The Miljacka River, narrow and winding, threads through Sarajevo like a vein of memory. Locals say its name comes from milja, meaning ‘the dear one.’ During the Siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996), the city was encircled by Bosnian Serb forces, resulting in one of the longest sieges in modern warfare. People crossed its bridges with hearts pounding, exposed to sniper fire at every step. On the Vrbanja bridge, two lovers, Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić, tried to escape together in 1993. She was Bosniak and he was Serb. Their last moments were in each other’s arms. Shot and dying, they clung together beneath a hail of bullets. Sarajevo called them ‘the Romeo and Juliet of the Miljacka.’ Standing by the Miljacka, I think of those who once risked everything to cross it.
Thursday 16 Oct 25
We’ve been travelling since 3 a.m. Three flights from Edinburgh, a blur of terminals and coffee cups. When we finally reach Sarajevo, the city welcomes us in soft amber light. The mountains stand tall, quiet, and watchful. Our group is a small delegation of teachers and young people sent by the Scottish charity Beyond Srebrenica. Our guide, Suvad Cibra, stops before the Vijećnica — once the National Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, now serving as the City Hall. He gives us a plotted history of the country and explains that the Miljacka isn’t his favourite river.
Earlier in the day, we had all sat with the young Bosnians of a local fee-paying school where Marshal Tito once spoke. Their energy is sharp, their wit quick, but their words feel heavy with history. When asked about the future, most say the same: they want to leave Bosnia. Their tone isn’t bitter; it’s matter-of-fact, a quiet exodus. Listening to them, it feels as if this longing to leave is part of the city’s history of departures and returns, and this generation was born to wait, hoping for something better somewhere else. Nearly half of all young people in Bosnia are thinking about leaving the country; one of the highest rates in Europe. Out of a survey of more than 5,000 people aged 18–29, 47 percent considered emigration—24 percent wanted to leave permanently, while 23 percent planned temporary stays abroad. In the same year, around 23,000 young people began the process of moving away. Bosnia’s overall emigration rate is among the highest globally; between 1.8 and 2.2 million Bosnians live abroad, making up about 44 percent of the resident population. The 2024 Youth Study supports these findings. This trend of young people leaving, often called a ‘brain drain,’ poses a significant challenge for peace and reconciliation in the region. Hearing their reasons why whilst sitting together in the classroom, it is not difficult to understand.
Our delegation crosses the Novi Most Vijećnica bridge. On the railings, someone has written words for Palestine. They stand out against the river’s shimmer. I think of Gaza — of children there. Of bread, of walls, of people caught in the geography of siege. The parallels are impossible to ignore. Sarajevo has seen this before. The city knows what it means when innocent people die waiting for bread.
Page from the Sarajevo Haggadah, written in fourteenth-century
We pause on the bridge, and Suvad gestures to the former library behind us. He tells us it once held two million books. In August 1992, it was set on fire. It burned for days. Later, I read one book survived: the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript of the Exodus, painted in gold and lapis. It survived centuries of exile, persecution, and fire. It travelled from medieval Spain to Ottoman Sarajevo, through Nazi raids and the siege of this city. It lived because people believed stories of exile and return are worth saving. Stories are what survive when everything else burns.
Three months before the fire, Vedran Smailović—the ‘Cellist of Sarajevo’ and principal of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra—answered violence with music. On 27 May, 1992, a mortar hit a breadline and killed twenty-two civilians. Many of them were children. In response, Smailović put on his concert attire. He returned to that spot for twenty-two days, one for each lost life. He played Tomaso Albinoni’s (1671–1751) Adagio in G minor among the ruins and under sniper fire. The piece itself was born from destruction. Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto had in fact ‘reconstructed’ the Adagio from fragments found in the bombed-out Dresden State Library around 1945–1958. It is a lament rescued from ashes, brought back as something beautiful.
Vedran Smailović the “Cellist of Sarajevo”
Thirty years ago, this city endured nearly four years under siege. Bosnia’s schools, theatres, and community centres, once homes of creativity and belonging, became sites of crimes against humanity. Beauty turned against itself. And yet, through it all, beauty persisted. Music rose from the rubble. A book survived the flames. The city began again. Sarajevo held film festivals, poetry readings, and concerts, even during the siege. Art became an act of moral defiance. In the markets, local coppersmiths now hammer old shell casings into flower vases, turning the remnants of war into something delicate, purposeful, and alive. Here, even metal remembers how to sing.
