The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
How the slopes of Sarajevo came back in from the cold
The 1984 Winter Olympics were followed by years of war – but now the Bosnian capital is looking to the future, says Chris Leadbeater
It is a giddy morning in the Olympic Village. Peals of laughter are echoing around the complex. For the most part, they are coming from children on sledges. School is out for the whole of January and the youngsters are making the most of it, gliding down the hill towards the apartment blocks on a street, inevitably, called Olimpijska. At the junction just behind, the five Olympic Rings reinforce the point, sitting proudly in the middle of a roundabout, sunlight glinting on the metal. It isn’t hard to buy into the joyfulness of it all.
This isn’t Beijing. True, China’s king city is currently hosting the Winter Olympics – the quadrennial feast of skiing and sliding whose 24th edition has just begun. But if you want to hear the most fascinating of Olympic tales, look nearer to home: to the mountains of the Balkans, and to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
It is a tale in two parts, of course. In Sarajevo’s recollection, the 1984 Winter Olympics was one great blur of sunny, snowy days – a halcyon fortnight when a small regional city at the heart of the old Yugoslavia became, briefly, the world’s sporting epicentre. The world shared that vision – particularly Britain, where Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean’s gorgeous Bolero routine won hearts, minds and the icedancing gold medal. But the world saw what came later, too: Yugoslavia’s fractious disintegration and Bosnia’s emergence as an independent state in March 1992; and the siege that enveloped Sarajevo a month later and lasted until February 1996, some four months after the official end of a war that consumed much of the Olympic legacy in its fire.
Sitting in the cavernous lobby of the Holiday Inn, the colossal accommodation bastion whose rise and fall became one of the symbols of Sarajevo’s Olympic story, Bibija Kerla wants to discuss the good times. She was 18 in 1978 when her home city was announced as the host of the 14th games; 24 when she took her place on the start-line as part of the Yugoslavian speed-skating team.
“When it was revealed that Sarajevo had won the games, my parents’ first wish was for a television, so they could watch it,” she laughs. “We couldn’t have dreamed that I would be part of it.” She only took up speed-skating in 1982, but practised fervently and competed ably, cheered on by an effusive home crowd. “That month, Sarajevo was the centre of the world,” she says. “It didn’t feel real.”
The events which followed eight years later involved a civil conflict along ethnic and religious faultlines that was among the most horrific chapters in the blood-soaked biography of the 20th century. History books will tell you more – weighty volumes crammed with portentous words: “Genocide”; “Srebrenica”; “the Markale massacres”. None of it makes for happy reading.
Sarajevo doesn’t want to talk about it. It has had enough of war. War took the surrounding ring of mountains that made the city a perfect Winter Olympic host and turned them into snipers’ nests and gun emplacements. War transformed the Holiday Inn from a showpiece built to house Olympic dignitaries to a literally shell-shocked semi-ruin, journalists sheltering in its basement as they reported on the siege. War left its fingerprints so indelibly that bullet holes still riddle the buildings along Zmaja Od Bosne, the main east-west thoroughfare, 27 years after the 1995 ceasefire.
War dug into Trebevic, the city’s most famous mountain, so stubbornly that when I ride the reconstructed cable-car to its ridge, I can see a Serbian trench in the cleared space below the gondola. War has visited Sarajevo so often that the 20th century’s most destructive tinderbox moment – the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which took place in the city and precipitated the First World War – is almost reduced to a footnote. A small museum and plaque mark the site, at the corner of Zelenih Beretki and Ulica Obala Kulina Bana; the River Miljacka indifferent as it flows by.
Sarajevo’s story is bigger. It goes back to 1461 and the elevation of a riverside village to an important Ottoman trading post. That era still sings sweetly in the medieval acorn of Bascarsija – the city’s old bazaar, with its minarets and markets – before the tide of history rolls west, into the classical core of the city that, with its museums, churches and ornate facades, recalls the Austro-Hungarian period of the late 19th century.
But the city also cranes its neck towards the future, particularly now that its beloved Olympic infrastructure has returned to life and purpose. The Olympic Village was the first part of the process – reconvened shortly after the games as the Mojmilo district, the apartments constructed for athletes added to the local housing stock. The Holiday Inn is the latest. Now known, simply, as the Hotel Holiday (the licence on its original name expired in 2013), it was bought by the group behind the Hotel Europe, the city’s flagship five-star, prior to the pandemic and will be thoroughly renovated in the next few years.
The ski resorts are already skipping ahead. Rearing up 20 miles south-east of the centre, Jahorina was the city’s first downhill darling – the Austrians were arcing down the mountain in the 1890s and the resort of the same name was founded in 1923. Sarajevans took to it quickly and so did elite Olympians: it hosted the women’s alpine skiing events in 1984. On a crisp Wednesday lunchtime, however, it looks nothing less than a star of 2022, skiers filing into the shiny new gondola whose ribbon was cut at the start of the season, then piling into the Olimpijski Bar at its topstation for wine and dance music.
Out on the south-west periphery of the city, Bjelasnica is similarly vibrant, still revelling in the 38-year memory of being the chosen course for the men’s downhill races. Even if you don’t fancy pitting yourself against an Olympic piste that doesn’t disguise its steepness, you can admire those who do from the lounge of chic Hotel Han at the bottom.
