Photos by Sue Spirit
transform | travel
ghost country struggles to live memoirs from mostar During those
January afternoons while on our cozy ship, the M.V. Athena, I snuggled into a soft loveseat in the lounge. I alternately wrote in my journal while tackling the 500-page tome, “To End a War,” by Richard Holbrooke, about the negotiations leading up to the Dayton Accords in 1995, when the leaders of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia finally signed the treaty that ended the horrible Balkan war. It was hard to believe we were bobbing along in the Adriatic Sea, so near where the fighting had taken place from 1991 to 1995. Even harder to believe was that we actually got to go ashore and travel through Bosnia to Mostar, an ancient town whose beloved 16th century stone bridge had been blown up in 1993 by
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the Bosnian Serbs, who were trying to bring the Bosnian Muslims to their knees. Today Bosnia-Herzegovina is divided into a Serbian area and a federation of Bosnian Muslims and Catholic Croats. On the way, we drove through a drab, sad land where we saw many bombedout houses crumbled like bitten cornrows. Every little inhabited cottage had a cabbage patch trying its best to produce for its family the main staple of the winter diet. They looked like pale green-and-brown tufted bedspreads, their small knots of hope mixed with sorrow. In Mostar, souvenir shops sold pens that had been crafted from spent shells and necklaces made with bullets. Bomb-pocked roof tiles had been made
by Sue Spirit
into lamps. Despair fashioned into resignation, or, just maybe, hope. Adding to the dark feeling of the town, shops also sold faded, greasy-looking black t-shirts featuring the head of Tito the former Yugoslavia’s communist dictator from post-World War II days until 1980. Life is so hard in Bosnia that most of the people actually long for the good old Tito days. Most of the town’s parks were turned into cemeteries during the 90’s war. There simply was no place else to bury all the dead. One vacant, weedy lot, however, was given as a thank-you gift, after the war, to the Jews of the town, to build a synagogue. They had not fought, but had served as medics to help bind up the wounds of the town’s Muslims. The lot’s iron fence was decorated