SARAJEVO . . . As an expert on Bosnian monuments, and secretary-general of the foundation Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue, I arrived at Sarajevo airport in the company of Roger C. Shrimplin, chairman of the Royal Institute of British Architects Eastern European Committee. We were invited both by the Bosnian government and by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Fund based in Sarajevo, and together we formed the very first mission to Sarajevo concerned with cultural heritage. Life in Sarajevo -- and here I speak of the cultural and intellectural life -- is a tribute to the continuation of peace. As Tony Land, of UNHCR Sarajevo, said, "One kilometre from War is Peace. War is the abnormality which we artificially sustain. Peace is normality". Sarajevans meet daily, conversing intently and producing publications about their culture, insofar as they can find paper on which to print. Cultural organisations include two Institutes for the Protection of Monuments, one town and one nation-wide (formerly, Federal); the Cultural Society of Muslims (Preporod, meaning "renaissance"); the Cultural Society of Catholics (Napredak, meaning "progress"); the Jewish Society (Benevolencia), and the Women's Group (MAK "Bosanka"). Many members of these organisations were formerly in the University. Recent congresses they have held include ones on medicine in Bosnia, in memory of a library of medical books which was destroyed, and one on an analysis of their personal tragedy -- the cruel and massive destruction of Bosnia's Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim monuments and books. At first, only Muslim heritage was destroyed. Then reprisal destruction began and eventually no class of monument was free from loss. As a brave counter- gesture to this massive destruction, a project has been prepared by artists and cultural workers of the city of Sarajevo and the Direction of the Sarajevo Biennial of Contemporary Art, to found a Museum of Contemporary Art in the former headquarters of the old Jugoslav National Army, to be opened in the year 2000. We all know that in this war, adherents to different religions have been metamorphosed into "ethnic groups", which have then been led to attack each other, or to be attacked. In Sarajevo's town government, however, and cultural societies, those of different religions work together, as do those of different religions in London and New York, and as did everyone in Bosnia, before the start of this strange war. Neither shells nor snipers (and snipers, it is said, are often Ukrainian soldiers formerly working for the UN) regard ethnic differences in selecting those whom they kill. Svetozar Pudaric, a Serbian architect with the town's Institute for Protection of Monuments, and his Muslim art-historian fiancee, both lost legs in a mortar blast. They married in hospital; she has now given birth. Among those still active in Sarajevo's surviving cultural core are Azra Begic and Enver Imamovic, both of Muslim background and both accustomed to their European-style lives. Both are art historians; Enver is an archaeologist as well. Azra's concern is Bosnian-Herzegovinian twentieth-century art; she is a museums advisor and vice-director of the Art Gallery in Sarajevo; she has held administrative posts in the AICA, the International Society of Art Critics. She is president of the Sarajevo women's organisation MAK "Bosanka", and the author of many exhibition catalogues and books on modern art. Imamovic is Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Sarajevo, and a traveller to remote archaeological sites in the Middle and Far East. Azra Begic is in her fifties; Imamovic is younger, with children that are still small. Azra's forebears -- a Herzegovinian noble family called Radojevic in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before they dopted Islam -- owned Pocitelj on the River Neretva, south of Mostar. Pocitelj is a complex of castellated medieval and early Islamic buildings which was destroyed by Croats in mid-September. When Azra and her two sisters were small, after the war and under communism, they were ordered through their school to decide and declare whether they were Croats, Muslims or Serbs. Azra decided she would be what there weren't too many of in the class, and became Serb. Jasminka chose Croat. Abasa stuck to being Muslim because she wanted to study law, and there were fewer Muslim girls wanting to be lawyers and so more places were available to them. In fact, the forebears of the Begic family, as West-Herzegovinian nobility, could have been either Croat or Serb; their territory ran along the Catholic/Orthodox fault-line of change in religion, that only distinguishing factor for what is now called "ethnicity". They are not now practising Muslims. Azra joined others, such as Enver Imamovic who, with the help of young people, packed away