“Do you know when was it the last time I climbed on mount Trebević? February 1992. I used to go there every weekend with my father. I never went again. From that mountain 22 grenades fell onto the roof of our house. Now I see it everyday from my window, and I just want it to disappear”. Bojan, 30-years-old Sarajevan.
The inhabitants of Sarejevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) don’t climb any more on Trebević mountain, even if the war ended 15 years ago; the restaurants and panoramic terraces are destroyed, the cable car that connected it with the city never worked again, and, most of all, there are parts of it where there still could be landmines. But it’s not lack of money the main reason why the city administration is keeping Trebević in this state of “no man’s land”: the divided city is useful for both nationalisms, and an invisible barrer separating “us” from “them” undermines the postwar coexistence project and the dream of a city that could be universal again.
Caterina Borelli (GRECS), in these texts previous to her master thesis, outlines an an ethnography of postsocialist postwar Sarajevo, with its growing monoethnicity and spacial segregation: its residents, under the pressure of market and of the new territorial divisions, remember uneasily the Sarajevo that was cosmopolitan until the 80s, where “under Trebević we dreamt the same dreams“.
- Caterina BORELLI (2010) And now what? Analyzing the transition from a socialist city in postwar Sarajevo. Presentation of the thesis project for University of Barcelona’s Jornadas doctorales. [PDF in english] [PDF in spanish]. “The inner city“, photos.
- Caterina BORELLI (2010) Trebević: la montaña olvidada. Geopolítica cotidiana en Sarajevo, in the blog El cor de les aparences [in spanish: link]. [PDF in italian]. Camilla de Maffei‘s “The visible mountain” (2010) photoreportage.
- Caterina BORELLI (2009) Atravesar la cuenca. [PDF, spanish]
- Sarajevo, 14-16/6/2011: “The importance of place” – CICOP (International Center for Heritage Preservation) IV annual meeting.