On the first morning we were in Sarajevo, I decided to explore the Old Town on my own for a while before stopping for a cup of tea. I stopped at a coffee shop, and while I was debating whether the tea was steeped enough to pour into my tea cup, another person in the store started talking to me.
I think he thought I was confused about how the teapot worked because of the way the teacup and the teapot were stacked on top of each other, so he decided to explain it, and we started talking. He told me he was from Florida and that he had spent a few weeks in Sarajevo, mostly for work but partially for other reasons. Later in the conversation, he told me that he visits Eastern Europe to avoid reaching the maximum number of days you can spend in the Schengen Zone without a visa, and because the food is good and the prices of things are inexpensive. He said I should visit one of the museums with historical artifacts because it was interesting, but recommended not going to one of the three or so museums about the war because those ones are too serious.
I didn’t know what to say to that. It seemed strange to me to visit a place without learning about its recent past. There are still buildings in Sarajevo with bullet holes in them from the war; we learned on our walking tour that, in some of the areas where explosions in the war had killed multiple people, the indentation marks in the ground were intentionally left unfixed and painted red.
Our tour guide made it clear that she wanted us to see Sarajevo as more than the war, and we did. It was a pretty city, and the people were incredibly friendly. I enjoyed walking around Old Town, and seeing different parts of the city. But I also went to the museums — the man from Florida was right that they were serious, but it felt wrong to go to a place with such a history and pretend it never happened.
I know there has to be a balance between the two; there has to be a way for cities and people to heal from the past and move on without forgetting. And it’s a topic I’ve considered before, with other subjects, but going to Sarajevo, where the war was so recent and so fresh in people’s memories, made me think about the role of tourists in remembering the past while still seeing the present. I started to ask myself what my responsibility as a visitor was because I believe there are times where there is a responsibility to remember things. I don’t think I figured out the answer exactly, but between my conversation with the man in the coffee shop and listening to the tour guide, I am convinced there needs to be a way to see the beauty in a city while still remembering its past.