Twenty-three years to the day since it was demolished by Serbian nationalists as part of an ethnic cleansing campaign, Banja Luka’s grand mosque, Ferhadija, was reopened on 7 May. Despite continuing tensions between the Serbian and Bosniak population of Banja Luka, the ceremony passed off without incident and marked an important date in the city’s troubled history.
The dead in Sarajevo’s Jewish cemetery cannot speak for themselves. They cannot protest the damage to which their final resting place has been subjected. David Schafer and Alastair Carr (photos) report.
Visoko was once the cradle of Bosnia, a royal town where the coronations of Bosnian rulers occurred. Today, it is a municipality in which culture and anything culture related has died. Lejla Bečar explores the decline of her hometown.
As poet Mak Dizdar describes in “Blue River” there exists a country: “Beyond dread, beyond doubt, beyond nine, beyond ten, deeper and stronger, beyond silence, beyond darkness.” It is here that a good country exists. A country shaped like a heart. That country’s name is Bosnia-Herzegovina and a strange people live in this heart-shaped land.