Packed In Oil

A wonderfully quirky word: "iddis," which is Norwegian for "sardine label collecting."  Apparently, there are whole organizations and clubs devoted to iddis.  No wonder: there are literally tens of thousands of different labels to collect.  These examples are displayed at the Norwegian fish canning museum, in Stavanger.  Labels make up only a small part of the collection; there are old wrenches and smokers, steam baskets and fish grinders, de-headers and tin-pressers, label printers and lid crimpers.  The building itself is an old tinning factory, with a century-old patina and beautiful light.
Stavanger is a pleasant seaside town with a turbulent history of depression and wealth, boom and bust. Because it's currently booming, there are over a dozen museums open.  On a rainy day in early September, as the sea churned grey and the populace huddled in their offices and bars, we visited two very interesting, very different ones: the Norsk Hermetikkmuseum (devoted to fish canning) and the Norwegian Petroleum Museum.  Together, they give a great picture of the town's glory days, grit and regeneration.

Norwegian Sardines aren't really sardines at all - that's just the category the canners thought would be most marketable.  In fact, there are no "true" sardines in the north Atlantic.  At least, there are none of the Mediterranean fish that popularized the term.  Instead, the most common "sardine" canned in Stavanger - and the type you'll still find in a tin of King Oscars - is really brisling.  These tiny little fish are actually mature when they're caught and canned, unlike true sardines which are too large at maturity to fit.  Also called European sprats (binomial: Sprattus sprattus), brisling are only about as big as  a baby carrot.
Along with herring, these delicious little fish made up the backbone of Stavanger's canning industry between the 1880's and the 1950's, when the industry fell on hard times.

Norway's fjords have always been full of fish, but - until industrial canning was invented - there was no way for those fish to be exported in any great quantity.  Sardine tins changed that, and Stavanger was at the forefront of the fish boom.
The sprats were caught in the fjords around Stavanger during the summer, from about May until October.  They arrived at the town docks packed with ice in wooden boxes.  At the cannery, they were salted, threaded onto steel rods, smoked, de-headed (first with scissors, later with purpose-built machines), laid into the cans by hand and filled in with oil.  Before a "seaming" machine was invented to seal the lids in place, the cans were soldered shut by hand.  When they were closed up, the cans were then steam-sterilized, washed, labeled and put into crates.

The floors creak, the walls are rough plaster.  Upstairs, one can peek into the old bathrooms and see a grainy film about the fishing ships.  Sardines are for sale in the entryway.  They advertise monthly sardine-smoking events, where one can taste "freshly smoked brisling from woodburning stoves."  It's all very low key and quiet.  Amazingly, the first-wave industrial equipment that was in use here lasted almost all the way until the middle of the twentieth century.  Stavanger's canning problem, eventually, wasn't a scarcity of fish.  They were just trying to compete using antiquated machinery.  Partly, that's what gives the museum its charm.

Stavanger's depression began even before the canneries closed.  The town was one of the scruffiest in Norway during the 1950's and '60's, with high unemployment and no great industry.  Even as other cities along the west coast were thriving, Stavanger wallowed.
Amazing what a few billion barrels of oil can do for a place.
Prominently displayed on the wharf, the Norwegian Petroleum Museum (Norsk Oljemuseum) stands as blocky, shiny testament to the new economy.  Here, monumental, spaceship-like machines crowd together behind sparkling glass.  Tubes droop, scuba gear hangs in the air, robot claws grasp at nothing.  Norway's oil mostly lies deep underwater, and the museum's focus is on the difficulties involved in extracting it.

At the beginning of the 1970's, Norway's government chose Stavanger to be the landfall point and onshore base for the country's new offshore drilling operations.  At the time, this was regionally significant, but not overwhelming news - there were far bigger petroleum producers in the world.  Now, though, it is a big deal.  Norway is currently the fifth largest oil exporter on earth and the sixth most productive natural gas country.  Statoil, the state-run Norwegian oil venture, is based in Stavanger.  Housing prices are nearly as high as in Oslo.  The streets are full of designer boutiques.  The city is scruffy no longer.
Even in miniature, shown as models, the offshore derricks are impossibly complex.  At tiny scale, they still towered over us - these platforms are virtually cities unto themselves, with room for thousands of occupants to live complete lives, miles away from land.

