Rick Steves Travel as a Political Act

by Rick Steves

  And then, as my eyes wandered to the curiously overgrown ruined building across the street, I noticed bricked-up, pointed Islamic arches…and realized it was once a mosque. As if surveying a horrible crime scene, I had to walk through its backyard. It was a no-man’s land of broken concrete and glass. A single half-knocked-over, turban-shaped tombstone still managed to stand. The prayer niche inside, where no one prays anymore, faced a vacant lot.

  The idea that there had recently been a bloody war in this country is abstract until you actually come here. Walking these streets, I talked with locals about the cruel quirkiness of this war. The towns that got off relatively easy were the ones with huge majorities of one or the other faction. Towns with the most bloodshed and destruction were the most diverse—where no single ethnic group dominated. Because Nevesinje was a predominantly Orthodox town, the Serbs killed or forced out the Muslims and destroyed their mosque. Surviving Muslim refugees reportedly had to walk for a week over a mountain pass to safety in Mostar—where, Serbs like to say, “They found better living conditions anyway.”

  A ruined mosque is a silent reminder of sectarian fighting in a now thoroughly Serbian, and therefore Orthodox Christian, town.

  Remaining impartial is an ongoing challenge. It’s so tempting to think of the Muslims—who were brutalized in many parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina—as the “victims.” But when traveling here, I have to keep reminding myself that elsewhere in this conflict, Serbs or Croats were victimized in much the same way. Early in the war, outcast Serbs migrated to safety in the opposite direction—from Mostar to Nevesinje. On the hillside overlooking Mostar are the ruins of a once-magnificent Serbian Orthodox church—now demolished, just like that mosque in Nevesinje. Travel allows you to fill out a balanced view of a troubled region.

  Considering the haphazardness of war, I remembered how in France’s charming Alsace (the region bordering Germany), all towns go back centuries—but those with the misfortune to be caught in the steamroller of war don’t have a building standing from before 1945. I recalled that in England, the town of Chester survived while the Nazis leveled nearby Coventry so thoroughly that it brought a new word into the language for bombing to smithereens—to “coventrate” a place. And I remembered the confused patchwork of Dubrovnik’s old and new tile roofs. These images—and now this sad, ruined mosque—all humanized the bleak reality and random heartbreak of sectarian strife and war.

  Ready to move on, I climbed into my little car, left Nevesinje, and drove out of the mountains. My destination was a city that once symbolized East and West coming together peacefully, then symbolized just the opposite, and today seems to be enjoying a tentative new spirit of peaceful coexistence: Mostar.

  Bosnian Hormones and a Shiny New Cemetery

  Exploring the city of Mostar—with its vibrant humanity and the persistent reminders of its recent and terrible war—was both exhilarating and exhausting.

  Mostar represents the best and the worst of Yugoslavia. During the Tito years, it was an idyllic mingling of cultures—Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Bosniaks living together in relative harmony, their differences spanned by an Old Bridge that symbolized an optimistic vision of a Yugoslavia where ethnicity didn’t matter. And yet, as the country unraveled in the early 1990s, Mostar was gripped by a gory three-way war among those same groups. Not that long ago, the people I now encountered here—those who brought me a coffee at a café, stopped for me when I jaywalked, showed off their paintings, and directed the church choir—had been killing each other.

  Mostar’s 400-year-old, Turkish-style stone bridge—with its elegant, single, pointed arch—was symbolic of the town’s status as the place where East met West in Europe. Then, during the 1990s, Mostar became the tragic poster child of the Bosnian war. Across the world, people felt the town’s pain when its beloved bridge—bombarded for days from the hilltop above—finally collapsed into the river.

  Mostar’s beloved, Turkish-style Old Bridge is rebuilt and once again brings hope that East and West can meet and mix gracefully.

