in the field around the palace

The Muse didn't want to wait until Sarajvo:

The Palace is not a place you find by searching for it.  Maps are completely inadequate to translate such territory.  Entering the Palace, the traveller brings with them their own ecstatic wonders, their own dread-filled tears.  The Palace is akin to the Grail Castle, to Chapel Perilous, the Silhouette Rogue.  Those who negotiate the Palace come out afterward either batshit-paranoid with belief or a stone-sober skeptic.  In most travellers, there is only that duality.  But for those who have walked the narrow alleys of a distant obscure bazāār, drank the elixirs in sensuous cafés of flesh, and inhaled certain honey-sulfur'd pollen of flowers from the sunless lands may encounter a lone bodhisattva, a pychopomp among the the slumming angels, who navigates paths to and from the Palace which are not counted in that duality and upon which ground few feet have ever tread.  Yet however one finds their way to the Palace, when they do so, they must enter alone.  Of this, there is no other.

Saraj-ovasi, in Turkish, means the field around the palace.  In 1461, this described the garden, mosque, and souk surrounding the governor’s mansion in the Bosnian province of the Ottoman Empire.

Midway along this journey of life I came upon this landscape where my much-studied oft-touted maps became utterly useless in guiding me through the soft geography where I found myself.  And there I lingered for a while, in that field around the palace…  Sarajevo.

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Once upon a time, in a mythic land called Jugoslavia . . .

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