The world's largest drill bit is the first thing one encounters in the lobby.  It weighs almost two tons, and is about the size of a small armchair, with ugly, three-part teeth beneath it and a bolt on top as thick as a man's leg.  It's been cleaned up, of course, but it still has the snarled, dinged look of a tool-box regular.
The Ojlemuseum's greatest accomplishment, from a curatorial standpoint, is the way it displays very grimy, much-used artifacts in a clean, graceful way.  There are old control panels and submarines, wetsuits and blowout-plugs - all dented and abraded.  The space looks amazing.  The portrayal of the oil-industry, however, is a little defensive and heavy-handed.  It should be enough for a museum to focus on these deep sea drilling machines.  Nobody asked them to lay out an argument for petroleum.

One could spend a whole day there.  There are exhibits devoted to the earth's geologic history, to the primeval swamps that created the oil and to life onboard the platforms.  We counted three different movie rooms.  A large part of the museum is actually built on stilts out over the harbor.  There's a well-regarded restaurant.  In the lobby, a sign pointed the way to a meeting room; ExxonMobil apparently had a group visiting.  One (rather perplexing) feature got the kids all riled up - it was some sort of escape chute.  We're not sure where it led.

Bergen's Hanseatic Bryggen

This is Norway's "city of rain." On wooden streets – even if they are storm-soaked and age-softened – footsteps echo so loud that two people can sound like a troop.  Bergen’s Bryggen (the name translates to “wharf”) is a neighborhood of lilting gutters, odd angles, old houses, blind corners, narrow spaces and medieval history.
Created in the 11th century, settled by the Hanseatic league in the 14th and updated during the late renaissance, the pretty stretch of buildings is the symbol of Bergen, a UNESCO site and an unfailingly charming tourist trap.

At every Bryggen entrance, there’s a big “no smoking” sign.  It seems silly on wet days in September, but the city is truly worried.  Most of the buildings have burned down at one time or another.  Fire destroyed most of the buildings in 1476 and 1702.  In 1955, several of the waterside houses were flattened in a conflagration that burned more than one third of Bergen.  In each case, the buildings were carefully reconstructed according to the original settlement plans, with old tools and methods  - which is interesting in the 20th century, but is astounding for the 15th and early 18th centuries.
The result is a fascinating area of boarded canyons and dripping clearings, filled with shops and confused tourists.

The Hanseatic League was, during the middle centuries of the last millennium, the pre-eminently powerful trading force in northern-coastal Europe.  The German-based association of tradesmen (all of them bachelors, all of them sworn to German law and the Holy Roman Emperor) existed as a kind of extra-state, self-governing partnership.  They set up enclaves in cities from London to Novgorod, with closely-held internal management, and essentially built their own cities - Gdansk, Bruges, Malmo - where they could.
Bergen was an outlier, far away from the north coast of the continental mass.  Still, its sea wealth and northern location made it a valuable outpost, and it became a major Hanseatic port. The Bryggen kontor, or enclave, was established in 1360, mainly to trade in Atlantic fish (which was brought to the south) and southern grains (which the people of Norway had a difficult time growing).  As a Hanseatic settlement, it was excused from local rulership and laws.  The traders mostly kept to themselves.

Wandering through the Bergen Bryggen, it's easy to feel off-kilter, as though you've just stepped off a rolling ship's deck.  None of the lines are plumb, none of the windows seem square.  People bump into eachother in wooden passageways - the whole place seems more in danger of tipping over than burning up.  It's especially off-kilter after the square lines of the modern town and present-day Norway in general.
In Bergen, like in most Hanseatic enclaves, the trading center was a compact and well-guarded compound close to the docks.  These mini-towns consisted of the trader's houses, storerooms and shops, all enclosing open courtyards where markets were held and goods were unloaded.  Today, there are high-price hair salons and antique stores, souvenir shops, art galleries and clothing boutiques scattered along the wooden walls.  They all have a quaint, nordic softness to them; frayed wool and well-worn wood, moose-heads hung on the walls, bold paints and grey skies overhead.  The courtyards are of well-rounded cobblestones.  The shop-proprietors are Norwegian now - not German - and generally they trade in tourism.

The Bryggen is one of those places that at first looks tiny, then feels huge, then reverts back to feeling small.  From across the harbor, it appears as a simple row of buildings.  A few minutes wandering through wooden alleys makes it seem like an endless sequence of corners and uneven boards.  Roofs hang, second-floor protrusions loom.  Then, it runs out - a few turns through and one realizes they've passed the same courtyard twice, the same yarn store three times.

