It is ‘insane’ to sleep there
Arijan Kurbasic, the manager of the War Hostel Sarajevo in the Bosnian capital, knows that his idea of hospitality is not to everyone’s taste and is ready to relax the house rules a bit.
He will, for example, turn down the volume on a sound system that, day and night, fills the place with the din of gunfire and explosions.
Getting to sleep can still be a challenge: There are no beds, only thin mattresses on the floor with no pillows or sheets, and heavy, scratchy blankets that create the feeling of sleeping with a dead horse.
The decor is hardly soothing — lots of guns and, in one room, a poster screaming “Death” and “The End.”
And while other hotels offer luxury suites and sweeping views of Sarajevo’s old town to guests looking for a particularly memorable stay, Kurbasic offers the ultimate in self-deprivation — “the bunker,” a windowless, dungeon room so hellishly and deliberately uncomfortable that, he said, “it is insane to want to sleep there.”
A former Sarajevo tour guide, Kurbasic, 27, said he had quickly realized that what many tourists really wanted to know about was the glorious city’s agonies during Bosnia’s 1992-95 war. “I decided to give people what they wanted,” he said. Sarajevo has an abundance of such places, including the spot where a Serb nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in 1914, and set Europe on the road to the First World War, and the market where a mortar shell killed nearly 70 weekend shoppers in 1994.
But it was also in Bosnia that an early version of dark tourism took a particularly sinister turn, said Zijad Jusufovic, a survivor of the city’s wartime siege who now leads idiosyncratic tours of Sarajevo’s sites.
“This is attraction number one for dark tourism,” he said, standing high in the hills overlooking the city.
War tourists with a criminal blood lust, mostly Orthodox Christian fanatics from Russia and Greece, used to go there to take pot shots, for a fee, with sniper rifles and even anti-aircraft guns at Muslim residents scurrying for cover in the city below.
Another place Jusufovic likes to take visitors is Yugoslavia’s first private hotel, a mountain getaway for romantic trysts that, now a ruin, was used by Serb forces to pound the city with artillery.
At the war hostel, Kurbasic said his aim was not to create nostalgia for Europe’s worst bout of bloodletting since the Second World War, but simply to let guests, particularly younger ones, get a small idea of the discomfort and deprivations of wartime.
“Millennials come and say, ‘This is so cool,’ ” he said. “But it is not cool. It is not a game. If you grow up thinking war is a game, you will make some very bad decisions.”