Welcome to Sarajevo

I'm fighting sleep, but first impressions are so meaningful and so fleeting, so I want to put down a few thoughts before I keel over in this cozy bed in Sean and Heather's cozy house.

Flying in over the hills over Sarajevo I tried hard to find some difference with Slovenia which I'd left 40 minutes before. The houses had the same red tile roofs, the roads wound up the hills the same way. The houses did seem more spread out, each with its own breathing space of yard, rather than clustered so tightly together, but otherwise, the sight was very similar.

And then among the villages, on a broad flat shoulder of hill was the biggest cemetery I have ever seen. From above it was obvious that it was new, hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of gravestones, all planted together at the same time. Even from that height I could tell the white Muslim pillars from the grey stone crosses. An exceedingly sober reminder of the truth of this place I was going, the recent history of Bosnia. Later in the middle of the city there was another huge cemetery similar to that one, and then yet another one. Sean told me that an estimated 250,000 people were killed in the war. Another one million were displaced and now live outside Bosnia. The population of the country is currently four million. There are other impressions and other visions of what this city was and what it is now becoming, but the sight of that enormous new cemetery will stay with me for a long time.