A City East and West

There's a line down the middle of Sarajevo, but it's not one you'd expect.  On one side is the Morića Han, a perfect example of the east.  There's something both soothing and sharp about carpet sellers, with their bright eyes in the semi darkness and their still faces.  One feels one shouldn't trust them, with their treasures from Persia and Afghanistan stacked in neat piles.  Still, it's impossible not to be drawn in; they're merchants in intrigue more than yarn.  The Morića Han is full of these people, the smell of old wool and dusty light.  An inn and trading station for centuries, the Han's ancient back rooms still have some imprint of the caravans and the old empire.
Sarajevo was once the second most important Ottoman city, a huge metropolis and site of the largest Islamic library in the world.  On this side of town, legends of the Orient still swirl in the alleys.

On the other side of town, in the yellow hued "Markale," vendors display hanging garlands of sausages and white cheese under fluorescent light.  The pink fleshiness of the marketgoers and mongers, the height of the windows, the meaty offerings, the airy environs - this could be a hall in Salzburg, it feels and looks so Western.  This is the other bank of Sarajevo's current, where the aesthetic of a different empire washed up and stuck.

Sarajevo is a city with one personality and two faces.  Taking an evening stroll with the locals on Ferhadija street is an exercise in patience.  The walking is slow, we often got caught in the snarl of children, high heels, amorous couples.  Moving slowly west, the buildings begin in the classic Ottoman style, with looming mosques, low caravanseries and markets built in grey brick and red tile.  Then, without warning, the landscape shifts to central europe, with pastel walls and secessionist-white moldings.  There is literally a line in the street where the buildings change. Standing there, one can look east into the Ottoman past and the 1600's, then turn and face the west, Austro-Hungary and the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In the outskirts, there are shrapnel holes and Tito's buildings, the concrete immensity of the TV station and the sprawl of the olympic village. But Sarajevo condenses and intensifies as it closes in on itself, until the narrow lanes and coffee shops press up against one another in a traffic jam of tables and young people.  It's particularly hectic in the Ottoman side of the old town.  We've spent hours wandering ćevapi scented courtyards and hookah-smokey passages.  It's the kind of city where one glimpses things in dark doorways.  Outside our hotel, this tight cluster of tables hums with conversation and laughter until the small hours of the morning - there are three different establishments, but they are packed in so closely that it's impossible to tell where one place's tables begin and the others end.

The western half has its share of atmospheric cafes and bars, with a different kind of nostalgia and a more local clientele.  At Zlatna Ribica (Goldfish Bar), old televisions flicker black and white and stylish young people drink rakija at brass tables.  It's a spectacle, a re-imagination of Lautrec's Paris by way of Leningrad.  After an hour or so of drinks, the waiter said he didn't have change for us - he told us to take our money and come back later to pay.
There's a big architectural difference, but the two sides of Old Sarajevo still feel like the same city.  It's a fairly homogenous capital, and almost everyone, everywhere, is Muslim and Bosniak.  The culture doesn't change from place to place, only the sense of history.

The Austro-Hungarian part of town is laid out in cleaner lines and wider avenues.  Not long after the Habsburgs acquired the city in the 1870's, a large fire destroyed much of the existing city.  Austrian engineers and city planners took it as an opportunity to begin afresh and experiment.  Trolley cars were installed in 1885 as a test before they were brought to Vienna, and architects were given space to work in the new Secessionist movement style.

There are many cities where east comes up against west. It's a common travel trope, used to give some feeling to places in the middle.  In Sarajevo, the physical division is clearer than other places, even if the culture is more nuanced - it's said that people from Asia feel that Sarajevo is very western, people from Europe feel that it's Oriental.  Looking up, minarets jostle against steeples.  Sarajevo's young people have embraced a low-key version of Islam - headscarves are a fashion statement more than a religious one, the prevailing climate is a mix of liquor, cigarettes and the call to prayer.  The cosmopolitanism in the street is of the violin case and bookishness variety.

The so called "Latin" bridge transcends all of Sarajevo's periods. It's now the most touristed landmark in the city, more for what it represents to the world than to the city. Built in wood under the early emperors and later shored up with stone, the little, three-arched walkway is now backed by a line of colorful, Austrian-style townhouses.  Of course, the bridge is famous for a different reason - this is the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914, helping to bring about the first world war.  It's a funny place to be so weighted with history.  The water underneath is barely a trickle, the span isn't long.  On the shadier side, a booth serves coffee and soft drinks to visitors.  A young American man asked us about the lemonade one morning.  He was fresh off the bus and seemed excited, we were at the end of our stay and feeling complacent.  As he sat down and looked at the city, we thought about what he was going to make of Sarajevo - how surprising it would be, how adventurous.