movable art treasures and books from libraries and museums, insofar as they were not already by then destroyed, and within the mandate of the Commission for Saving the Cultural Heritage of Sarajevo, founded 14 May 1992, under the direction of Mrs Mevlida Serdarevic. Azra and Enver discovered then that some Serbian colleagues and sympathisers in various institutions had already removed items of great value or interest to their regime. Azra's art gallery lost icons in this way, and a collec- tion of paintings by the Austrian-period painter Hodler, much admired in Belgrade. Both Azra and Enver participated in caring for the contents of the Territorial Museum (Zemaljski Muzej), across "Sniper's Alley" from the Holiday Inn. The atmosphere of the time, and the winter which followed it, is presented in a letter from Enver to a friend in Zagreb: "Never before in my life could I have imagined that this, what we are now going through in such a terrible manner, could happen. How many times have I passed by when a shell has fallen either in front of me, or behind my back, and killed a few passers-by who happened to be there. They hit even in my immediate vicinity; it is better if I don't tell you what happens and how it looks. It suffices to tell you that the house I live in has so far twice remained roofless, and that the flat above me has been devastated. The other day the front wall of our house was hit, just at dusk, just as the entire day had passed quietly, and there were ten children on sledges all around. I am bearing all this relatively well, physically as well. My accumulated fitness and everything I went through during my travels have made me tough enough and I have no problems. On the contrary, I work enormously. At the moment I am working on a large manuscript and at the same time I write quite a lot for the newspapers, the radio, the TV, etc., because you can fight as much and defend your country with the written word. We organise scientific gatherings, round tables, because there is so much about everything that is happening to us that you must explain to your own people and to the world and to point out the roots of this evil. "The situation at the Territorial Museum is desperate as well. Of all our colleagues, only a few have remained; everybody else fled a long time ago. The building itself has received some sixty mortar shots. By the way, a foreign lady reporter at the Sarajevo hotel housing all the foreigners was furious at the constant shelling of the hotel, got in her car, drove herself to the Serbian headquarters and made a scene there. The brave Serbian soldiers said they were so sorry, but that they were trying to hit the museum! The hotel is across the street from it. "I can be thanked for everything that we have succeeded in saving, not only in the archaeological, but also in the other departments of the Museum, because I rescued them under heaviest fire. Everything now stands ruined, ajar; there are niether doors nor windows; snow, rain and humidity entering. It is a real sorrow. One does as much as one can. In the same way I look after my faculty at the University, because there is nobody who dares to go there, because at several points you have to run because of snipers who constantly keep these passages under fire. I am not afraid, and so far everything has been OK. You cannot imagine how one becomes immune to every- thing; the fear disappears and instead an anger and spite appears within everybody. We thank our existence only to hope for better times, because with this belief you can endure everything more easily, the cold as much as the hunger and fear. "I, too, could have left Sarajevo, but my conscience makes me remain here, in our town and country, and to contribute as much as I can. It is patriotism one suddenly feels strongly and it is much stronger than we are." When I met this heroic man, he wanted to conduct me across Sniper's Alley to the museum. To my shame, I took a taxi from the Holiday Inn across the street. However, I fled with him away from the museum, parallel to Sniper's Alley, across threatened streets and past the blackened cadaver of the University, while he told me of his rescue of Sarajevo's revered treasure, the Sarajevo Haggadah, a thirteenth-fourteenth century manuscript brought to Sarajevo by refugees from the Spanish Inquisition. "That day 6 June was the most hellish ever in Sarajevo," Enver recalls. "That was the day the barracks burned, the biggest barracks in town and right near the museum, in the first war zone. All the fighting and artillery attacks taking place then were at their height near the museum. In these circumstances, our action took place. We entered the museum unnoticed. For six hours we hunted for the Haggadah in all the places we thought it might be. We forced open every museum safe and found it in none. Finally, we came to the basement. It was completely dark. We