Friday 17 Oct 25
I set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. I want to see Sarajevo before it wakes. In the old quarter of Baščaršija, rain has left the cobblestones slick and shining, and doves circle above the roofs. Not far from here, near the Latin Bridge, a young Bosnian Serb nationalist named Gavrilo Princip once raised his pistol and shot another young couple.
Later, our van winds along Sniper Alley, once Europe’s deadliest road. As we pass apartments still marked by bullet holes and repaired but unrestored balconies, I am reminded of how the past lingers here. Nearly 10,000 civilians were wounded between 1992 and 1996, heightening the strangeness of traveling along this road that once symbolised so much danger. Approaching the British Embassy for a meeting, I realise I have carried Sarajevo with me long before I arrived. When I was growing up, I watched Sarajevo flicker across the television: the siege, the breadline massacres, and the orphanages where children learned to sleep through shellfire. I heard that the Bjelave Orphanage took in hundreds who had lost everything—its walls patched with blankets, staff sharing rations to keep the youngest alive. Other places, too, became sanctuaries under siege, where teachers whispered lullabies over the sound of mortars.
Back then, I watched without understanding: Sarajevo, Belfast, Jerusalem, Rwanda—divided cities, displaced people, and language used as a weapon. Headlines framed one side as aggressor, the other as victim, while truth bled in the middle. Facing these stories, I wondered: How do we assign blame when everyone bears scars, and both sides have histories of suffering? Can outsiders ever grasp these conflicts’ complexities? Asking these questions invites us to sit with ambiguity and the uneasy sense that there may be no clear villain or hero. Or is this a ridiculous equivocation?
Upon arrival at the Embassy, the contrast is sharp. The glass façade reflects the red-tiled roofs below, sunlight clear against the hills. Inside, a James Bond poster hangs beside a red phone box, relics of British soft power and self-assurance. Conversation turns quickly to UK policy in Bosnia, and to new wars fought not with bullets but words. “The war for truth,” one official says, “never really ended — it just changed form.” That sentence stays with me. In Sarajevo, as in Gaza, truth is under siege. Both have faced bombardment and the erasure of narrative — denial about what happened and to whom. In Bosnia, some deny the Srebrenica genocide, recasting the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys as a political myth. A recent example on social media revealed this linguistic warfare when a tweet attempted to discredit eyewitness accounts of the genocide, framing them as mere fabrications. Similarly, in Palestine, words fracture: defence, resistance, terror, tragedy — each term twisted by moral grammar. The violence of war endures in language, where denial becomes destruction.
Words matter. They can humanise or erase; bear witness or bury memory. The people of Sarajevo know this intimately. During the siege, shells fell daily. Still, writers and poets gathered by candlelight, composing verses on scraps of paper, documenting hunger and loss. Their survival was linguistic as much as physical. To speak was to resist. This resilience through language is a legacy I hope the young people on the trip carry home: that words can be tools of reconstruction, forging paths to understanding and healing in the midst of turmoil.
“It’s hard to forgive when the other side isn’t asking for forgiveness,” one student says quietly. The others nod, not in bitterness, but in weary recognition. That afternoon, we visit a state school, where optimism contrasts with the private one we saw before. The students here are bright and determined. They want to stay, to rebuild, to belong, to reclaim their story. Our conversation turns to education, social media, and the dangers of misinformation. Words, again, matter. Without them, without apology, dialogue, or acknowledgment, reconciliation has nowhere to begin.
I’m surprised to learn the Bosnian War is scarcely taught in schools. Students know it through family, not textbooks. That shocks me—but then I think of home. In Scotland, hard histories like the Troubles and Empire are also diluted, taught as distant or concluded stories, if mentioned at all. This comparison underscores that teaching truth needs language brave enough to hold pain. Silence isn’t neutrality; it is complicity. Still, words failed me every day I was in Bosnia.