Sarajevo Under Siege, Survival Underground

Near the Sarajevo Airport, in the suburb of Butmir, is a house that used to belong to the Kolar family.  Its exterior is pockmarked in that now familiar Bosnian way, the markings of bullets, shrapnel, war.  It looks like any house in a quiet spot outside the bustle of the city, but is actually one of the most important sites in Sarajevo.  Two tour buses pulled in while we were there, one carried a group of Chinese daytrippers, the other had arrived all the way from Turkey. Backpackers set down their loads at the entrance, most likely visiting before or after a flight.  Our own journey there was courtesy of a taxi driver named Rasim.  Each of us were there to see something undeniably important.  In the family's backyard, in the side of a grassy mound, is the southern entrance of the Sarajevo Tunnel, the secret weapon with which the people of Sarajevo managed to survive during the longest siege of any capital city in modern history.  One thousand days.  "Without the tunnel, everybody dies," said Rasim.

The roughly 3,000 ft long tunnel was devised by the Bosnian army and dug by volunteers over the first seven months of 1993.  The men worked in four hours shifts around the clock to secretly connect blockaded Sarajevo with the "free" or "neutral" area near the airport, which was Bosnian held and UN controlled.  On July 30th, two excavators working from opposite sides of the tunnel had finally dug far enough to meet each other.  They shook hands in the middle and hundreds of thousands of lives were given hope.  With the tunnel complete, international humanitarian aid that arrived by plane could be transported into the completely cut-off population inside the city.    Around 20 million tons of food entered the city this way, single-handedly keeping its inhabitants alive for 3 and a half years.  

"I went through the tunnel twice," Rasim recounted casually.  Once, was to pick up a package sent from his cousin.  The other was to shop for food in the Bosnian-held territory on the other side. "It was much cheaper," he said, "inside the city, food was ten times the price!"  He said this like a neighbor telling you about their money-saving drive to Costco as opposed to a man who lived in a blockaded city in which any food that remained or was smuggled in was sold for high prices by war profiteers.  It never ceases to amaze me how these stories are told to us with such ease.   How the definition of 'normal' can be so drastically distorted.

"Perhaps for people who experienced very terrible things, it would be harder to come back to Sarajevo," but not for her, Mia reasoned to us over dinner.   Just before meeting her, we were told by a mutual friend that she had escaped through the tunnel in 1995 - at nineteen years old and at the edge of starvation.   She and her husband were handed plane tickets to Burlington, Vermont on the other side and were whisked off to the Zagreb airport before even being given a meal.   "She only remembers putting her foot in the water," we were told on our walk to meet Mia.   The tunnel had a constant pool of water at its bottom.  Sometimes, it reached knee-height.   Imagine sloshing through the meter wide space with a live, mega watt electric cable running alongside your hunched head. In the dark.   It would be scary if the word "scary," just like her use of "terrible," hadn't been so intensely redefined.

Mia and her husband were more an exception than the rule.  Most of the million or so people who made the trip through the Sarajevo Tunnel were bringing supplies in or helping the sick, wounded or very important out.  Government documents were required to enter the tunnel from either side and one way trips out were almost exclusively allotted to children, the elderly, the dying and the dead.   And VIPS, of course, like Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, who was pushed through the tunnel on an armchair rigged up to a trolley by the Kolar family's then-18 year old son, Edis.  A gripping, mostly wordless documentary shown inside the Tunnel Museum had footage of some of these journeys.  As people emerged in the Kolar backyard, the wrinkled matriarch would hand them a cup of water. 

People and food were far from the only transports through the Sarajevo Tunnel.  An arms embargo meant that any weapons or ammunition needed to be smuggled in this way.  Germany provided cables to bring in a little electricity and a few telephone lines.   Oil was piped in, military and medical equipment, everything.   The design of the tunnel was tweaked and updated throughout its three year usage.   Points were widened to allow people to pass each other if coming from opposite directions, a rail line similar to that in mine shafts was added.  When the Serbian forces figured out where the Sarajevo-side entry was a new, stronger entrance was constructed.  Any attempt to collapse the tunnel with bombs was futile, as the it had been ingeniously dug in a wide L shape.  So, even with knowledge of both entry points, the Serbs couldn't pinpoint the underground trail between them.

