Road trip to Kiss the Future
Sarajevo.
Arguably how and where we, in Europe, find ourselves these days. Founded by the Ottomans in the 1450’s; destroyed by the Habsburg’s in the late 17th century; annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early 20th before becoming the flashpoint that started World War 1 by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, along with his wife in June 1914.
Fast forward to the collapse of the Iron Curtain and Yugoslavia in the early 1990’s and the Bosnian War which saw the siege of the city from April '92 to February '96.
14,000 people were killed, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, sitting in the The Hague (not far from where I write this) tried and found guilty common soldiers to generals and all the way to prime ministers. Slobodan Milošević was the first sitting head of state indicted for war crimes, Milan Babić, former president of the Republika Srpska Krajina; Radovan Karadžić, former President of the Republika Srpska; and Ratko Mladić, former Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army all became household names for terror.
Step into this history - who else but my former school and class mates, U2.! They performed in Sarajevo as part of their global PopMart tour in September 1997. Look online and you’ll find many video links to the concert and the preparations leading up to it.
More recently has been the 2023 film, 'Kiss the Future', directed by Nenad Cicin-Sain, produced by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Sarah Anthony, and featuring appearances by Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton, Christiane Amanpour, and former President Bill Clinton.
And so - 30 years on since the Srebrenica genocide, during which over 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were systematically murdered, and the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement which put an end to the Bosnian war - I decided to do a road trip - and Kiss the Future…
I’ll share photos of the trip in a separate blog piece soon, but for now, here are some iPhone snaps of the city itself. Click on any to enlarge.
Shortly…
