Excerpts from the ~Sarajevo Survival Guide~ (FAMA, 1993)

[As written (mostly) by Miroslav Prstojević. Originally published by FAMA; reprinted by Workman Press, NY.]


CLIMATE

Sarajevo's climate is very continental, with a short hot summer, when the nights are still cold due to the constant breeze coming from the surrounding mountains. Winters are rich with snow, from November until April. Snow has been recorded in August and in June--a fact which can be found in old Sarajevo chronicles. War so far hasn't changed the climate. The moon is still shining, the sun rises, rain falls, and it snows, too.


THE MODERN SARAJEVAN MALE

He has accreditation [ID], weapons, a good car, and a complete uniform. The owner of a bullet-proof vest is regarded with respect. One who doesn't wear a uniform has an ax in his right hand for cutting down trees, and a series of [water] canisters on his left shoulder. His image would be complete with a mask against poison gas.


THE MODERN SARAJEVAN FEMALE

She cuts wood, carries humanitarian aid, smaller canisters filled with water, does not visit a hairdresser nor a cosmetician. She is slim, and runs fast. Girls regularly visit the places where humanitarian aid is being distributed. They know the best aid-packages according to their numbers. They get up early to get water, visit cemeteries to collect wood, and greet new young refugees. Many wear golden and silver lilies as earrings, as pins, on necklaces.
Sarajevo is a city of slender people...wearing youthful clothes of teenage size. Sarajevans have lost about [8 million pounds]...They greet each other with--TAKE CARE!


TOBACCO

The tradition of famous tobacco from Herzegovina and more than a century of the existence and production of the Sarajevo Tobacco Factory left a bad impact on Sarajevans. It spoiled them--people were used to the best cigarettes and tobacco for which special pipes, cigarette-cases and cigarette-holders were made.
Today, cigarettes are the biggest luxury and need. No one is quitting. You can buy them on the black market. Members of the army and of the police get them daily or weekly. There is no possibility of regular purchase. Matches too are to be found only on the black market.

On some markets you can find tobacco dust, which before served as a high quality fertilizer for plants and vegetables. Today, that dust is precious and hard to find. Tobacco leaves are even more expensive and very rare.

The most passionate smokers are smoking tea. They are drying chamomile, Swiss chard, leaves, and cut it into "tobacco." That tobacco is then being rolled into regular paper or daily [newspaper]. Filters are made of toilet paper which comes as a part of lunch packages. It seems to be easier to find a pipe.


BOOKSTORES

There are two that are working, and one "Book-Club"...in which the number and selection of books is rapidly diminishing. All the storefronts in the bookstores are gone, but no one has been stealing books. The storage of the biggest publishing house in Sarajevo is now in occupied territory. The destiny of those books is unknown. What can be seen is the growing interest for foreign books, and dictionaries. Everybody seems to be interested in the languages of the world. Price does not matter.


SOUVENIRS

The most desired are the shrapnel, which can be found everywhere: on the sidewalks, on the streets, balconies, apartments. Bullets are popular, but have a somewhat lower price. Some take with them food coupons. Other 'trophies' include war issues of OSLOBODJENJE [the newspaper], pedigree dogs, shoes made of snake-leather--excellent for running at crossroads.


GIFTS

A bottle of clean water, a candle, a bar of soap, shampoo, some garlic or an onion. Passionate love is being expressed here by a handful of wood, a bucket of coal, a complete edition of books that lack humor or poetry. Could you spare some Vladimir Illich Lenin? Last winter has proven that his books burn well.


RECREATION

Wear and Footwear

Everyone is in sports clothes, for they are warmer, more comfortable, and enable you to run quicker. Most of the members of the Bosnian Armed Forces wear deep white sneakers with the logo of Yugosport. Their uniform, at the beginning, consisted of jeans, [camouflage] ingeniously [improvised] of bright colors. Bulletproof jackets are very rare...Citizens renew wear and footwear by moving into abandoned apartments.

Walking

Six kilometers a day--that is the average for those who don't need to go very far. Some believe it helps to keep you in shape.

Running

That is the favorite sport, practiced by everyone in Sarajevo. All cross-roads are run through, as are all dangerous neighborhoods. One runs with stolen wood, to the line where others are standing. Something is for sale, and you will know [what] it [is] only when you join the line.

Rock-climbing

Urban rock-climbing is a compulsory sports discipline. Instead of adequate ropes, one uses sheets. Climbers [negotiate] distances between balconies, from higher to lower ones which are not yet reached by fire.

Soccer

Often played with soldiers of UNPROFOR. On the other side--Bosnian Armed Forces, police and professional city players who are still here. Games take place in the hall of the burned Skenderija. The game is hard, masculine, with lots of injuries. Foreigners lose here, as they always did.

Chess

Played on staircases, in basements and in shelters. Sometimes even in the chess club Bosna, which has a good and very expensive buffet.

Tree-cutting

An entirely new city discipline. Tools for this sport are an electric saw and axes, small and big. One gets trained by cutting, trimming, splitting, and piling wood on a balcony or in a room, where they don't suffer so much humidity. Wood is stacked in the bedroom, hall, living room, in the next apartment whose owners have left or disappeared.