  Now the bridge has been rebuilt, and Mostar is putting itself back together. But the scars of war are still evident. Most of the Serbs who once lived here have fled deeper into the countryside, into the Republika Srpska. The two groups who still live here are effectively segregated along the front line that divided them during wartime: the Muslims on the east side and the Croats on the west. While the two groups are making some efforts at reintegration, progress is slow. In 2005, some young Mostarians unveiled a statue of Bruce Lee, who they saw as symbolizing the fight for positive values that all sides could identify with. Lee, who struggled against ethnic divisions between Chinese and Americans, represented to the people of Mostar an inspirational bridging of cultures. Sadly, two days after the unveiling, the statue was vandalized.

  But there is progress. As I explored the workaday streets of the town, it seemed that—despite the war damage—Mostar was downright thriving. Masala Square (literally “Place for Prayer” square) is designed for big gatherings. Muslim groups meet at the square before departing for Mecca on their pilgrimage, or Hajj. But on the night of my visit, there was not a hint of prayer. It was prom night. The kids were out…Bosnian hormones were raging. Being young and sexy is a great equalizer. With a beer, loud music, desirability, twinkling stars…and no war…your family’s income and your country’s GDP hardly matter. Today’s 18-year-old Mostarians have no memory of the war that shaped their parents’ lives. Looking at these kids and their dried-apple grandparents clad in dusty black, warming benches on the “Place for Prayer” square, I imagined that there must be quite a generation gap.

  On Mostar’s main square, children of former combatants embrace life…and are ready to party.

  I was swirling in a snow globe of teenagers, and through the commotion, a thirtysomething local came at me with a huge smile: Alen from Orlando. Actually, he’s from Mostar, but fled to Florida during the war and now spends summers with his family here. A fan of my public television series, he immediately offered to show me around his hometown.

  Alen’s local perspective gave Mostar meaning. He pointed to a fig tree growing out of a small minaret. Seeming to speak as much about Mostar’s people as its vegetation, Alen said, “It’s a strange thing in nature…figs can grow with almost no soil.” There were blackened ruins from the war everywhere. When I asked why—after two decades—the ruins had not been touched, Alen explained, “There’s confusion about who owns what. Surviving companies have no money. The Bank of Yugoslavia, which held the mortgages, is now gone. No one will invest until it’s clear who owns the buildings.” I had never considered the financial confusion that follows the breakup of a country, and how it could stunt a society’s redevelopment.

  We walked to a small cemetery congested with more than a hundred white-marble Muslim tombstones. Alen pointed out the dates: Everyone died in 1993, 1994, or 1995. Before 1993, this was a park. When the war heated up, snipers were a constant concern—they’d pick off anyone they saw walking down the street. Because of the ongoing danger, bodies were left for weeks, rotting on the main Boulevard, which had become the front line. Mostar’s cemeteries were too exposed to be used, but this tree-filled park was relatively safe from snipers. People buried their neighbors here…under the cover of darkness.

  This cemetery, once a park, is filled with tombstones all dated 1993, 1994, or 1995.

  Weaving slowly through the tombstones, Alen explained, “In those years, night was the time when we lived. We didn’t walk…we ran. And we dressed in black. There was no electricity. If the Croats didn’t kill us with their bullets, they killed us with their music.” That politically charged, rabble-rousing Croatian pop music, used—apparently effectively—as a kind of psychological torture, was blasting constantly from the Croat side of town.

  As we wandered through town, the sectarian symbolism of the conflict was powerful. Ten minarets pierced Mostar’s skyline like proud Muslim exclamation points. Across the river
, twice as high as the tallest minaret, stood the Croats’ new Catholic church spire. Standing on the reconstructed Old Bridge, I looked at the hilltop high above the town, with its single, bold, and strongly floodlit cross. Alen said, “We believe that cross marks the spot from where they shelled this bridge. They built it there, and floodlight it each night…like a celebration.”

  Firsthand Accounts Make History Spring to Life

  Learning from a local who actually lived through those horrible years made my Mostar visit a particularly rich experience. Thankful for the lessons I learned in Mostar, I considered the value of firsthand accounts in my travels over the years.

