Sarajevo Cemeteries

The civil war in former Yugoslavia killed over 12,000 residents of the Sarajevo region, including about 1,800 children. Throughout the city and surrounding countryside, existing cemeteries have been expanded and new ones opened. A soccer field at the site of the Olympics was transformed into a graveyard where people quickly buried their loved ones, amidst continued shooting. It is quite moving to see entire cemeteries whose inscribed dates of death happened within a few hellish years.

The War Tunnel

I also took a tour of the Sarajevo Tunnel, constructed by Sarajevo residents in 1993 to link the city to safe neighborhoods nut cut off by Bosnian Serb forces who otherwise strangled access to the city. The tunnel, running around 800 meters (but now mostly collapsed), allowed food and humanitarian aid to come into the city, and people to escape. It also was a way for weapons to enter the city. From the view of the remaining parts of the tunnel, one could easily see the airport (where the tunnel once went under), a supposedly neutral area but ineffectively protected. The video (shown without words) showed people sloshing through water seeping into the tunnel. The museum also displays a medical cot used to transport wounded along the railway tracks within the 1.2 m wide/ 1.5m high tunnel. It is estimated that 1 million people used the tunnel and over 20 million tons of food entered the city through this lifeline.

Cemeteries of Sarajevo