Downtown Sarajevo is the site of all the action: you go there to shop, party, eat, and people-watch. But now, climbing up out of the downtown river valley has become one of my favorite things to do. I live five minutes up the mountain, north of the Miljacka River, in a mostly residential neighborhood with one public school and way too many hair salons. As I’ve learned recently, heading straight up lifts me first to sweeping graveyards, in which every stone gives a death date between 1992 and 1996. Next come the old city boundaries—a rolling, eighteenth-century stone wall built by a protection-minded pasha.
Finally, as the roads simultaneously get narrower, twistier, and steeper, I pass some critical fog height, and the air brightens (let’s just ignore the possibility that this is an illusion brought on by my low-oxygen lightheadedness). You can still hear the muezzin calls, but only a few mosques’ minarets poke out of the gray below. That winter fog must have really ticked off Serb snipers back when they surrounded the city from its mountaintops.
Avoiding hungry cats and cars sliding on locked wheels, I summit at one of Sarajevo’s old fortresses, Bijela Tabija. There are no signs about the fort’s historical significance, and the wintry mist makes sweeping, informative vistas of the modern town impossible. Maybe this is a stingy place sometimes. But I’ll settle for old stone and strange snatches of radio carried to me by the wind.