The Nouveaux Weds: II. Split, Sarajevo and the Road in between

Whereas in Zagreb sound was the thing -- all those songs that struck personal notes for us -- in Split and in Bosnia it was smell. It started on the small deck off our room in Split, which offered a pretty view of the harbor and, the night we arrived, a spectacular golden orange sunset. It was the smell of burning fires. Judging from all the pizza places in town, it must have been all the wood-burning ovens at work. But as we made our way to Sarajevo, the smell evolved. One element -- the hardest to ignore -- was cigarettes. The driver of our bus, a grizzled veteran with a potbelly, a bald dome and the remaining hair slicked back on the sides, puffed away most of the eight-hour ride, despite the no-smoking sticker posted above him and the many stops we made along the way. On one of our last stops, at a picturesque bend in the road through the mountains, two pigs were roasting on a spit over charcoal, adding another olfactory element. Then, as we passed through small towns, I noticed a haze hanging over several of them. It was smoke from the wood being burned to heat all the homes and apartment buildings, which you could see puffing out of chimneys. It was also a taste -- quite literally -- of what was to come in Sarajevo, where, as the Wikitravel guide for the city warned us, the air is bad. Surrounded by mountains and home to many wood-burning chimneys and cars of varying ages -- from shiny new Mercedes to rattling old Ladas and Yugos (gas, as our driver to the airport on Sunday told us, is a euro per litre, well below Western Europe (though still probably out of reach for many Sarajevans)) -- a haze hangs over the city even thicker and grayer than what I saw in the smaller towns along the way. We smelled it everywhere we walked, and we felt it in our lungs. The stuff inside wasn't much better. For an American, walking into a Sarajevo restaurant is like taking a time machine back to when (a) a full meal for two cost $7 and (b) you could smoke inside. We took full advantage of the former, stuffing ourselves with delicious meat and cheese pies, sausages and bread charred from their time in charcoal-burning stoves, while the locals availed themselves of the latter. We walked out gingerly sniffing our clothes to assess the damage, but incredibly full and very satisfied.

Such cultural differences become trite when you step in to the exhibition on the seige of Sarajevo at the history museum. The museum itself was damaged during the Bosnian War, and perhaps as a further reminder they have not repaired it or chosen not to heat it. Or perhaps they don't have the money: walking around the center of town, you still see buildings partially or completely reduced to rubble, and even the town hall is still being restored. The exhibition is direct and powerful. There are photos of Sarajevans crouching behind UN vehicles, in preparation for a dash across a street that would expose them to snipers. There are makeshift stoves that people fashioned to burn the firewood that they gathered from parks to cook and heat their apartments. There is a young girl's diary with entries about a school day cut short because the teacher deemed it too unsafe and how time moves slowly when there's nothing to do. I smiled to myself when I saw that the local tobacco factory didn't stop production (the local brewery, meanwhile, was an important source of water during the seige), and I marveled at the fact that the newspaper never did either. In Sarajevo today, there are green shoots of capitalism amid the gray and rubble -- tall office towers and hotels and several large shopping centers, one of which contains a Vapiano where we ate the night we arrived (as in Budapest, once we saw it, we couldn't resist). The museum was a vivid reminder of a terrible part of a terrible war that was not that long ago at all.

-- MBB