  When I was a gawky 14-year-old, my parents took me to Europe. In a dusty village on the border of Austria and Hungary, a family friend introduced me to a sage old man with breadcrumbs in his cartoonish white handlebar moustache. As the man spread lard on rustic bread, he shared his eyewitness account of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. I was thrilled by history as never before.

  A lard-eater with a big moustache made history fun for a 14-year-old future travel writer.

  In Prague, my Czech friend Honza took me on the walk he had taken every night for a week in 1989 with 100,000 of his countrymen as they demanded freedom from their Soviet overlords. The walk culminated in front of a grand building, where Honza said, “Night after night we assembled here, pulled out our key chains, and all jingled them at the president’s window, saying, ‘It’s time for you to go now.’ Then one night we gathered… and he was gone. We had won our freedom.” Hearing Honza tell that story as we walked that same route drilled into me the jubilation of a small country winning its freedom.

  My Norwegian uncle Thor gave me a similarly powerful experience in Oslo. Gazing at mosaic murals in the Oslo City Hall that celebrate the heroics of locals who stood strong against German occupation, Thor told me stories of growing up in a Nazi-ruled Norway. He woke up one morning to find his beloved royal family in exile and German soldiers on every corner. Norway’s resistance fighters took to the snowy mountains, coordinating with brave townspeople smuggling children to safety. Even with the vastly stronger occupying force, Thor told how his country’s national spirit remained strong until that glorious day when the king returned and Norwegian flags flew happily again. As Thor brought the mural to life, I wondered what I would do to win back a freedom lost.

  In Northern Ireland, my guide Stephen was determined to make his country’s struggles vivid. In Belfast, he introduced me to the Felons’ Club—where membership is limited to those who’ve spent at least a year and a day in a British prison for political crimes. Hearing heroic stories of Irish resistance while sharing a Guinness with a celebrity felon gives you an affinity for their struggles. Walking the next day through the green-trimmed gravesites of his prison-mates who starved themselves to death for the cause of Irish independence capped the experience powerfully.

  With a local guide, like Aziz in Morocco, you’ll learn more than just where to get the best tea.

  El Salvador’s history is so tragic and fascinating that anyone you talk to becomes a tour guide. My Salvadoran guides with the greatest impact were the “Mothers of the Disappeared,” who told me their story while leafing through humble scrapbooks showing photographs of their sons’ bodies—mutilated and decapitated. Learning of a cruel government’s actions from those sad mothers left me with lifetime souvenirs: a cynicism about many governments (you can tell by their actions whom they really represent) and an empathy for underdogs courageously standing up to their leaders when necessary.

  Tourists can go to Prague, Norway, Ireland, and Central America and learn nothing of a people’s struggles. Or they can seek out opportunities to connect with people (whether professional guides or accidental guides) who can share perspective-changing stories.

  You can travel all the way to a place as instructive and fascinating as Mostar and not quite cross the goal line. It’s important to reach beyond the tourist-friendly zones and connect with real neighborhoods. That evening, I reflexively headed for the romantic strip of touristy restaurants with English menus and glorious views of the iconic and floodlit bridge. But then, my appetite for education commanded, “Halt.” Rather than the easy, no-stress dinner on the riverfront, I stopped, turned 180 degrees, walked in the opposite direction, and risked earning a lifelong memory.

  I took my business to the Boulevard—the former front line that only now is getting some tentative businesses opening up. I stumbled upon a new-looking café and ordered a plate of stuffed peppers and a Sarajevska beer. The young man who served me had just opened his bar here, on the Muslim side. Immediately across the street stands the new Catholic church, with its oversized steeple. He said that while bullets are no longer flying, he was worried about vandalism from young, hate-filled men across the road. He had been open two months, and so far, no problem. Eating my meal, I was surrounded by poignant sights and sounds. First a warbly call to prayer echoed across town. Then the church bells tolled determinedly across the street. All the while, a little boy with training wheels on his pint-sized bike pedaled vigorously around and around a new sidewalk by a still-bomb-damaged line of buildings and grass too young to walk on. He went faster and faster with each circle.

