Monday, July 24, 2017

Scars of Sarajevo

On April 5, 1992, Bosnian Serbs, looking to create a new state of Republic Srpska, encircled the hills that surrounded the city of Sarajevo with 13,000 troops and laid seige to the land below.  For 1425 days they shelled and shot and assaulted the buildings and people below.  Neither side showed any mercy and when the war finally ended, 13,952 people were dead.  40% of them were civilians.

It has been just over 21 years since the final shot was fired.  And in those years there has been a lot of rebuilding. But for every bright and shiny new high rise, there are many, many more buildings that still bear the scars of war.  Everywhere we walked we saw bullet holes, and mortar shell scars and broken or boarded windows...




Under our feet, we saw far too many of these...


The Sarajevo Roses.  The mortar shell leaves a unique fragmentation pattern when it explodes, almost in the pattern of a rose.  During the siege, thousands of mortar shells were exploded and left marks very unique to the city.  The mortar shells that killed one or more persons were filled with a red resin as a memorial.  There are fewer and fewer of them each year as the concrete is replaced.

Some buildings bore their scars in a more modern way - they put plaques of the persons who lived in the building who were killed during the war...


But the most obvious scars of the war are the white graves, standing tall and straight, in all areas of the city, bearing witness to the inhumanity of what happened here.












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