Travel Guide Sarajevo

" Whatever the time of the day, whatever the place, when you look Sarajevo extended to your feet the thought always springs, even unconscious. A city is there. A city that, at the same time, transforms itself, dying and revives. " Ivo Andrić, Tales of Solitude, 1976.What a estates! This city has an irresistible charm that catcher you like an oriental city. Finally, almost… because it's something else, an unlikely mixture between Istanbul, Vienna and Chamonix. Nestled between the mountains, this small capital has fewer inhabitants than Bordeaux. Its history dates back to the Neolithic, passing through the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The result of all these blends is that Sarajevo is the only place in Europe where, after a good day of skiing, one can hear the muezzins of one hundred mosques singing at the same time. It's even more exhilarating to listen to the hills with a hot wine or a little glass of rakjia! Because this "Muslim" city is open and tolerant. Open and tolerant, it has always been. Muslim, it has become the force of things, welcoming Bosnian refugees from the rest of the country and seeing its inhabitants from the end of the war.War. This is inevitable here. Moreover, most tourists come here for this. To see the traces of the terrible siege of 1992-1996: buildings were decimated, the towers from which snipers were fired, the shrapnel of shells still visible in the asphalt, etc., but also to see where the other war, the «Grande», began with the assassination of Archduke François Ferdinand in 1914. Symbolically, Sarajevo is the city where the twentieth century was born and where it ended in the aftermath of the fall of European communism. This is something we already know a bit about before coming here. What one discovers on arrival is that there was not enough time to see everything, to understand everything, to taste everything and to take pleasure in the streets of the old town, between a mosque and a synagogue, an Irish pub and the statue of John Paul II, an Orthodox church and a caravanserai.