Sarajevo, the Beautiful

My presentation will draw upon my recent book, Unforgetting: Contemporary Voices from Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Politics of Representation (forthcoming, Routledge 2025), focusing specifically on the role that memories of Sarajevo’s multi-ethnic history have played in the process of peace building after the war. Arguing that the siege of Sarajevo has acquired the status of memorial form now more than 30 years after the war, through rich ethnographic accounts I collected from Sarajevans themselves, references to the published records of Bosnia’s independent media company FAMA and Dževad Karahasan’s brief war memoir of the city, Dnevnik Selidbe/ Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (1993/1994), I will show that the siege is reconstructed in the contemporary cultural sphere as an affirmative act of multi-ethnic survival, revealing the vibrant, darkly humorous, and resilient way in which the city and its people see their connection with the multi-ethnic past. In these narratives and testimonies, as a memorial form the siege of Sarajevo contains references that link remembrances to the present moment and to the future, as they tend to take a longer, historical view based on different aspects of Sarajevo’s multi-ethnic history. A memorial form depends not only on the relationship between past and present, but on the accumulation of previous such relationships and their ongoing construction and reconstruction. The memorial form of Sarajevo under siege is thus constructively connected to people’s current orientation toward the city and its evolving cosmopolitanism. This perspective is grounded in a longer history and knowledge, one that preceded the war, and to which the war simply added another memorial dimension.