We drove into Belgrade at sunset. The city — a mass of concrete and brick — was disappearing into the night. Only graffiti remained visible under the streetlights. Belgrade, with its potholes and the sunshine in between splashes of rain, reminded me of Bogotá, the city I was born in. As we walked through the streets and took the bus to the Museum of Yugoslavia, however, I realized the feeling of Belgrade was completely foreign to me. The General Staff Building of Belgrade was nine minutes away from our hotel. It was bombed by NATO during the Kosovo War twenty-six years ago. I hadn’t noticed it when we arrived, but on our first morning, I could not ignore how the sun shone through its entrails and the wind rustled the vines growing inside. We had to stand on the other side of the street to take photos of the building, not only to capture its full size but also because locals were staring at us when we approached it with our phones in hand. The otherwise bustling city of Belgrade seemed to come to a halt around the General Staff Building. We spoke in whispers as we walked past. With its destroyed brick, empty window frames and exposed pipes, the building had remained frozen in 1999.
Ten years earlier, the Administrative Department of Security (DAS) building in Bogotá was destroyed by a truck bomb in the midst of the war between the Medellín Cartel and the Colombian government. The building was demolished and rebuilt in the same location and with the same architectural style. If you drove past it without knowing its history, you would never know it was the site of one of the deadliest car bomb attacks in Latin America. That sense of ignorance and ease is not afforded by Belgrade. The city itself does not forget — and neither does it let you. But does it forgive?
We crossed into Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early afternoon. Mostar’s Old Town feels suspended in the Ottoman era with its cobblestone streets and bazaars. The imposing Old Bridge catches your eye as soon as you arrive. I knew it had been bombed by the Croatian Defence Council during the Bosnian War. And yet there it stood, high above the aquamarine water, brimming with tourists no matter the time of day. As we watched the sunset over the bridge, a street guitarist asked us if we spoke Spanish. When we said yes, he sang “Macarena” and “Bailando” — songs I grew up listening to — and then we talked in English. He was Bosnian and older than all of us, but somehow we connected with each other through music and the knowledge that we were all standing in a place that survived extreme violence and destruction.
How do we remember tragedy? Belgrade lives alongside it. There, memory is physical and steadfast. Mostar, on the other hand, transforms tragedy into art. Marina Dapic, the founder of the Street Arts Festival, showed us around the city on our first morning. The war resides in every corner, in buildings with bullet holes, fractured pavement and broken concrete columns. However, the opposite sides of buildings bore colorful murals commemorating women’s struggle for freedom and Luciano Pavarotti. We walked on top of shiny mosaics embedded between rock fragments and looked at the Legos in the broken parts of columns. As Marina told us, art “brings[s] to people something beautiful” within the memory of tragedy. Mostar does not forget, but through paintings and sculptures, it reinvents its divided history into unity.
In Sarajevo, where red paint pools inside bomb craters on the streets, we met Danijela Duganzić, a feminist activist. In our walking tour of the city, we looked at monuments for the Second World War and the Bosnian War. Danijela said she believed those monuments are “not something that gives us hope,” but rather something that can further divide people. Can memory remain a battlefield, even after a ceasefire? I think of Colombia and our diverse memories of armed conflict. Like in Belgrade, Mostar and Sarajevo, we coexist with both physical and intangible representations of our past. However, despite their groundedness in factual historical events, monuments and memorials are up for interpretation, constantly filtered through our biases, experiences and knowledge. Perseverance, vengeance and ignorance all serve as frames through which we can understand and remember. While I still don’t know which one I have used throughout my life, I hope to balance these competing perspectives in my own exercise of remembering the past and building a future.