The original entrance on the Sarajevo side was in the basement of one of these houses.  Nothing is known of who owned it, Rasim wasn't even sure which one it was.  Most likely, the family had abandoned the house in some way before it was chosen as the entryway.  From inside Sarajevo, you see bucolic hillsides all around you.  A natural ring around the city, the forested slopes remind you of mountain air, cold springs and leafy shade while pounding the pavement.  At the very top, after the orange roofs of the hillside villages peter out, the green changes from sweet pea to deep emerald.  The trees get denser and pointier.  This was the Serbian front line.  You can instantly see how easy it was to surround and cut off the city.  While the Serbs held the city from above, showering it with ammunition, blockading it from all the resources one needs to survive, Sarajevans found salvation down below, in the basement of one suburban house and the backyard of another.  Through the Sarajevo Tunnel. The Tunnel Museum is well worth a trip outside the city center. 

The Most Bosnian Town

If one place could claim to really encapsulate this country's identity, spirit and history, it's Jajce.  And to most people, Jajce is this view.  Looking at it reminded me a little of tourist t-shirts that show an artistic rendering of all the key sites in a country.  A composite that could place the Empire State Building side by side with the Statue of Liberty, whose making eyes at the guys of Mount Rushmore from behind the Golden Gate Bridge.  It's like a celebratory diorama.  Bosnia and Herzegovina = water! forests! castles! Medieval churches! Ottoman mosques! the prettiest hillside houses you've ever seen! They're all right there, piled above the town's very own set of waterfalls.  It would be almost twee if it weren't Bosnia.

As a taxi driver told us on our third day in the country, "We have a war every fifty years.  It's tradition!" While that's not precisely true, it's pretty close and Jajce has characteristically played a significant part in each.  Piled up behind and cascading down around the beloved waterfalls that have witnessed it all are reminders of all different chapters.  The 13th century fortress crowns the town, apropos of its status as capital and royal residence of the Bosnian kingdom beginning in the 1420s.  St. Luke's Tower, illuminated on the left side of the skyline, harkens back to this time.  It's the only in tact Medieval Tower on the Balkan Peninsula and was the location of the coronation of the last Bosnian king.  It has been idiosyncratically attached to the side of a mosque since the 1520s, when Ottomans destroyed the church but knew that the historic tower was worth saving.

Across from St. Luke's sits the entrance to the royal catacombs.  It's an underground church, complete with nave, altar and the now-emptied tombs of noblemen, built in the 15th century in just about the final years of the Bosnian kingdom.  The Ottoman Empire was swooping in and the Austro-Hungarian Empire grabbed a hold of Jajce and successfully protected it for around 60 years.  Then, in 1527, Jajce was the very last town in all of Bosnia to fall to the Ottomans.  Like everywhere else, this rule lasted about five centuries - at the end of which, Jajce became Austro-Hungarian once more. Unlike many other places, though, both sides cherished this town.  It never fell into neglect, was not ignored or forgotten.  It retained some of its former-capital luster and in the years before World War I it was treated to an  updated road system and modern infrastructure in the surrounding region. 

The next chapter of Bosnia and Herzegovina's life came, of course, with another war.  It was the big war - and the big turning point.  And, of course, Jajce was right there at the center of it.  In 1943, during World War II, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) met and drew up the documents that would outline the new state of Yugoslavia.  Tito's Yugoslavia.   A museum has been created where this took place, but we found out about it after closing hours.  Instead, we visited the small, but bright Ethnographic Museum.  A television set up amongst costumes and ancient pottery showed a video about wedding rituals.  Three vignettes played on loop, about Catholic, Muslim and Orthodox rituals, respectively.

At ANVOJ, Bosnia and Herzegovina proclaimed itself "neither Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim, but rather Serbian Croatian and Muslim" and guaranteed brotherhood, freedom and equality for all three people.  In the next fifty years, Jajce's population reflected this sentiment, just as its steepled and minaretted skyline does.  Of course, the war challenged this very principle and Jajce was placed in its familiar wartime spotlight once more.   Jajce changed hands many times and was bombarded by every side.  The town's Serbian population fled, as did the Bosnian Muslims, neither group returned to the town in anything near their pre-war numbers. This young boy waved a Croatian flag as part of a long, honking wedding caravan.  Each vehicle has at least one flag bearer, some hung full sized versions over the back window.  This sort of nationalistic pride, which we've seen throughout the country (Banja Luka was covered in Serbian flags)  is worrisome to some in Jajce.  It's uncharacteristic of this town, a symptom of post-war divisions that aren't entirely mended yet.

