Inner Siege

2017 has been the anniversary of the siege of Sarajevo.
The city has been paralized, divided and destroyed from opposite forces for three years.
I was only a child when the conflict broke out in this land. I never lived the war in my own skin, but I have vivid memories of how it was before it all spread out. I remember the sun in summer when I was visiting my family there.
I hadn’t had the chance to get back there if not only after several years from the end of the war.
What I found was something familiar, and still something completly changed.
The first time I went back after many years it was summer, again, my cousin drove me to the city with the night falling, the fog around the mountains.
Something was different.
As I arrived in the city I recocgnized the places, the smells of the food, the laughs and some kind of black hu- mor after lots of drinks, the mood of the city seemed to always be the same, but there is something now like a heavy air, inside a valley, which is mixed with something undefiened that is hard to get rid of.
Some signs are still very visible. Some others…hidden.
Trying to breathe the air I could feel that every moment was stuck in the past. Looking at the faces, you can see the loss, or the emptiness behind them. Something still hurts.
Seems like the siege never ended, it’s holding up on people, walking through the streets.
I felt lost in a city I knew I had been before, walked little steps to know it again, through this valley of long lost aspirations which were never fully realized and had been swallowed by themselves.
Its theatrical dark mood portrays the everyday life.
Looking at the memories and the remains left behind, trying to make sense, what happened.

The crux of their nationalistic quarrel was penned by their famed poet as such:
“… In their blood they have the belief that real life consists of a series of truces, and that it would be foolish and useless to disturb these rare moments, trying another life, more solid and stable, which does not exist.”

Ivo Andric
The Bridge on Drina , 1975