“She’s not going to write about the war, is she?” someone asked my guide, Ivance. In truth, I knew little about Bosnia and Herzegovina (often abbreviated to BiH) before I arrived. But when we launched Wanderlust in 1993, the news was dominated by images of Sarajevo under siege from the Serb army. In November that year, as the first magazine was printed, the iconic Stari Most bridge in Mostar was destroyed by Bosnian Croat forces, sending shockwaves around Europe. Thirty years later, I felt I was long overdue a visit to somewhere that had been so much a part of our collective consciousness in the early days of the magazine.
As we drove out of Sarajevo the morning after my arrival, taking the city’s main boulevard, Ivance casually mentioned that this was formerly known as Sniper Alley during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). With a jolt I recognised it from the old news footage, and it was at that moment that I thought, yes, I probably was going to at least acknowledge the war in anything I wrote. But once we were out of the city and heading north-west, into the country’s mountainous heart, I soon realised there were plenty of others stories here waiting to be told.
We had entered a world of pastoral scenes and plunged into valleys with sparkling rivers. Over 40% of the land here is forested, and bears, wolves and wild boars lurk in the more sparsely populated wilderness areas.
Arriving in the small but historically important town of Jajce, the overcast skies and persistent drizzle did little to distract from its picture-perfect beauty. Down the centuries, it has been home to Illyrians, Romans, the Bosnian Kingdom and the Ottomans; now its medieval citadel stands proudly atop a 22m-high waterfall. It was of little surprise that Jajce lies on the UNESCO tentative list, nor that it has 30 national monuments and several museums.
Local guide Dragan took me on a whistlestop walking tour, offering insight into the city’s multilayered and multicultural history. Frankly, it was dizzying. “This was the
