More than 10 years since the end of the four-year siege of Sarajevo, the Bosnian city has emerged buzzing and friendly. Catherine Cleary revisits the city for the first time since the end of the conflict.
They are teetering through the streets with arms linked, smiling and grimacing, these willowy teenage girls in ball gowns. After a night of dancing their high heels are giving them hell on the walk home. It's a familiar vignette of early summer to be found in any city at the end of a school year. Here, at midnight in Sarajevo, it is a picture of how far a city can come more than a decade after a 3½ year siege.
It is difficult not to wonder whether some of these young women in their silk and taffeta hid in dark basements when they were small children, terrified by the noises outside. Chances are some of them went to sleep hungry and cold, their dreams disturbed by the shells and artillery fire that rained down on the city from the mountains and tower blocks looming over it.
Coming back to Sarajevo after more than 10 years is to see a city reborn. In December 1995 I first bumped down in a cargo plane full of soldiers and diplomats to witness New Year's Eve in a city hoping that a tentative peace would hold. The last of the war correspondents were still in situ. The Holiday Inn was charging more than a freelance journalist could afford. Bono came to town, and Pavarotti didn't.
The Dayton Peace Agreement had been signed a fortnight earlier. The sniping and shelling of civilians on the streets had stopped. Heat and light and sugar had returned. But there were bursts of gunfire in the hills every night. Sarajevo was holding its breath, sticky-taped together with UN-issue plastic sheeting, and living on strong coffee, slivovitz (gullet-stripping Bosnian brandy) and Drina cigarettes.
The transformation in the intervening decade has been remarkable, and is almost complete. Hundreds of homes have been rebuilt by their owners, their cheerful terracotta roofs visible from the sky as the scheduled flight arrives from Budapest, gliding through milky white cloud onto the pristine tarmac of the new airport.
Many of the pockmarked and shredded facades of elegant old buildings have been repaired and repainted. Only the Hotel Europa stands out in the city centre, decimated and crumbling, with a round hole on the top floor where a mortar pierced the building.
Already the plate glass is being delivered at the ground floor and in another year it will be hard to remember the snaggle-toothed windows where bricks had been blown out.
In the city centre around Ferhadija, the central boulevard through the city, gleaming shop windows display Parisian levels of consumer goodies, with rows of sugary patisserie, bejewelled shoes and designer babywear. Diesel, Swatch and 18 different flavours of ice cream have come to town. There is a Miss Selfridge, but no McDonald's. The fast food chain was reportedly defeated by local bureaucracy in its attempts to buy a cafe by the city's reconstructed cathedral.
Looking beyond the candy-coloured consumer gloss, the scars of Europe's worst siege since the second World War are still visible in the asphalt. Outside the plate glass Yves Rocher shop window where anti-ageing creams and perfume are displayed, a "Sarajevo rose" is marked out in red on the ground. The splash pattern of damage - the large hole in the centre and "petals" of shrapnel damage radiating out - was left when a mortar killed 17 people in a bread queue in May 1992. The following year the UN declared Sarajevo a safe area but the siege of the city by the Bosnian Serb Romanija Corps continued.
For people who want to remember the war, the signs are easy to find. On school walls around the city, brass plaques line the walls with names, birth dates and death dates; some of them were barely teenagers when they died. A siege museum is being talked about.
In the meantime, tour guides will take visitors on what one group describes as the "Times of Misfortune" tour. In an old Volkswagen Golf (the car that is everywhere in Sarajevo) we drive to the Koevo Stadium, where the football pitch was turned into a cemetery.
"What was amazing was the million hours spent for free by the people," guide Adnan Vlacic explains as he points out the stadium built for Sarajevo's proudest moment, the 1984 Winter Olympics. Five days before the games were due to start there had been no snow, he said. Then the clouds dumped so much snow on the city that it almost hampered the opening.
He prefers the word "aggressor" to "Serbs" when people ask him questions about the war. Many Serbs stayed in the city to help defend it, he points out. Religion and nationality provided convenient cover in a struggle for land and power. He was able to leave with his mother to stay with relatives in Germany three months into the conflict, they clutched the crucial invitation paper to get them out with an aid convoy.
On the road out to Dobrinje on the outskirts of the city, which was once frontline territory, he points out a Slovenian-financed thermal spa and water fun park. A few minutes farther down the muddy and rutted country lane, at the back of a small house, a privately-run museum allows visitors to smell the damp murk of the DB Tunnel. The tunnel was the only route into the city for much of the siege. The narrow passageway, an 800m stretch, was dug from the small house in Dobrinje and from an apartment in Butmir under the airport runway. Its construction shows the materials that were to hand in those times of desperate need.
At the city end they lined the tunnel walls with steel girders taken from the silent factories. From Dobrinje they used pine planks and tree trunks. After four months and four days of back-breaking work the tunnel-diggers met in the middle. Everything - weapons, food, fuel, animals and the injured - were carried through the narrow, low tunnel, and tourists can walk a short stretch of it after watching footage of people passing through it during the war.
"It was our salvation during the war," Vlacic explains. Much of it has collapsed, and he would like to see the government reopen it as an official monument to the efforts to keep the city from falling. The Kolar family ,who lived in the house where the tunnel was dug, still live there and maintain the makeshift museum.
The city has a long way to go. "The story may not be a beautiful one about our history," Vlacic says as we stand overlooking the rooftops, minarets, the dome of the Orthodox Christian church and spires of the Catholic Cathedral, all packed into this small city. "But definitely people have to know what happened." There is still a crippling rate of unemployment (40 per cent, according to official figures) but for visitors it is a city that vibrates with the kind of life that could invigorate even the most jaded traveller. During the siege, journalists were disarmed by the wit, beauty and strength of the city's population.
When asked for directions for a tram to the Holiday Inn (now fully rebuilt), a ticket-seller at a newspaper kiosk comes out and speaks to us. She gets on the tram with us and beckons us off at the next stop. She then walks us through the city for more than 15 minutes. When we spot the "twin towers" of the Unis buildings on what used to be Sniper Alley, she smiles broadly at us and turns on her heel to walk back in the direction she came. In all, she takes more than half an hour to help two strangers who know only the words for "hello" and "thank you" in her language.
There is gallows humour galore here. Gift shops in the Turkish old town sell T-shirts with the caption: "I'm Muslim. Don't panic." Elsewhere, metal craftsmen have fashioned the spent artillery and mortar shells that fell on the city into pens, heavy vases and key rings. The pen I buy for five marks (about €2.60) has a disturbing weight to it.
In the central square, an everlasting game of outdoor chess continues with the men of the city, some young but many of them elderly. Even in the rain, under dripping umbrellas, they stand around the black and white squares, directing the players, praising or deriding whatever move is made with shouts of advice and much gesticulating with umbrellas and walking sticks.
Even though the siege has been over for a decade, the city revels in its outdoor life like a cat stretching in sunlight after being locked in a dungeon. It is a walking city, and strolling is the national pace. Almost everything can be reached on foot.
Hours can be spent people-watching as the tall and lovely locals walk by, relaxed and always dressed and groomed to perfection. In the City Pub in the old town more young women sip fruit juice through straws and chat with their friends, as a walnut-muscled singer of indeterminate age croons Bob Seger numbers. "There isn't an ugly person in here," my friend remarks as she marvels at how tall everyone is.
The hills around the city are beautiful too. No longer threatening or watchful but green and benign, looking down at the city that survived and is now determined to thrive.