"All war is stupid," that taxi driver had continued on.  "But ours was the stupidest."  The constant witness, Jajce's waterfalls, would undoubtedly agree.  At some point during the fighting, a hydroelectric power plant up the river was attacked, which caused some major flooding.  The falls were cut down by about a third of their size.  Once 30 meters tall, they are now around 21.  How sadly symbolic that the icon of this most Bosnian citizen, that had survived untouched through all that preceded, was truly hurt by the tragedy of its own people fighting each other.  Still, it gushes and it is beautiful.  It is visited by its fellow residents of Jajce every day.  The town has a unique energy to it.  After dark, the cafes overflow, though you won't necessarily hear bursts of laughter.  The constant rush of water in the background goes with it so well. Maybe that's chicken and egg, though.

Since the conflict, international organizations have been helping to fund the restoration and renovation of Jajce's historic monuments.  There are 24 protected national monuments in what's not a very large place.  Above, the Esma Sultana Mosque sits (newly) pretty.  This was once the most important mosque in the region but was destroyed - along with the town's Serbian Orthodox Church - during the war in the 90s.  It's exterior has been redone, but the inside is still a work in progress.  The first historic buildings to be worked on, of course, were those that make up that iconic waterfall panorama.  That view is an icon, the "Mostar's Old Bridge" of Northwest Bosnia.  To leave it in shambles would have felt too sad.

You don't get the sense that people see themselves as living in what could really become a museum town.  Excavations don't take place here, even though accidental findings date back to Aneolithic times.  The breakfast room of our hotel has a glass floor, beneath which are Roman ruins found during construction.  Luckily, they didn't just cement over them. But one gets the feeling someone else may have.  "The owner is Swiss," we were told by someone not associated with the hotel.  As if that explained the very logical, thoughtful decision to keep the findings exposed to the public. Even the Mithras Temple, the most ancient jewel in Jajce's sightseeing crown, was discovered by accident during construction.  It was found underground, hidden like all temples to this god are.

Now, it is in pieces, above ground, in a green tinted glass box by a condominium behind a Maxi supermarket.  It's obviously in the process of being fixed up, completely moved from its original home to help stop the effects of moisture damage.  A sign gives the estimated date of restoration completion as April of last year.  Like a lot of things, this is probably a combination of a lack of funds and interest.  Maybe Jajce just doesn't know what to do with their history anymore.  Looking back at all of their amazing town's past may feel impossible without also seeing the events that took place between then and now.  It is easier to look forward, to stroll by the waterfall and look out toward the future while the rest of us are taking little tours of their past.

The Frontier: Bosnian Krajina

We came up to the Krajina trying to get out into the wilderness, lured by stories of river rafting and ancient castles.  We found the edge of Bosnia, where the country long ago mixed and bled into the world outside.
A frontier is both one thing and another.  The very meaning of the word suggests two sides, where something comes up against the unknown, or the other.  The Bosanska Krajina - or "Bosnian Frontier" - is a place where war has always been close at hand, where the people are quiet and tough, where minarets rise beside cornfields and river trout jump at flies.  This is the most beautiful and wild corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, pushed up into the sickle of Croatia and overflowing with rivers and pretty towns.

In Banja Luka, government buildings still fly the Serbian war flag. In the northern plains and forests, Muslim farmers and loggers make up the vast majority. In 1992, the Bosanska Krajina was swept over by fighting. A quick and ugly front sprang up between towns and ruined any chance for camaraderie in the future.  The combatants - Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks - have mostly withdrawn to their own corners, creating homogenous enclaves where once there were ethnic mixes. Wounds are licked.  Life goes on.
An old name for the Krajina was the "Ljuta Krajina," or the "angry frontier."  It's been at the heart of almost every conflict fought in this part of the world: the fault line between Roman Dalmatia and the invading slavs, the grating edge between Austro-Hungaria and the Ottomans, the headquarters of the Yugoslav partisans during WWII, the bloody site of Serb concentration camps during the conflict of the nineties. War is ingrained in the landscape.

On the other hand, the area is also very peaceful, even bucolic.  Farmland abuts pine forests, there are countless woodland springs and the soft, low mountains have a sentimental resemblance to old-europe or New England.  If the people are reserved, they're also determined and hard working. Towns like Bihac, Jajce and Cazin fill up in the evening with men in from the fields and woods. Tan, broad shouldered youths drink beer in workboots and jeans, a scene that would be familiar in Oklahoma or the Hungarian Puszta.  Tractors rumble through the streets, lamb grills on roadside spits, the food is a hearty mix of grilled meats and potatoes - with some river fish mixed in.

In the dyer valleys between rivers, the land is more yellow hued and open.  To the north of Bosanki Petrovac, we drove through a long expanse of fields.  There were a few houses, but mostly they lay in ruins, shelled during the war.  Much of the land was fallow.  Shepherds huts and carts had replaced the old farms, perched high on the valleysides.  In the intense light of noon, they were like faraway glimpses of the past.  Flocks of sheep moved as one thing, spreading and contracting on the grass.  It was an empty place, where the driving was fast and straight and there were few other cars.

