Sarajevo was so unexpected!  I had this idea of Sarajevo being a very ugly city and not very interesting. I have no clue where th...

Sarajevo!

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Sarajevo was so unexpected! 

I had this idea of Sarajevo being a very ugly city and not very interesting. I have no clue where this idea came from but I was 100% wrong about it! Sarajevo had so much character and was beautiful! 
While walking the city I noticed that it had either been rebuilt after war or was not impacted as much as Mostar since there were not that many buildings with bullet holes around the areas where I walked.

I decided to go on a walking tour of the city and it was very good. Our guide was a kid during the time of war so she shared with us lots of her stories about living as a kid through the war and what that was like. 


We started the walk in front of a church and the guide told us that the Ottoman never imposed a religion in B&H but had some ways of tricking people to convert to Islam. For example, if you converted and became a Muslim you paid lower taxes and were pretty much guaranteed a job, or at least had a better job than the catholics or orthodox. For that reason a lot of people converted to get the benefits that came attached with the religion.

Game of chess!


In B&H there are pretty much 3 ethnicities: Boniaks, Croats, and Serbs; and for that reason there are THREE PRESIDENTS!!! Each president representing his ethnic group but interestingly enough there is no president to represent the underdogs, or any minority group.

The main religion in Sarajevo is Islam and you can find mosques every couple hundred of feet! In fact, there are more than 200 mosques in Sarajevo!!! That’s more mosques than in Tehran (the capital of Iran!)… That’s totally crazy!!!! The building of mosques was totally practical because Muslims have to pray 5 times a day so if they had to go back to a far away mosque it would be a waste of time so each neighborhood in Sarajevo had to have a mosque, a fountain, and a bakery in it (that way all the basics would be covered: religion, food, and water.)






Our guide shared how during the war they had to live in the basement and they got really nasty food but the most interesting part of her story (to me) was when she shared that people would wake up every morning and go to work even though there was no money for them to get paid. She said that people went to work to retain the sense of normalcy in their lives, that it gave them a purpose and something to do.





The Franciscan Church

The walking tour was so informational and lots of fun, even when we got rained on!

After the tour I went out for coffee with 2 girls from the tour and we tried the traditional Tufahija, a cooked apple stuffed with walnuts.


We then walked around the many little streets at the bazaar and it really looked like Istanbul! (after all this place was ruled by the turks) The streets were filled with many Turquish coffee an tea shops. We decided to go grab some dinner and while searching for one restaurant in particular I saw my friend Leo standing on the street so went to say Hi! and invited him to join us for lunch.
The whole Balkans have been filled with a lot of meat which made it difficult for me to eat and Sarajevo was not the exception. We sat at a traditional restaurant and the menu had ZERO! yes, ZERO! options for me so I told them to order and as I was very hungry I went to a bakery and bought some Burek (bread with cheese and spinach inside) and ate it with everybody else.



After lunch we decided to go on a walk to the top of the hill overlooking Sarajevo. The view was incredible but I was impressed by the high number of cemeteries I could see from up there!




Spent the rest of the day walking the streets of Sarajevo and ended it with more tea… and baklava! 

I call this building the "Lego" building. It was built to give Sarajevo a more modern look but I think they completely failed; they failed so bad that the people who live in the building in front of it have lower rent than the rest because they have to look at its ugliness from their living room! 



The Latin bridge






Just in case you feel like buying bullets!
Baklava time!

The old town at night

The cathedral the day I arrived, big concert... my dorm room, exactly above the ambulance!
Now it is time to leave Bosnia and Herzegovina and head on to Croatia!


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About Post Author

Hi! It's me... Andrea! In 2016 I decided to drop everything and take a year to enrich my life and travel around the world. It turns out the world is just too big for 12 months! Still on the road and sharing my experience as a solo female traveler around the globe!

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About me




Hi! It's me... Andrea!

In this blog you can live vicariously through my journey around the world!

Please feel free to share tips or places to go!
Contact me: andreaheartstraveling@gmail.com