Photo Link:
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After spending an exciting New Year’s Eve overnight in the Amsterdam airport, I arrived in Split, Croatia on the afternoon of January 1, 2022. I spent a couple of days here…it was a nice enough town, sort of like a slightly cooler version of Antalya, Turkey. Both had a Roman old town that had basically transformed to a medieval old town, while maintaining a distinctly Mediterranean feel. Split was the site of Diocletian’s Palace, a massive compound that the Roman Emperor Diocletian built. A medieval city, filled with narrow alleyways and labrynths, basically grew out of the ruins of this palatial complex, and the current city is basically this preserved medieval old town. I would say it’s up there with Mont St. Michel as the most preserved medieval city I have seen in Europe so far, though Split is obviously a good deal bigger. It was fun to spend a couple of days just wandering around, though I really do think that anything more than 2 days would have been overkill here. Split was yet another Game of Thrones film site (following Girona and Sevilla in Spain) – the main thing filmed in Split is the dungeon where Dany imprisons her dragons – this dungeon is a little subterranean walkway by the main plaza of Diocletian’s Palace. One really surprising thing here was how expensive the food was – basically every restaurant was like a minimum of 25 USD for a main dish. I guess it’s a combo of tourist town and seafood, but still. Overall, I wouldn’t say Split felt uniquely Croatian in any way. Just sort of a generic Mediterranean feel, the same that you see in places like Turkish and Greek coastal towns.
After Split, I took a day bus ride across the border to Sarajevo, in Bosnia & Herzegovina. Sarajevo is absolutely one of the most pleasant surprises I’ve ever had while travelling. Would put it on par with Myanmar in terms of how much it exceeded expectations. Just an all around incredible city. It’s a narrow, meandering city that follows the river, so you really only walk east or west, not north/south. It’s actually pretty unique in that there are three distinct districts. From the bus station walking east, you first walk through the somewhat uglier, “modern” city that was largely built when it was a part of Yugoslavia. You then somewhat drastically enter the old Austrian city, which was fleshed out under Hapsburg rule at the turn of the century. The transition from the modern city to the Hapsburg quarter is quite sudden – you suddenly go from ugly concrete buildings to regal European buildings within one block. After some time walking in the Austrian quarter, there is an equally sudden transition and you enter my favorite part, the old Turkish quarter. Maybe it’s a combination of me having seen a lot of Europe already and me having spent the past 2+ months in Europe, but the Austrian part was nice but whatever, while I loved the Turkish part. Really seemed like a small town in Turkey, with the narrow streets, the Turkish style stone mosques, the old hamams and bazaar buildings, and the dark red tiled roofs that you see in provincial Turkey. It was honestly this Turkish quarter where I spent the bulk of my time, and this was the real reason I really enjoyed Sarajevo.
Sarajevo of course is known for two main things. The first was that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated here, which kickstarted World War I. Walked to the site of his assassination, and it’s interesting because Gavrio Princip, the assassin, is viewed as a hero here while in the US his group is taught as being like a quasi terrorist organization. The other main thing Sarajevo is known for is being the site of a multi year siege in the 90s during the wars that took place after the breakup of Yugoslavia. There isn’t much destruction evident in the touristic heart of the city (it’s all been repaired), but there are a bunch of really moving musuems about the war and the genocides that the Serbian troops initiated.
Sarajevo is a ridiculously diverse city, which given its’ central location between Europe and Turkey makes sense. There was a thriving Jewish population here before the Nazis as the Ottoman Empire welcomed all the Jews that Spain kicked out in 1492, and many of them settled in Sarajevo. As a result, you have a city that is littered with synagogues, Orthodox Churches (primarily for the Serbian population), Catholic Churches (primarily for the Croation population), and of course, Sunni Mosques (primarily for the Bosniak population). Bosnia is something like 60% Muslim – religion falls along ethnic lines, as Bosniaks tend to be Muslim, Croats Catholic, and Serbs Orthodox – but the country as a whole reminded me more of the Turkish cities with regards to how liberal it was. The Bosnian countryside was also very liberal by countryside standards – locals drank alcohol, women were not covered, etc. Though obviously, as a majority Muslim country, there’s really no pork here.
My hostel was empty, so I did my first free walking tour since, I think, when I took a weekend trip to Prague in 2012 when studying abroad. Turned out to be a great idea – met these two girls from Belgrade and a couple from Zagreb and the five of us wound up hanging out the entire time in Sarajevo. There was also an older Greek couple on this tour that got pickpocketed (their backpack) during the tour, and they only found out at the end when looking for their wallet for the tip. This was the first time I have ever “witnessed” (if that’s the right word, since I didn’t notice it) a pickpocket. The walking tour was also great because the guide recommended us some super local restaurants and bars that I otherwise would never have found, and the food and atmosphere at these places was excellent. My favorite Bosnian food is this minced meat sausage that is a kebab offshoot, called cevapi. To call it a sausage is an injustice – cevapi almost disintegrates in your mouth, and is great with a dollop of a dairy fat cream that is also quite popular here. Middle Eastern desserts like baklava and kunafa were also everpresent in Bosnia, though not quite as good as the stuff you get in other Islamic countries (it will be very hard to top the kunafa I had in Amman last year). And my first night, we went to this super local, almost hidden tavern that our walking tour guide recommended. We had to call the grandma that ran the establishment, and she picked us up in the square and walked us over to the place. It was a hazy room (I have never met a people who smoke cigarettes more than the ex-Yugoslavs), and was filled with locals (all the ex-Yugoslav languages are mutually intelligible) of all ages. There was a live “band” playing folk tunes, and by the end of the night everyone was in a giant dance circle singing along to them. Just such an incredibly fun evening. One interesting highlight in the Sarajevo old town was a gift shop that was selling Nazi memorabilia and even had a painted portrait of Hitler and SS uniforms for sale. I peeked in, saw it, but didn’t walk in since I wasn’t sure if the owner would take kindly to my kind walking in.
Sarajevo also hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and in the foothills overlooking the city there was an abandoned bobsled track that I wanted to see. It was a 2 hour hike up and the other 4 did not want to hike, and too windy for the cablecar, but the girls from Belgrade drove in so they drove all 5 of us up to check it out. Was a pretty cool sight with tons of graffiti all over, and there were other abandoned structures nearby that were clearly impacted by the war in the 90s – you could see bullet holes and shell damage. Obviously nowhere near something like Chernobyl in terms of urban decay and ruin, but still a very very cool sight and probably my favorite part of this quick foray to the Balkans.
After Sarajevo, I took a 2.5 hour bus ride to Mostar, which was a surprisingly beautiful drive. Driving through valleys surrounded by mountains that looked particularly scenic when coated with snow. After crossing one mountain range the snow disappeared and you just got pretty hills everywhere. One thing that surprised me about Croatia and Bosnia was the structured bus schedule with proper busses. Figured ex-Yugoslavia would be like ex-USSR with the unscheduled marshrutkas leaving “whenever” but there’s way more structure and way less chaos here. Got to Mostar and spent a quick day there – it’s a very pretty town with scenic, narrow streets and a bright blue river cutting across the center. The most famous attraction here is this old pointy bridge that was destroyed in the 90s and rebuilt. Unlike Sarajevo, you could clearly see wartorn buildings here even near the city center. I also stayed at this incredible guesthouse in Mostar called Goa Mostar – 25 EUR for a private suite with a great hot water shower and a legit ginormous and fresh and delicious breakfast.
Much like Iraq, one big takeaway from Bosnia in particular was how normal everything was given how recent the war was. Obviously more time has passed since Iraq, and you have a thriving tourism sector here with hostels and public transport, but I think that’s a good sign for places like Iraq and Syria as they continue to emerge from the shadows. Overall, Bosnia was the definite highlight of this trip…Croatia was nice but definitely more “generic” European, much like Northern Italy or Spain minus Andalusia was for me.
My final Balkan stop after Mostar was back in Croatia, to see Dubrovnik. Honestly, I think I enjoyed Split more. Both were very similar cities with regards to being a walled off, medieval, pedestrian only area, but Split at least had the added oomph of being the shell of Diocletian’s Palace. But it was still a nice town to walk around for a few hours – unlike Split, which was crazy crowded, Dubrovnik was a ghost town when I was there. In possibly the most egregious example of price gouging that I have seen yet, they were charging a smidge under 40 USD for the right to walk along the city walls, which I politely declined before going on a nice 90 minute hike from the Old Town up to a cliff overlooking the city, ~400 meters above the Old Town. This (free) walk and view was magnificent. In a way, it reminded me of a lesser version of Table Mountain – the views were not quite as impressive as the one over Cape Town, and the hike was much easier (was also just under half the overall height so that makes sense). Much like Split, the food here was mediocre and overpriced. And again like Split, it felt more generically Mediterranean than uniquely Croatian in any way. And of course, Dubrovnik was heavily, heavily featured in Game of Thrones for filming so I saw quite a few areas that were a part of the show.
Overall, Croatia was cool enough but Bosnia was the real highlight. If I had more time I probably would have ventured over to Serbia and Slovenia to see a bit more of ex-Yugoslavia…don’t really have much interest in Montenegro as it seems like more of the same of Croatia with cute coastal towns with the same architecture. Regardless, heading to England for probably until the end of January. Will be spending a week up north in Yorkshire and Liverpool before heading down south to London and seeing that area for a bit, staying with my friend Martin.