Sarajevo May 2025

Oh Sarajevo, beautiful Sarajevo.

This trip was a little different to others in not being the usual solo or duo effort but part of a larger group of photographers who descended on the city courtesy of the wonderful team at Magnum Learn. 

And I know I wasn’t alone in falling a little bit in love with Sarajevo.

To understand why we obviously have to detach from the exhilaration and exhaustion of the photo workshop itself, a non-stop rollercoaster of shooting, engaging, learning, listening, and thinking. The qualities of the city clearly stand alone despite this experience.

It started for me after landing at dusk. Our arrival necessitated a walk across the tarmac, a blessed relief from coaches, and allowed us the first glimpse of the geography of the city as the surrounding hills loomed above us in the fading light. The hills serve a dual purpose, acting as a permanent and picturesque companion while also ensuring the city spreads along narrow valleys, managing to avoid becoming the amorphous blob that is so many cities. As such, whatever part of the city you are in feels compact and intimate. The hills have another, and darker, significance but more on that later.

Then there is the architecture and the way the city wears its history on its sleeve with Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, pre-war 20th Century and post-war Soviet presences all intensely mashed up and yet aligning alongside each other. As I described on my Georgia blog here Medieval meets Modern (and all stops between) and East meets West.

The final part of the equation is the people. Sarajevans may have the neutral resting face that is usual in the region (and thank heavens for this, who wants gushing?) but in any engagement they quickly move towards warm and helpful. There may have been the odd exception (such as the coffee shop server who was so studiously trying to avoid being to be helpful or friendly that she can only have been a method actor preparing for a role) but everyone else were well represented by the locals who attended our final evening screening, including not only my marvellous and brilliant AirBnB landlord but a chap who shared his poetry with us on stage. Heartwarming stuff, you won’t feel a stranger for long in Sarajevo, as also shown by the wonderful folk at MC Boxing who were so generous with me when I requested to visit their gym.

All of the many great things about Sarajevo feel intensely poignant, and the reason for this is of course the receding but far from distant war that ravaged the city and broader region in the 90s. The last thing I wanted to do upon being a guest in this city was to focus too much on those awful years. After all, no-one wants to be seen as a war voyeur. At the same time it’s crass for a visitor to (even mentally) airbrush such out of history an event that directly impacted on everyone aged over 30 and indirectly on so many more.

Besides which, it’s very hard to ignore the presence of the conflict. The formal monuments are one thing but there is a much more visceral presence in the shape of the bullet and shell damage still seen around the city. This is most famously represented by the Roses of Sarajevo, mortar shell craters filled with red resin, but are also seen in a more raw sense with the external damage to buildings that has either never been repaired or only partially repaired. This for me is history in the raw, eliciting far stronger emotions than, for example, the location of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand which is something harder to absorb.

But the ultimate symbol of that period is for me the aforementioned hills. One of the delights of walking around Sarajevo is turning a corner and being presented with a beautiful distant visage of wooded hillside. Yet for four years seeing that view meant the potential for imminent risk as it also meant that a sniper may be able to see you. This really struck me as the ultimate perversion, that something of beauty, familiarity and protection could be twisted and distorted into such a malevolent presence.

A very obvious feature of Sarajevo are the very visible and prominent graveyards. It would be easy (and trite) to attribute this to events of the 90s, but the likely truth is that it far more reflective of a positive and constructive view on the subject, one often seen in southern and eastern cultures and quite opposite to the doom-laden negativity with which the subject is treated in northern and western parts. In fact I read not so long ago that the famous Mexican Dia de los Muertes is merely the most famous of many similar celebrations of deceased loved ones around the world.

The manifestation of this cultural attitude in Sarajevo comes in the form of a whole series of stunning mini-forests of bright white gravestones collected in beautifully maintained areas in the very heart of the city.

Restored now to their natural role, a whistle-stop tour of the surrounding hills, courtesy of Amar the brilliant (and multi-tasking) AirBnB host, is a rewarding affair. On offer in these hills are stunning overviews of the city and plenty of stops of considerable interest, notably old fortresses and the derelict remains of the bobsleigh run and ski jumps from the the 1984 Winter Olympics, and a beautiful old observatory, brutally damaged in the war but now the subject of a bold renovation plan. But it was the city views that I was most captivated with, trying to understand the layout, nature and identity of Sarajevo and see how all of the bewildering component parts mesh together.

And one final view of the city taken on a midnight trip to the hills courtesy of the irrepressible Nora and, of course, Amar. One in which Sarajevo is seemingly converted into the Milky Way.

Central to this cohesion is the river that snakes its way from east to west through the heart of the city. It has something of a poor reputation historically, its low rate of descent often blamed for creating discoloured waters and dubious odours. It’s not exactly clear and sparkling nowadays (which main urban river is?) but it seemed in pretty fine fettle and enthusiastically surges forward over a series of cascades in a bid to reverse its previous notoriety.

The connection of the river with the city shows a strange relationship though. It determines the very shape of the city and few people are ever that far from it in the course of a day. It feels like the throbbing artery of the city, and lends itself to the large number of often picturesque bridges. And yet it is also a very distant entity, its high and steep walls creating an imposing barrier between the river and the city (a necessity apparently based on some pretty nasty historical flooding events). As the days went past I found myself more and more interested in the connection between the city, its people and these walls.

So an insightful, educational and rewarding trip for sure. But what about the purpose of this trip, did I manage to identify a consistent theme and build a compelling story as the basis for a photo project that met the brief of the week? Absolutely not. But did I enjoy every single moment of my sojourn in this fascinating and engaging city, and will I one day return? Oh yes, for sure.

But farewell for now Sarajevo.