  The next day, I popped into a small theater where 30 Slovenes (from a part of the former Yugoslavia that avoided the terrible destruction of the war) were watching a short film about the Old Bridge, its destruction, and its rebuilding. The persistent shelling of the venerable bridge, so rich in symbolism, seemed to go on and on. The Slovenes knew the story well. But when the video reached the moment when the bridge finally fell, I heard a sad collective gasp. It reminded me of how Americans feel, even well after 9/11, when watching video of the World Trade Center disappearing into a column of ash. It helped me, if not feel, at least appreciate another country’s pain.

  At lunchtime, I stopped at a tiny grocery store, where I was happy to see a woman I had befriended the day before. She was a gorgeous person, sad to be living in a frustrating economy, and stiff with a piece of shrapnel in her back that doctors decided was safer left in. She made me a hearty ham sandwich and helped me gather the ingredients of what would be a fine picnic. Stooping to pick up items on shelves lower than she could bend to reach, I considered how this woman’s life will be forever marred by that war.

  With a shrapnel souvenir embedded in her back, this shop-keeper will forever feel the pain of a senseless war.

  The sentiment I hear from locals when I visit this region is, “I don’t know how we could have been so stupid to wage that unnecessary war.” I’ve never met anyone here who called the war anything but a tragic mistake. The lesson I learned from their mistake is the importance of taking pluralism within your society seriously. While Bosnian sectarianism is extreme, every society has groups that could come to blows. And failing to find a way to live peacefully together—as the people of Mostar learned—means everybody loses.

  Smells like Bosnian teen spirit.

  That night in Mostar, as the teenagers ripped it up at their dance halls, I lay in bed sorting out my impressions. Until the wee hours, a birthday party raged in the restaurant outside my window. For hours they sang songs. At first I was annoyed. Then I realized that a Bosniak “Beach Boys” party beats a night of shelling. In two hours of sing-alongs, everyone seemed to know all the words… and I didn’t recognize a single tune. In spite of all its challenges and setbacks, I have no doubt that this Bosnian culture will rage on.

  Nouveau Riche and Humble Devotion on the Bay of Kotor

  Circling back to Dubrovnik, I drove south to yet another new nation that emerged from the ashes of Yugoslavia: Montenegro. During my travels through this region, my punch-drunk passport would be stamped and stamped and stamped. While the unification of Europe has made most border crossings feel archaic, the breakup of Yugoslavia has kept them in vogue here. Every time the country splintered, another border was set up. The poorer the country, it seems, the more orn
ate the border formalities. And by European standards, Montenegro is about as poor as it gets. They don’t even have their own currency. With just 600,000 people, they decided, heck, let’s just use euros.

  For me, Montenegro, whose name means “Black Mountain,” has always evoked the fratricidal chaos of a bygone age. I think of a time when fathers in the Balkans taught their sons that “your neighbor’s neighbor is your friend” in anticipation of future sectarian struggles. When, for generation after generation, so-and-so-ovich was pounding on so-and-so-ovich (in Slavic names, “-ovich” means “son,” like Johnson), a mountain stronghold was worth the misery.

  My recent visit showed me that this image is now dated, the country is on an upward trajectory, and many expect to see Montenegro emerging as a sunny new hotspot on the Adriatic coastline. International investors (mostly from Russia and Saudi Arabia) are pouring money into what they hope will become their very own Riviera.

  A zigzag road leads high above the Bay of Kotor to the historic capital of Montenegro.

  Unfortunately, when rich people paste a glitzy facade onto the crumbling infrastructure of a poor country that isn’t ready for it, you get a lot of pizzazz with no substance. I stayed at a supposedly “designer” hotel that, at first glance, felt so elite and exclusive that I expected to see Idi Amin poolside. But the hotel, open just a month, was a comedy of horrible design. I felt like I was their first guest ever. My bathroom was far bigger than many European hotel rooms, but the toilet was jammed in the corner. I had to tuck up my knees to fit. The room was dominated by a big Jacuzzi tub for two, but I am certain there wasn’t enough hot water available to fill it. I doubt it will ever be used (except for something to look at as you’re crunched up on the toilet).