Perhaps that failure was the lesson. Confronting history demands more than information — it requires dialogue, courage, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. What I couldn’t articulate in words might, in a classroom, become a shared act of inquiry: a space where students learn not only about the past, but through it, encountering human fragility and resilience side by side.
To encourage this learning, it seems clear that teachers should use project-based methods focusing on survivor interviews as a keystone activity. This primary focus allows students to research and present hard histories by directly engaging with those who lived through them, providing a foundation of empathy and understanding. Students should conduct interviews with survivors or read first-person accounts, using these narratives as a springboard to explore present-day issues, such as rising nationalism and xenophobia in Europe. These personal stories can highlight why confronting Bosnia’s legacy is essential now. Schools must organise panel discussions or collaborate with schools in conflict regions through digital platforms for global connection. Additionally, classrooms should incorporate multimedia resources and guest speakers to add depth and humanity to facts often reduced to statistics. This approach not only empowers students to engage with history’s complexities but also motivates them to apply these lessons to current global issues. It is essential that educators in all contexts take these steps to foster meaningful understanding and lasting change. Charities like Beyond Srebrenica can help with this.
Later, the young people in our delegation begin to draw their own parallels. They notice the flags appearing across the UK — from lampposts to farm gates, from shopfronts to the feeds of social media — quiet reassertions of belonging. A Union flag above a war memorial speaks of remembrance; the same flag at an Old Firm game or draped from a lamppost can signal defiance, exclusion, or nostalgia. Context changes everything. Yet we are living in a moment when context is dissolving. Algorithms flatten difference, stripping words and symbols of history until they circulate freely, detached from meaning.
The rise of parties like Reform trades on that flattening. Patriotism becomes a brand, outrage a currency. Flags, slogans, and soundbites travel faster than thought — and without the friction of context, they accumulate emotion but shed understanding. In digital space, nuance is algorithmically punished; what survives is what provokes. For young people, both in Britain and Bosnia, this creates a landscape of echo rather than encounter. The stories that once taught moral complexity are replaced by loops of grievance and belonging that demand neither empathy nor reflection.
In Sarajevo, the students see this clearly. They scroll through feeds where nationalism and memory blur together, where symbols of the war are recycled into memes, and where identity is once again simplified into “us” and “them.” They recognise a warning in it — the same one they read in the bullet-pocked walls of their own city. In Scotland, nationalism still feels civic, grounded in democracy rather than ancestry. Yet even civic language can harden when context is lost. The flags we fly, the words we choose, and the silences we maintain all shape the nation we imagine.
To ground these observations in action, it is important that educators initiate exercises where students create their own narratives about inclusion, imagining a community project or initiative that fosters empathy and understanding across different cultures. Such activities challenges them to think critically about how words and symbols can either divide or unite, and invites them to explore what a nationalism that embraces diversity — and resists algorithmic amnesia — might look like.
As evening falls, we climb into the hills to the 1984 Winter Olympic bobsleigh track. Cracked concrete curves are softened by moss and graffiti. Once a monument to unity and joy, where the cheers of crowds reverberated through the mountains, it became an artillery post used by Serb forces to shell the city below, echoing with the deafening blasts of war. The cacophony of celebration and disaster reverberates in the heavy silence around us. Standing there, overlooking Sarajevo, it’s hard to reconcile those two realities: the language of celebration turned into the language of war.
Among the ruins, I think of poet Stevan Tontić who wrote: “I have only one homeland now: language. Everything else has burned.” Each February, at the Sarajevo Winter Festival, poets gather from around the world. The closing ritual is unlike any other: they recite in all their native tongues — Bosnian, Turkish, Ladino, Serbian, Romani, German, Italian — until the words overlap into a river of sound. One organiser calls it “a linguistic prayer.” Another says, “Sarajevo is not rebuilt — it is re-spoken.”
As the call to prayer drifts through the valley, I think again of the Miljacka — of Admira and Boško, of the copper roses, of the doves that carry souls skyward. Sarajevo endures as both place and parable: a city where memory remains contested, forgiveness unfinished, and truth forever fragile. Peace begins in language — in naming a thing for what it is, in listening, in the courage to speak truth when silence is easier. Ferida Duraković wrote: In Sarajevo, every tear is bilingual —one part sorrow, one part song.”