Of the ski mountains, only Igman bears its scars. Bjelasnica’s slightly lower neighbour witnessed active fighting during the Bosnian War, to the extent that there was a UN base on its slopes from 1993 onwards. It was not, however, shells or shrapnel that killed its most obvious landmark, more the creeping white-elephant status that tends to ensnare Olympic venues around the globe. Seen in the winter gloaming, its now defunct ski-jump is a giant ghost, its dizzying challenge unmet since 1989, its eeriness only amplified by the permanent medalpresentation platform at its foot – a forlorn exercise in abandoned concrete.
Two miles away, the Hotel Igman is much, much sadder: a burnt-out ruin, constructed for the games, that was destroyed in the conflict. Stepping into its eviscerated lobby is an unsettling experience, the only signs of humanity the canisters left by graffiti artists who have daubed the walls. Glass crunches underfoot. It feels like walking on bones.
And yet, here too, there is change. The site has been sold. The wreck will disappear. A fresh Hotel Igman will emerge. And in the meantime, there is the Hotel Monti, a splendid spa retreat with a view onto the field where crosscountry skiers enjoy the most genteel winter pursuit, silently mimicking those who competed here in 1984.
Even Sarajevo’s most notorious mountain speaks of regeneration. Popular perception has Trebevic, south of the centre, as some dread emblem of decay, thanks to its abandoned Olympic bobsleigh track. But “abandoned” is a relative concept. Yes, it no longer stages competitive events (bobsleigh is expensive, and tracks demand proper maintenance) but this near-mile of winding concrete is a living part of the city.
The completion of the new Trebevic chairlift in 2018, which replaced the one destroyed during the enemy occupation of the hill in 1992, has helped to reconnect Sarajevans to what has always been a playground. At weekends, locals stream up from the riverside to walk leafy paths or hike and even mountain-bike down a relic which, coated in graffiti murals, is now as much art installation as Olympic echo.
If they have the energy, they can continue upwards, following marked trails towards a near-summit mountain hut, named after the local Olympic skier Jure Franko, where Bosnian coffee is served hot and gloopy. (If not, they can sip a latte at the almost-trackside Pino Nature Hotel, another spa retreat where, as photos in reception indicate,
‘That month Sarajevo was the centre of the world – it just didn’t feel real’
guests have included Novak Djokovic.) Franko was the home-terrace hero of 1984: a speedy Slovenian who grabbed a silver for Yugoslavia in the giant slalom, to ecstatic scenes in the grandstands.
Sarajevo had Olympic Fever, but the gleam of the games extended far beyond the sporting arena. “The Olympics were great PR for Sarajevo culture,” explains Davor Sucic. Better known by his stage name Sejo Sexon, Sucic was – and is – one of Bosnia’s foremost musical icons: a rock star whose band Zabranjeno Pusenje emerged from the city’s febrile punk movement in the early 1980s.
“Sarajevo had the most interesting music scene in Yugoslavia,” he says, “but there was a perception of the city as provincial. The Olympics changed that. Journalists came. People came. Suddenly, we had a much bigger audience.”
Now 60, he still does. We are chatting in the Hotel Europe bar and there are double-takes from some who enter, but no one bothers him. Outside, the city is starting to swirl in the late afternoon, lamb sizzling on the grills at the restaurants of Bascarsija, the district forever day-dreaming somewhere in the 1770s.
Half a mile to the west, the Olympic Museum is firmly tethered to 1984, dipping back into those sunny, snowy days before the soldiers came. There is a tender nostalgia to this showcase: an image of figure-skater Sanda Dubravcic lighting the Olympic flame; a bobsleigh salvaged from Trebevic; Franko’s skis; a photo of Torvill and Dean’s perfect scoreboard, a chorus line of 6.0s. On one wall, Vucko, the games’ cartoonwolf mascot, gives an enduring grin.
Another mile to the north, the stadium complex feels trapped between the 1980s and the 1990s. On the hill above, the Lav (Lion) cemetery is a swathe of sorrow, every other grave seeming to bear the year 1992. Below, the Zetra arena, where Torvill and Dean skated, has survived – in a way. Shelled into oblivion, it had to be rebuilt, starting in 1997. There was financial help from Barcelona, which hosted the 1992 Summer Olympics just as Sarajevo was falling into the abyss, and felt obliged to offer assistance.
The relationship lingers. Next door, at the body’s offices, Dr Izet Rado, the vice-president of the Olympic Committee of Bosnia and Herzegovina, talks of a potential joint bid from the two cities for the 2034 Winter Olympics – a games that will mark the 50th anniversary of Sarajevo 1984. “It is a realistic project,” he says. “Before 1984, no one had heard of Sarajevo. But we won the right to be the host. It would mean so much to be so again.”
‘There was a perception of the city as provincial. Suddenly, we had a much bigger audience’
Arrivals in Bosnia and Herzegovina must present proof of full vaccination, a negative PCR test no older than 48 hours, or a certificate of recovery from a doctor. For full details of entry, see gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice