Crossing over to normal

Enduring traditions ... Mostar's famous bridge.Credit: Reuters

The scars of war are plain to see on the stonework of Sarajevo and Mostar, yet nothing diminishes the country's wild mountain ways, writes Sophie Cooke.

THE CRY of the muezzin floated over the drumbeat of hammers mending the copper roof of the bazaar. In a city where pale minarets pierce the sky, the sound of cathedral bells joined the call to prayer. Sarajevo has always been the place where East meets West: people once called it the European Jerusalem.

The central mosque, the synagogue and the cathedrals of the Serbian Orthodox and Catholic faiths grew up within a few hundred metres of one another. Long before it became synonymous with televised sniper warfare, this city was the great trading point between Italian merchants and Silk Road caravanserai. Fourteen years on from that divisive war, the much older spirit of tolerance survives.

The old town district, Bascarsija, forms a warren of pretty, Turkish-style streets and mediaeval covered bazaars. Around it, ornate Austro-Hungarian streetscapes take up where the Ottoman Empire left off, lining the river with their fine facades. The corner where Gavrilo Princip shot the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 is marked by plaques and a small museum. In the suburbs of Alipasina, Communist-era apartment blocks remain riddled with bullet holes from the war of the 1990s, their surfaces pitted like sand after rain. But even on the balconies of these blocks, brightly coloured washing hangs again. My boyfriend, Stuart, was here in 2001 and he commented on how many of the old frontline buildings have now been restored.

During the '90s war, the Sarajevans dug a secret tunnel beneath the airport that enabled them to bring in supplies and withstand the siege. The far end of this was concealed in the house of the Kolar family, who recently opened a length of it as part of a private museum - and moving testament to the city's resilience.

In chic Italian restaurants such as Noovi and Tavola,

bright young things smoke cigarettes and punctuate their intellectual conversations with gales of laughter. The people here are not the type to take anything too seriously: they have lived through enough to know what is important. "After war," one said to me, "what is there to get upset about? Anything else is nothing by comparison."

The entire city, despite its battle scars, has a uniquely laid-back attitude to life, a love of food and friendship, a preference for music over materialism.

Numerous new malls were offering Versace and Chanel but the Sarajevans seemed less than keen on frequenting them. Bascarsija is still the city's bustling heart, filled with family workshops handed down through 10 or 12 generations; locally owned, affordable boutiques; lively bars and plentiful cheap cafes offering cevapcici (sausages) in flat bread with Bosnian-style coffee.

The light glowed on the narrow, pale-pink marble lanes and on the animated faces of young women in fur-trimmed anoraks. Shop fronts were hung with handmade copper coffee pots, rich cashmere scarves, silver and garnets and little leather slippers. In one of the workshops, veteran metalworker Kemal Hidic was turning old tank shells into engraved vases. Delis sold candied fruits, local cheeses and home-made Turkish delight. On almost every corner, water gurgled from one of the city's famous fountains, drawn up from pure mineral springs.

We were staying in the heart of old downtown Sarajevo, in a lone Communist high-rise that once housed the offices of the national Yugoslav airline. The upper four floors of the building are a designer hotel, the Hecco Deluxe, with panoramic views across the city to the nearby hills. From our top-floor suite, we watched the hills distil into sparkling drifts of copper and silver lights rising up into the night around our windows.

When we tired of eating in fine Italian restaurants, we tried traditional Bosnian cuisine at places such as Aeroplan, an institution in the old town; romantic Kibe, up on the hillside with sweeping views across the rooftops; and cheap and cheerful little Kod Keme, with its cowhide and kilim seats, great platters of grilled aubergine and resident fez-wearing rock and blues guitarist Imre Kovacs. We tossed back rakija in cosy bars such as Zlatna Ribica, stuffed with antiques, and recovered over perfect coffee and thick hot chocolate among the Bosnian hipsters in slick joints such as Ventra.

I could have happily spent a week doing nothing much in lovely Sarajevo but the skies were clearing and the mountains beckoning.

In the heavy snows of January, many people go skiing and snowboarding at Jahorina, 45 minutes' drive from the city, but we were headed for hiking country a little further off, at Sutjeska in the Dinaric Alps, where Europe's last great primeval forest covers Bosnia's high border with Montenegro.

Mosques and dome-shaped haystacks flickered past before the road wound into steep mountains. White pom-pom seed heads of traveller's joy festooned the bare grey beeches, shining silver in chasms of sunlight. An old orthodox spire rose alone in a distant pine clearing. In Sutjeska, vast ancient trees in the valley bottoms gave way to firs as we climbed into the peaks, passing partisan battlefields.

We walked along a high ridge in what must be one of the world's most beautiful wild places with pristine snow-dusted mountains cradling glacier lakes and storm-blasted pines.

Wild boars grunted in the woods below; wolves and lynx also inhabit these slopes. The paths were unmarked but our guides, Milan and Sasha, knew the mountains well. They stopped to brew coffee for us on a picturesque ledge and we lunched amid the clean scent of high-altitude juniper bushes. If we come back in summer, Milan said they would take us up to the lakes for swimming and a barbecue.

We descended the next day into the river valley of balmy Mostar. This southern region is the Herzegovina part of the country and, with its long, hot summers and mild winters, basks in a Mediterranean climate quite different from Bosnia's continental extremes. The road from Sarajevo snaked its way down through the limestone gorges and along the banks of the pale-green Neretva river, where pomegranates hung red and ripe in the orchards.

We stopped along the way, in a town called Konjic, at Rukotvorine, a famous old furniture workshop where craftsmen were carving delicate patterns in panels of local cherry and walnut wood.

Jablanica, to the west, has a ramshackle roadside market and the road south is lined with the lamb roasters' restaurants. At Gojko's, the simply cooked meat was so good that people heading to Mostar from assorted corners of the former Yugoslavia made detours to eat there. We shared a plateful of tender mountain lamb cut from the spit in the courtyard, served with the owners' tasty home-grown potatoes, and washed down with red blatina wine from Mostar.

Mostar itself was luminous in the lilac afternoon. The old town centre and the elegant bridge have been completely rebuilt since the '90s war, stone for stone as they stood before. We walked down lanes cobbled with round white pebbles like pearls, between houses with creamy walls and limestone roofs that caught the light from the sky and reflected it between tumbling vines and minarets so the whole city seemed to shine.

Our guide, Majvedin, told us about Mostar politics, bridge jumping and history as we walked up through the prettily terraced cafes and shops. Leading us on through the unrepaired streets beyond, he took us to an Ottoman-era mansion, Muslibegovica Kuca.

Somehow, this historic house escaped the war unscathed. Kiwi fruit grew over the pergola and palm trees swayed in the dusk outside the place that the owner, Tadzudin Muslibegovic, now runs as a museum and hotel. The peaceful rooms with their curtained beds and brocaded sofas made me wish we could have stayed.

The next day, eagles glided in the passes below us at Lukomir, an isolated mountain-top village that didn't even have a road until 10 years ago. Life has hardly changed here for centuries: the villagers still survive by herding sheep and trading knitted products made from their wool.

High in the tight folds of the mountains, among the stone houses with their patchwork wooden and sheet-iron roofs, we sat on logs drinking strong, sweet coffee courtesy of our guide's friends.

For the rest of the week we stayed in Sarajevo, that city of enduring soul. We loitered in madrasas and listened to the chanting of a priest in a sixth-century church as he swung his censer before glittering gold icons while the trams rumbled loudly past outside.

Like one of the pomegranates on its market stalls, Sarajevo is a hard-skinned city with a whole soft and glistening world inside.

Sophie Cooke is the author of The Glass House (Hutchinson) and Under the Mountain (Arrow).

Trip notes

Getting there

Lufthansa partners with Qantas to fly from Sydney to Sarajevo via Hong Kong and Munich, priced from $3232. 1300 655 727, www.lufthansa.com.au.

Sophie Cooke travelled with Exploring Bosnia, a new Bosnian travel agency set up with help from USAID. See www.exploringbosnia.com.

Staying there

The Hecco Deluxe, Ferhadija 2, Sarajevo, has double rooms priced from $108 a night. [phone], heccodeluxe.com.

Check out other accommodation options (including Muslibegovica Kuca House) on the Exploring Bosnia website.

See + do

A 1-day hike in Sutjeska with guides and lunch costs $54 per person.
1 day return trip from Sarajevo to Lukomir, including 4WD, driver, guide and lunch: $70 per person. 2 hour guided tour in Mostar: $22 per person. Other day trips / 1-night trips available: go to www.exploringbosnia.com. In addition to the trips featured in this article, you might also like to check out the white water rafting section of the website.

In Sarajevo, Noovi restaurant ([phone]) is opposite the British Embassy. Tavola is at Marsala Tita 50 ([phone]). Aeroplan, Saraci 6 ([phone]), is in the old town. Kod Keme (Mali Curciluk 15, [phone]) is both a hostel and restaurant in Bascarsija. Zlatna Ribica (Kaptol 5) is around the corner from the Benetton store in Bascarsija.

The Kolar house and tunnel museum is open 9am-4pm daily (Donji Kotorac 34, Sarajevo, [phone]).

The Rukotvorine furniture workshop is at Varda 2, Konjic ([phone]).

Muslibegovica Kuca House Museum is at Osman Dikica 41, Mostar ([phone], muslibegovichouse.com).

Further information sarajevo-tourism.com, bhtourism.ba; www.hercegovina.ba.