Ottoman bridge, then ARK D-0: Tito's nuclear bunker in the mountain. Declassified in 1992. Now a contemporary art exhibition space as well as a Cold War monument. The most extraordinary building in Bosnia, almost nobody knows it exists.
Sarajevo
Sarajevo — Farewell
Final morning in Sarajevo. The market at Markale — rebuilt after the 1994 massacre. Coffee in a Sarajevo kafana that has been there since 1906. Farewell dinner. Departure.