had a little torch, which lasted only two hours. We had to grope in the dark, and that way we found it ... "The basement itself was under water, which was rising fast because projectiles had punctured the central heating pipes. The height of the floor where the book lay was just a little higher than the height the water had then reached. Had we found the Haggadah only a few hours later than we did, water would already have reached it, and it would have been destroyed." True to his scholarly principles, Imamovic wrote his report about the discovery of the Haggadah at its findspot, crouching on the floor for safety, in water and in the dark. Sarajevo is a European city, former host to the Olympic games. Sarajevans are pained that they are not depicted as Europeans by the foreign press. The Western press, they told us, likes to picture them in ethnic costumes, or else dying or dead, like victims of gladiatorial combat, rather than as the well- dressed Europeans, who can be seen engaged in a remarkable variety of urban or cultural pursuits (as well as carrying their own water) on any and all Sarajevan streets. The West refuses to allow them the dignity of considering they need aid to culture as well as aid in the form of food. They need the advice of foreign experts, such as emerge from UNESCO to other lands in less terrible circumstances, to show them how to safeguard their wounded monuments. This they do not get, because the West has decided for them, monuments must come last. Sarajevo's historic centre looks at first, or even second, glance, much as before. Probably most buildings are damaged in some way, but most damage is not total. Exteriors remain looking much as they did, even when the interiors are burnt out. The Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish sacred buildings look little affected by war. The much-photographed, fifteenth-century Sheikh Magribija Mosque is the only seriously damaged mosque I saw in central Sarajevo; most other major mosques have at least retained their minarets. Jewish monuments look as before; even the ancient Jewish cemetery, sacri- legiously used as a Serbian gun emplacement, from the far distance appears intact. Austrian and Ottoman buildings withstand missiles well, in contrast to buildings made of steel, concrete and cement. For this reason, the historic buildings in the city centre, as well as the large, more isolated, Austrian- built Territorial Museum, remain basically unchanged against a backdrop of huge blackened and opalescent cadavers of high-rise structures such as the UNIS building or the University. Buildings with architectural elements of steel fare much worse, such as the Oslobodjenje Newspaper building which boasts steel elements that have melted under high temperature, producing Gaudi- or Dali-like effects. Steel window frames with many glass panels have sagged, the panes hanging from them like items of laundry on a clothes line. The Territorial Museum has been under constant fire from the time of Enver's adventure there. This, the principal museum of Bosnian archaeology, historical monuments and natural history, sits on "Sniper's Alley." Behind it, along the Miljacka River, is the present front line, from where devastating projectiles of varying sorts are intermittently hurled into its back wall and its court- yard, within which mainly unprotected Roman and medieval monuments wait to be destroyed. The interior ceilings are painted daintily on a white ground in Pompeian style, crossed by water stains from where the cupola sky-lights are broken. No one risks death to cover the holes in the roof. Only a stuffed falcon, suspended with wings widespread under the skylight in the Natural History Department, offer futile protection. Beneath him, a large hole is punched through the wall.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------- LONDON CONFERENCE - Effects on the Cultural Heritage On 25 November 1993 Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue and the Courtauld Institute of Art are jointly organising a seminar to be held at the Institute to evaluate the effects of the present conflict on the cultural heritage of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to discuss proposals for future restoration and conservation. For more information contact: Dr Anthea Brook, Witt Library, Courtauld Institute, Somerset House, The Strand, London WC2, United Kingdom, tel. (71) 873-2726, or Dr Wenzel, Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue UK, 9 Canterbury Mansions, Lymington Road, London NW6 1SE, tel. (71) 433-1142. Mike -- Let them tremble and at the last moment let them comprehend that the word SARAJEVO from now on will mean the destruction of their sons and the debasement of their daughters. They have prepared it by repeating "We at least are safe," unaware that what will strike them ripens within them." Czeslaw Milosz/Sarajevo