Several thousand Bosniaks were imprisoned, tortured and raped at the Serbian Omarska concentration camp, near the town of Prijedor.  One of the most publicized and awful outrages of the Bosnian war, Omarska was officially referred to as an "investigation center" by the Serbs who had taken control of the region - in truth, between four and five thousand people were shot, beaten or starved to death at the camp before it was shut down.  Mass graves have only partly been exhumed, the Mittal Steel company resumed operations at the town mine after the war and hasn't allowed much investigation.
Cazin, not far away from Omarska, up at the very point of the frontier, came to life in the evenings after the daily Ramazan fasting.  We ate dinner at Papillon restaurant, which served proudly national food.  A man popped in and out of the kitchen with plates and bags of cevapi. Only one other man ate in the restaurant, but there were plenty of other people waiting to bring food home.  We have stopped trying, in this land, to reconcile normalcy with horror.

This was once one of the most ethnically and religiously mixed regions of Yugoslavia, with Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Serbs living together somewhat peaceably.  When this was the end-point of the Ottoman Empire, the government encouraged Muslim farmers and Bosniak families to move here and create a kind of buffer against the Hungarian and Austrian lands beyond.  Later, in the 18th century, Serb herders and mercenaries came to graze sheep and fight against the northern neighbors.  The boundary changed often, allegiances broke generally along religious lines, the Krajina's culture changed much less than its boundaries.
Joseph Broz Tito, the daring young Partisan leader (and later ruler of Yugoslavia) hid his base in a cave near Dvar, in the thick of the Krajina's mountains.  Thousands of German paratroopers failed to capture him there in the embarrassingly unsuccessful Operation Rösselsprung - his escape and the Yugoslav victory helped create a legend after Tito returned.

In truth, our experience in the frontier has had little to do with bloodshed.  We've traveled here like drivers across the American west, covering large distances and letting a larger ambience sink in.  Between busy towns, there are stretches of light and shadow as the trees and plains pass and the sun rises or sinks.  We've come by lakes near Jajce, followed river canyons around Bihac, climbed winding passes through the firs.  The towns, when they appear, are pass-throughs, with sunny-walls and self-contained cultures - a whirl of gossip, wedding halls, rusty trucks and the smell of meat.  Sometimes we stop, sometimes we don't.  In Bosanski Petrovac, we parked our car at the bus station - a place even more transient, where ancient-caravan buses creaked and puttered in from the lands around.  We ate lunch at "Florida Restaurant," where the sign was very faded but the trout was perfectly fresh and tender.

As we licked ice cream in the old castle of Bosanska Krupa, looking down on the Una river, we felt satisfied that we'd made it far enough.  We had a pleasant time doing it, too.  The Bosanska Krajina is a beautiful place to come to grips with history and culture.
For us, this is also the frontier of our journey - the last push into the hinterlands of the Balkans, of southern Europe, middle Europe, wherever it is that we are.  In a few days, we'll be ensconced in Sarajevo, then headed home, then on our last leg - Scandinavia, the British Isles, places that feel especially far removed from heat and confusion, tiny cultures, bombed buildings and Turkish coffee.  We'll leave behind a tangle of roads traveled and looped, borders crossed, towns with impossible names.  This is the last foray into this particular wilderness, and, standing in the breeze atop the castle, we began to sense the end.  Fitting, probably, that this historical middle ground felt like a perfect place to finish the chapter.

Castle Hunting: Ostrožac

Ostrožac castle's been used recently.  That much is clear from the bullet holes in the plaster, the burnt window frames, the shelling holes punched in the walls.  It's not often that one comes across a castle that hasn't outlived its purpose.
The surrounding fields are bucolic enough, like many green pastures around many old fortresses.  There is an abandoned bar on the road below the castle, an old sign on the roof is painted luridly with women in lingerie.  A man chopped wood nearby, his young children kicked a soccer ball.  It made us think, in some ways, about the periods of peace and warfare that every castle went through.  In so much of Europe, that peace has extended now into a kind of permanence that belies millennia of turbulence.  Here in Bosnia, the very quiet - an evening calm, with soft light and chirping insects - seemed to clang against recent violence.

