Andrew Currie Online

After my Turkish coffee, I went for a bit of a stroll, only to see more signs of devastation from the war.

This is Sarajevo’s main cemetary. Many casualties of the war were buried here, but not all. Funerals were, if you can believe it, a favourite target for snipers. So the dead had to be buried either under cover of darkness or anywhere else that was relatively safe, like public parks.

Kyle, Peter, myself and Lisa stop by the monument to Josef Tito.

And even here, we couldn’t escape the signs of fighting.

During the siege of the city, the UN took control of the airport and citizens took advantage of it, building a tunnel underneath to smuggle people out and supplies in.

The twenty meteres or so of tunnel that remains has been turned into a museum, so that younger generations of Bosnians will be able to understand what their country went through. He also has kittens!

This is one of the gates leading to Camp Butmir, in Sarajevo. The multi-national facility was certainly impressive, but the city proper had much more to offer in the way of photo opps…

This pleasant block of apartments sits within the jurisdiction of the United Nations-supported local government.

And literally across the street is this mess, under the jurisdiction of the breakaway government and not supported by the United Nations. Think the UN is trying to send a message to someone?

If you didn’t already know, Sarajevo was synonymous with war even before its thousand-day siege. This is the bridge where the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Serbia was assassinated in 1914, the event which kicked off the First World War.

Signs of gunfire from the latter half of the century can still be seen throughout the city.

That’s not to say, of course, that Sarajevo isn’t a pleasant place to spend an afternoon. Here’s me enjoying a good, strong cup of Turkish coffee.

Our ragtag team of merrymakers weren’t the only guests at Castle Greyskull; a Hungarian SFOR unit was stopping over as well. Here’s me hamming it up with some of ‘em, hoisting a variant of the famous Russian AK-47 above my knobby knees.

This is Maggie, an abused dog who was adopted by the base, and who stole everyone’s heart.

A group shot of the troupe in our emergency gear… In case the bus broke down in no-man’s land everyone who rode it was issued a hockey bag containing a helmet, flak jacket, gas mask and a day’s worth of rations.

As a further safety precaution we were escorted by jeep into the centre of Drvar. What our escorts didn’t know is that we had come into town the evening before, on bicycles.

Asshole of the world? Well, Drvar is pretty rundown, but no… This is the entrance to the caves where General Tito hid from the Nazis during the Second World War.

We didn’t get keys to the city, but Shag singer Sandra Volodoff did get some hand-picked flowers from a local goat-wrangler…