Just spent some QT at the local coffee shop, did my Bosnian homework and read this amazing article on Sarajevo that my teacher had given me on the first day of class last week. It was written by a local, and I’m going to keep the English mistakes in there for authenticity; in fact it makes it more poetic. I don’t have a source reference at all…
…Here in Bosnia and Sarajevo, they are present in good deeds (and also in bad deeds) two and even three simultanious, of the same gender and alike, by partly faintly coordinated glances directed towards the same Sky, giving different prayers to another, but actually the same and only God. The various roads towards common goal and end. Various civilizations code, two or more hypotheses or dogmas on the one Truth unknown to everyone. It is here that those differences have been entering each other, which at any other point of their crossing would raise walls of separation between themselves…
…Because of that quite unique and unrepeatable essence, because of that exclusive formula after which the being of Sarajevo has been created and its spirit normed, also other people always come here….They come so that each of them in their own way, after their own requirements, should look at themselves in reflection of the spirit and the being of Sarajevo, that is present here in anything visible and invisible, in something that you cannot touch and also something that you cannot reach or grasp, in everything that makes the life and duration of Sarajevo. All these people come here as though on pilgrimage to some kind of sanctuary that is indestructibly and divinely human….
They all come to leave a part of themselves behind, to build into the sense and symbolic of Sarajevo at least one sincere look, one real word of their own, one smile, one sigh…And also to take from here something of the treasures and gifts of Sarajevo…even multiplying Sarajevo that way…</i>
It came at the perfect time, as I struggle daily to get myself to my language training (I don’t say Bosnian, because it wouldn’t matter what language it was, I would struggle with it). A reminder as to why we have felt this pull towards this town of amazing circumstance and spirit…