Sarajevo

I arrived on the overnight bus in the before-dawn light and walked the 30 minutes or so into town. It was magical- there was nobody around, the roads were deserted. A hauntingly beautiful call to prayer broke through the silence, and seemed to carry from the towering minaret for miles through the thick air.

This is a hard place.

The streets are hard, the people are tough, everything has rough edges.

This is no accident: Sarajevo holds the grim record for withstanding the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, an incredible 1,425 days during the Bosnian war from 1992-96. For nearly 4 years, people here were shelled, shot at and starved. Reminders of the war and horrific genocide are everywhere.

The museums and memorials here are a different breed: the photos are fuzzy from being blown up too big and there's spelling mistakes in the English descriptions but suddenly it doesn't matter anymore because there's a child's bloodstained t-shirt hanging in a glass case on the wall and no words are necessary, none will do. Every exhibit, displaycase, photo, feels like repeated Floyd Mayweather left jabs to the head. The very word "Srebrenica" seems to suck oxygen out of my lungs.

One of my literary heroes is the late, great Robert Fisk, a journalist and war correspondent whose reporting from the Balkans is amongst the most powerful writing I have ever read. Having traced some of his footsteps, I remain amazed at his control of language and his quietly incendiary prose, his ability to bring the reader to imagine such unimaginably terrible things.

The city sits in a river valley, with houses climbing out of the mixing bowl to the east and west. Partly due to its geography, there is a thick fog in the mornings that the weak winter sun never quite sees off during the day. Coupled with persistent air pollution this creates a tepid smog which tints the landscape like an Instagram filter.

My UK SIM card has offered decent service throughout Europe so far, but this ended in Bosnia so I bought a cheap local SIM rather than pay caviar-esk rates for roaming.

I didn't have a paperclip or pin to pop out the slot in my phone to switch the cards over, so I asked the girl behind the desk at the hostel for one. She looked puzzled for a moment, then without a word took a pin out of her headscarf and handed it to me.

My surprise must have been evident on my face because she laughed at me as I hurriedly inserted it in my phone and switched the SIM cards over. I handed over the pin once I was done with a thousand embarrassed "hvala, hvala" and she put it back in place with a smile I will carry with me forever. As I walked away I realised I never asked her name.

Sarajevo is famously where 19-year old Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in June 1914, which led to the beginning of World War One. (The antagonistic historian in me wishes to make plain that it neither started the war nor was the start, as some people claim, but I sense that is a subject for another time).

There is a cast of Princip's footprints in the pavement on the exact spot where he stood and fired into the Duke's car. The right foot points out into the street and the left is open slightly, like a ballet dancer's pose.

In a way it's the perfect historical monument. A statue would be gaudy and inappropriate, and anything grand would block the pavement. As it is, cars still drive past like it was any other street corner in this history-soaked city.

I stood back for a moment and watched as people walked past. Most didn't stop, either knowing already or not caring to discover the intense history of that few square feet of pavement. A couple did though, and posed with their feet in the footprints as I had, looking out over the Latin Bridge into the pale sun where that car appeared all those years ago.

Though the Dayton Agreement ended the Bosnian War in December 1995, elements of the conflict live on. An estimated 2% of the landmass of Bosnia and Herzegovina is still covered in landmines, which continue to claim lives every year. Victims of genocide in mass graves are still being identified and prepared for proper burial, made more difficult by 'secondary' and 'tertiary' graves- bodies were dug up and moved to other sites closer to battlefields to make them look like they were caused by the fighting, meaning remains are often spread across multiple sites.

I love this place. It's desperate, addicting, and chilling. I feel like I'm in a staring contest with a cobra, and to flinch or blink or look away is to end something vital, vivid, unforgettable.

Look away I must though, and onwards.

But I cannot imagine a future where I do not come back.