Text by Jasmina Tešanović | Photo by Goranka Matic (Link to larger size).

You cannot miss something you didn't have, you cannot go back somewhere you've never been.

I've never been in Sarajevo: not in the seventies, when it had the best rock scene and street smarts culture in Yugoslavia, not in the eighties, when the winter Olympic games where held there in 1984. Or in the nineties, when the Serb-military committed a cruel and prolonged act of urbancide.

Sarajevo is a meta place and a meta name for Balkan history: the first world war was caused when a student from Sarajevo shot the Austrian Archduke. Though I never visited Sarajevo, the city was part of my life: I listened to the music of Bjelo Dugme and Goran Bregovic, I saw the films of Kustirica. When war came, my women peace activists made public standing in the Sarajevo square in solidarity with the murdered city. I published a book from the Sarajevo author Alma Lazervska in the midst of the war. I have family and relatives who fled the city or survived its ruin.

Now, in 2007, in a car, I finally descend from the hills into the city. There is a soccer match in town, wild kids on adrenalin, swarming among the police.

The famous quince trees are in flower, just like they say in the old "sevdalinka" folksongs. During the war, we pacifists sang mournful sevdalinkas for years on end, as a hymn of never lost friendships and solidarity. My driver is a retired policeman, with a yellow tie and a black leather jacket. He chain-smokes and drinks heavy Bosnian coffee, and yet, due to a war injury, he has literally had no stomach for the past eleven years.

We bound along the road past cemeteries of all creeds and races: improvised, extended, continuous fields of human slaughter.

We leave the car among brand new houses, tall hills and mountains under a clear blue sky, the sun and the moon...with a muezzin's voice singing loudly all over the downtown... We walk the narrow cobblestoned streets, the shops of sweets, the best barbecue in the Balkans, oriental slippers and silks... We sit to drink a champagne cocktail in a bar called Egypt, then some homemade red wine which feels hallucinatory... We all eat and talk constantly: we women guests form former Yugoslavia, and our hosts, who are taking us to the local parliament to celebrate our humanitarian work.

The war is not even mentioned anymore, there is very little shell or bullet damage visible.... People at a nearby table are talking about a bomb which once exploded in the market, killing civilians lined up for food in the besieged city, but they also mention a big monument to all the partisans who fought the Nazis in the second world war.

My cab driver is sensing my Belgrade accent: he points out a big imperial scary looking building; that's where Tito's army was quartered was when the war broke out... People, he says, can be beasts on all sides... The Bosnians wanted to kill a 19 year old soldier from Belgrade who was doing his regular military service here. I took him in my own house for a month until I managed to smuggle him back home to Serbia.

As I look at his eager face I suddenly have a feeling that he might be my relative... His name is Jasmin, and every third woman here is called Jasmina or Jasminka. I even met a couple of Tesanovic people.

The girls in the streets are dressed in cheap westernized gear with a lot of creativity and fuss. They have my height, and the slender legs of shepherd girls from the banks of the River Neretva in Herzegovina. From my hotel window I see a hospital, a white graveyard, glittering snow-topped mountains... The moon is silver and thin and low as in the Thousand and One Nights.

I've never been before in Sarajevo, for, as a Serb, I didn't have the guts to face the slaughter my people were doing in my name. But I swear I never abandoned it. Dream-cities don't require your presence even when they turn into nightmares.

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Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Jasmina Tešanović: Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women 
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

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