Tour of Sarajevo

Last week and this week until Thursday we have been having meetings, time to work in our classroom and we took one day to take a tour of Sarajevo. One of our coworkers, Selma, who is the librarian at our school, took all the new teachers on a great tour of the city. Our school is located 15 minutes from Sarajevo, so we loaded one of the vans from school and headed back to the city.

First, we drove through “Old Town” and up one of the many hills to a coffee shop called Biben. Biben sits on the top of the hill and you can see all of Sarajevo. We stood up there looking for our apartments. Even though we could not actually see all of them, we could tell where they are by locating buildings near by the apartments. We were able to see an old military building that was bombed and the roof is still destroyed. Overall, it was a beautiful view. The coffee that the people drink in Sarajevo is so thick. I haven’t seen anything like it back home-- it is not your Starbucks coffee.

After visiting the coffee shop we loaded the van again and headed towards the “Tunnel.” The tunnel was built during the war, which took place 1992-1995. Serbians surrounded the city of Sarajevo, trying to get the Bosnian army, and the remaining Bosnian citizens, to give up. There was only one way in or out of the city: The Tunnel. The tunnel was finished on July 30, 1993 and was used to transport food, cigarettes, oil, ammunition, weapons, medications, and the injured. All those things had to be carried and later a tramline was installed and small carts made, so that the transportation was easier. To go through the tunnel, civilians had to have a permit which was free. The tunnel took the people to the free territory in Bosnia and then they could leave the country. Some people still tried to run across the airport to freedom and were shot by snipers. The tunnel is 800 meters (2624 feet) long, roughly one meter high (three feet), and the average width of 1.5 meters (5 feet). Often people had to go through knee-deep water because the pumps had broken. Twice the tunnel was completely flooded and closed, once for 2 days and the other time for 5 days. After that they installed larger pumps and it never flooded again.

Our guide, Selma, and Alma, our P.E. teacher, used the tunnel to escape the war. Alma was around 14 and she left with her mom and sister. She said that they drove on a bus to the tunnel and the driver had his lights off. When they got to the tunnel they had to sleep in the bus until the morning. When morning came they were allowed to go through the tunnel. They left and went to Italy. She says that she remembers the first night that they left and the night was quiet and she didn’t know how to react. She was so used to all the bombing that the quiet scared her more, since when it was quiet in Bosnia during the war you knew something was about to happen that wouldn’t be good. Selma also used to tunnel leaving with a family who was a friend of her family and her sister. Her mother left later, but I think her father and grandparents stayed in Bosnia those three years. She left in a similar way and went to Switzerland or Germany for 2 years.
Selma had been back to the tunnel a few weeks before we went, but Alma had not been there since 1995. I wonder what she was feeling. The tunnel was not easy for us to find, even after asking the local people (which would have been a good thing during the war). There are many scars on the building, shell markings and even one unexploded shell still left in the ground inside the tunnel entrance.

After the tunnel it was time for lunch, so we loaded the van again and headed back into Old Town which is about 15 minutes from the tunnel. We drove past the national library that was bombed and hasn’t been rebuilt in the 15 years since the war. Selma and Alma told us that when the library was bombed they lost all the books and as the ash settled you could see parts of the pages from the books. The driver parked the van and we got out and walked to a café. On the way to the café we walked past an area nicknamed Pigeon square because of the many pigeons. We had delicious Bosnian food and I wish I could remember the names of the food we ate. While we ate Zack and a co-worker Krista were feeding a cat that was hanging around the café. Even though Zack said it was only Krista but we all know Zack…

After lunch it was time to go back to school. We had a great day touring Sarajevo and learning about the history behind the country. We have a lot more to learn, but we got a good start today.