Perched at the edge of a shelf-like plateau, overlooking the pine trees and steep slopes of the Una River valley, Ostrožac is a long, low-walled fortress with two distinct ends and a few intermediary towers on the less steep side.  The gatehouse and keep are fairly standard, with thick-built, mid-medieval style defenses and little nuance.  These are classic designs, much used.  This part is mostly ruined but - as is the way of dense stone - it has held its basic shape and not crumbled much.      This is a rocky, remote corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, nearby to the provincial town of Cazin, but not to much else.
The first surprise is the sculpture garden in the grounds.  There are some two dozen (maybe more) large carvings, all probably done by one artist who liked to experiment with styles.  Some of the pieces are better than others, none have any information by them, none of it seems to be maintained.  In fact, the whole castle is wild feeling and, in all practical terms, unattended - though the grass had been cut sometime recently.

It's always a thrill to feel as though you have the run of the place, and never more so than when there are obvious dangers.  In some castles, everything is fenced-off or protected by guardrails.  Even the most solidly built ramparts are usually off limits, to say nothing of already caved-in floors and rooms with collapsed walls.
At Ostrožac, we were free to wander everywhere - on the narrow battlements, on the very tops of the walls, into the unmarked bowels of the keep.  We clambered and climbed and pleaded with one another to be careful.  It's not for the faint of heart, but the views and experience are both worth the danger.
Sometimes, we find castles like this.  But nothing we've visited has been like the residence part of Ostrožac.

On the far end of the compound, in the most protected and steepest-sided part of the walls, the later Austro-Hungarian owners of the castle built a small, ornate residence during the last throws of their conflict with the Ottomans.  It's a place built more for show than defense, with fanciful turrets and intricate moldings.
There isn't much grandeur left.  This probably wasn't the hardest hit section of the complex during the most recent conflict, but the lighter-weight construction didn't hold up well against bombardment.  The walls were better for graffiti, the floors easily rotted, glass windows broke.  The centuries have treated the stone walls outside better, the old keep still holds its squat shape - this newer part looks like it has been part of a war.  One can still see the remnants of the older walls where the newer material has fallen away, the original framework of the building set in stone.

We explored this waste of cave-ins and scrawl for a while, putting our feet down carefully and counting bulletholes (too many to count, really).  It still seemed surprising that we were even allowed into this part of the castle.  From outside, it looks normal enough - though some of the turrets do lilt and the rooflines aren't all plumb.
It's almost impossible to tell exactly what kind of fighting went on here, but that's nothing unusual - the marks of war are just more recent than in other castles, but the stories are similarly cloudy.  The 1990's were a while ago now, most people here don't like to recount what happened or where.

The castle's earliest form dates to the thirteenth century, but its present shape was mainly formed in the sixteenth century, as the Ottomans were trying to shore up the northwestern reaches of their empire.  They picked a solid bit of slope where the land rose and flattened.  The rise of land that the walls fortify is most easily accessed at only one point, and this is where the original fortifications were built up the strongest.  There are rounded walls enclosing thick inner tower structures.  A long, stone ramp - presumably for cannons to be hauled in - was attached at some point, but doesn't look original.  There were remains of several bonfires inside, and lots of broken glass.  The rough, surviving chambers were in surprisingly good shape.

Later, the Austro-Hungarians took Ostrožac and saw something of a frontier post in it.  At the time, mountain fortresses had mostly been made moot by heavy weaponry, but the symbolism was still important.  The act of restoration - putting their architectural claim on an enemy's castle - was probably done as much to impress the locals as fend off gunmen from Ankara.  In fact, the initial thrust of Austro-Hungarian ownership here came about by semi-forcible annexation, not by direct military action.  The Bosnian "acquisition" was one of the pre-cursors of the first world war, though it occurred in 1878.  At the time, the Ottoman empire was reeling from an extended conflict with Russia, and had little chance to defend itself from the takeover - because the new Habsburg owners of Ostrožac hadn't won it by force, they may have felt that renovations were especially needed to set themselves apart from the previous owners.

Ostrožac is a great castle to visit, perhaps the most whole and impressive in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina.  It's remote, of course, in a far-flung part of the country that is deeply cut by river gorges; the going is slow around here, the roads twist and follow old topographical curves.  But, to find this castle in the pine forests and cornfields is to find a place that feels immediately powerful and multi-faceted.  The older walls are fun in themselves, the sculpture gardens add a bit of intrigue and interest, the marks of recent conflict make it unique.  The landscape is beautiful too, with little towns and minarets outlined in the distant hillsides and thick forests below.  We left feeling as though we'd explored something unlike anything else we'd seen - a place that felt as recently used as it did old and deserted, as though a wave of something ancient had just passed through before us.