GAMES

Cards

The basic mode of comradeship during the long winter nights. Takes place on staircases where it was the first possibility for frightened neighbors to finally meet each other. For those who know how to play and win, it becomes part of the survival-struggle. No one plays for money, but for a lunch packet, canned fish, a liter of oil--that is serious capital!

Billiards

Banned in the nineteenth century, today it is the favorite time-killer for the jobless, school-less people. Some of them might become world champions.

Pinball Machines

They work despite the electricity. Their owners learned how to solve that minor problem.

Children's Games

Counting of grenades fired on the city, trimming fallen trees, collecting bullets, shells...Exchange of collections.

Speed

Dismantling the parts of abandoned cars and taking them away, into "security." Rules of the game: as quickly as possible. No age limits.

Ladies' Talk

Exchange of war recipes: who can prepare the better meal made of nothing?


RUMORS

Rumors are the most important source of information. They spread with incredible speed and often mean more than news transmitted through the official channels. They regularly--"this time for sure"--report on military intervention, on the siege of the city being lifted, on establishing corridors and safe havens. And they are regularly, each time "for sure," wrong. Rumors are spread by all: housewives, university professors, teenagers, doctors. No one is immune. They travel the city quicker than you will be able to, and they are mostly optimistic. Only later you might hear opinions that they were too optimistic.



· • ·

About a misquote...

Karl Marx has often been cited as the source of the derogatory comment concerning Southern Slavs to be "ethnic trash."  I myself have used the refernce in a published work.  Last night, I came across a minor refernce that indicated this attributation was not entirely correct and spend far longer than I perhaps should have searching for the source of the quote in its original language.

Marx may well do to share the credit/blame, but it was Fredrich Engels who actually wrote it.

In January, 1849, the tract Der magyarische Kampf ("The Magyar Struggle") was published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung (n.194, v.13), authored by Fredrich Engels (not Karl Marx, bless his long gray beard).  A paragraph midway through begins:

So in Östreich die panslawistischen Südslawen, die weiter nichts sind als der Völkerabfall einer höchst verworrenen tausendjährigen Entwicklung.


Previous to this the term Völkerabfälle had already been uused.  In this instance, the term is slightly changed due to context, Völkerabfall.

The beginning of the sentence would be: "…the pan-Slavist Southern Slavs, who are nothing but people's waste/racial refuse/ethnic trash…"

Literally, this mean's "people's waste."

In the local language about who it concerns this term can be translated to naroda otpada.  If we take it to mean (and the translation would not be inaccurate) ethnic trash, the local tongue would have it be etničkih smeće.




So, the always eloquent (notice the switch to sarcastic font there) Fredrich Engels, is actually calling the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Albanians, and their neighbors, human shit.


Don't think that it is above ideological philosophers to use vulgar terms.  Engels and Marx were, after all, discussing genocide at a time when that word had yet been coined.




· • ·

I can dig. See? I got a shovel.

Sarajevo War Poster c. 1993

Getting close...

I've got a few meetings scheduled in Serbia, Sarajevo, and Croatia.  Hoping to have a few more lined up by the time i depart for the mythic realm that was Yugoslavia.

This long weekend break from school, I'll make a trial of packing things for the trip to see where I'm at as far as space and weight goes, continuing reading, set up my profile and mission statement on Couch Surfing, and sketch a geographic itinerary.  I've made some orders for books and a couple of items I still need for the Travelogue, but  other than that, I need only to stay focused on the remaining weeks of school and the three papers and two exams left this semester.  Then three weeks of nothing but work and antici ... pation.  :)

50 days from now I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic en route to Heathrow before the immediate hop from there to Budapest.

Life may be sweeter for this, I don't know...


· • ·

Contact. 3... 2... 1...

So I finally got off my electronic missives to a couple of notable persons in the Balkans.  Directors Danis Tanović and Emir Kusturica.  Incidentally, both are Sarajevans, with one having returned to Sarajevo after the wars and the other relocating in (apparently) more than merely geography from where he was before the wars.

I would feel honored and privalaged if I can even have a correspondence with them, let alone getting to meet and speak with them first-hand.

52 days until I hop on that big ol' jet airliner that will carry me to Far Away.

Excitement is starting to simmer at a mid-boil.  :)


· • ·

In Memoriam.

One of my war heroes died Sunday morning.

Margaret Moth did all of her combat shooting with a camera.  She survived being shot in the face in Sarajevo in 1992, but she fell prey to the cancer snipering down the alley of her intestines.

Gravity feels a little heavier, the air a little thicker, today.


· • ·

Writing a roped puma

Imagine two people holding a captured puma on a rope.
If they want to approach each other,
the puma will attack, because the rope will slacken;
only if they both pull simultaneously on the rope
is the puma equidistant from the two of them.
That is why it is so hard for they who read
and they who write
to reach each other:
between them lies a mutual thought captured on ropes
that they pull in opposite directions.

―Milorad Pavić


· • ·