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Stef O’ Driscoll (award-winning theatre director) and Mark Griffin (St Mary’s University College, London), friends I’ve made through my thespian daughter, are off to Sarajevo on Friday. They want to dramatise some of the wonderful stories in Miljenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories on how the young people of Sarajevo from the different communities – Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs – helped each other to survive during the siege. They plan to stage performances in London and in Bosnia.
They’ll spend much of their time listening, I suspect, and it will be hard.
Amila and Niko at Blackburn Cathedral
We had a wonderful time in London this evening with some of the Bosnians who have been taking part in the Forgiveness Project exhibition at Blackburn Cathedral. They fly home tomorrow morning. Stef met Silva (a young woman from the Croat community), Amila (who teaches English in Tuzla and is connected to the beautiful madrassa there) and Niko (Deputy Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Tuzla area).
In a wholly uninspiring hotel lobby, conversation ranged from the dreadful and continuing pain of multiple and unexplainable bereavement, to justice denied, the thirst in Bosnia for creativity, beauty and the arts, the power of women’s stories and of the life-giving and transformative possibilities of carefully devised theatre. It’s impossible to have conversations like these with our Bosnian friends without a great deal of laughter, too – I love it.
I also caught sight of Chris and Anjum from Blackburn Cathedral, who worked hard to bring our Bosnian friends to the UK. We’re hoping that the final report of the original UK visit in October 2009 will be the kind of document that people will say, “If you’re going to Bosnia, read this”.
The best laid plans . . . no wi-fi at the motel, but I have an hour’s free time now in central Sarajevo and have found an internet cafe: Bosnian keyboard (not quite qwerty and lots of extra accents). Central Sarajevo is buzzy and feels like a petite Paris or Vienna – warm sunshine, lots of cafes and smart shops, stylish young people, a river, cathedrals. Extras include small, Ottoman-style mosques, powerful one-shot turkish coffee and some mortar and bullet damage on the buildings. One of our hosts over lunch told me about three families (Serb Orthodox, Bosniak and Croatian Roman Catholic) sharing a small block of flats during the siege who took it in turns to go to the water pump each day (risking sniper fire) to get water for all the families. The history, particularly C20th, inevitably comes up a lot. Getting directions to this cafe I was told, “near the assasination point”. The houses on the outskirts of town are like Swiss chalets – large, detached, not in rows and with balconies and pitched roofs. Inside: IKEA no, solid wooden unpainted furniture yes.
At the moment we are trying both to get to know one another (we are five Muslims and seven Christians from the UK – although it isn’t obvious at a glance who is what) and also to start meeting Bosnians and learn about what’s happening here.
Over half of Europe is right out of my comfort zone – the iron curtain had a much more profound effect on my understanding than I’d realised. I’m far better informed about countries with colonial & trading links to the UK, with a bit of western Europe thrown in.
Having visited Andalusia, I was fascinated to meet a Jewish woman from the Sephardic tradition here whose family was thrown out of Spain after the reconquista. But just like the shocking events in Salonica, the Jews from here were also put on trains to the extermination camps. There was an island off the Dalmation coast which had a concentration camp. And it was people from two countries within my comfort zone, Italy and Germany, who were responsible.
We met Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Roman Catholic and Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) religious leaders at the Inter Religious Council this morning. Building civil society, and how religious groups can support that, is a challenge. I was interested, with my faith literacy hat on, to hear about the Council’s booklets and activities designed to inform the different communities about the variety of religious customs in Bosnia. Information certainly helps and I wonder whether the telling of personal stories about our heritage and values, as we do, might add to the experience of understanding one another. There was some discussion on the merits of confessional and information-only teaching of RE in schools. A very formal meeting.
