Schooling undersiege in Sarajevo

[...] for it is only when we begin to participate emotionally in a landscape that its uniqueness and beauty are revealed to us. »

— J.B. Jackson, The necessity for ruins and other topics.

Introduction

From april 1992 to february 1996, for nearly four years, the city of Sarajevo was under siege. This situation didn’t prevent the teachers and the pedagogical institutions to fulfil their mission: educate and teach their students. They organized an unprecedented network of safe places, called punkts, as an alternative to school buildings. This network spread all over the city bringing school near to the students’ houses to limit the dangers associated to school trips.

During almost three years, teachers had to walk often long distances from their houses to one or different schooling punkts daily, when it was not too dangerous. The children also, had to brave their fear of snippers and mortars and wage their own resistance against barbarism.

The punkts were the smallest link in the education chain; and were in turn located in the smallest urban unit, the Mjesna Zajednice, MZ (Local Community, or neighbourhood unit). Each school in town, or matična skola (mother school) was responsible for a number of MZ and had to provide teachers that could reach the students in each of these communities. It was the Pedagogical Institute that initiated this reorganization, based on the model of the first school experiments that took place in the Dobrinja district, where informal classes were organized for the first time in the underground sections of stairwells, hence the name of this teaching practice — the haustorka skola or stairway school—.

This period of the schooling in Sarajevo was entitled Ratna Škola, (School during the war). Around April 1993, almost 300 punkts were disseminated across the besieged Sarajevo [1].

In 2001, the pedagogue David M.Berman published The heroes of Treća Gimnazija. In this book he recounts how schooling in the city of Sarajevo was organized under the siege. Berman focuses on the case of the high school “Treća Gimnazija”.

I came across Berman’s book accidently, as a new comer to Sarajevo in 2020; I wanted to get “acquainted” with the city by doing some readings and walks. The story fascinated me: The teachers’ walks, the spaces and punkts mentioned in the book were the first hints for me to “spatially” tell the story, 30 years after the end of the war.

This map, and the accompanying texts, are an attempt to keep a record of this story, of the walks and schooling hideouts of the students and teachers under siege.

It is also an invitation for a singular walk in Sarajevo that incites to a different apprehension of its built environment, the silent witness and unfathomable archive of city life. Its walls hold the recitations of multiplication tables; its streets resonate with the sound of the furtive steps of the teachers and students.

Every story needs a place in which to unfold [...] »
— Franco Moretti, Far country, Scenes from american culture.

From a post-representational cartography perspective, the map is less important than the process of making it and using it. »
— Sebastien Caquard & William Cartwright, Narrative cartography: From mapping stories to the narrative of maps and mapping.

On Walking and Mapping

THE WALK

Walking is the simplest tool I have to explore a city as a newcomer. What started as random wanderings in Sarajevo, ended up in following an itinerary, built upon a local narrative embedded in the city’s history.

I had this incredible luck to have an already “existing situation”, a walk carried on 30 years ago, and to meet the teachers who did it in order to reach their makeshift classrooms. After some mapping sketches inspired by the reading of the book The heroes of Treća Gymnazija, I reached out to the teachers mentioned in the book so that they could help me re-localize the punkts where they gave class, and to retrace a recurrent walk that they were doing almost daily to reach their students.

This wasn’t an easy task for them, not only because the memory was possibly weak, but also because meanwhile, the city had changed.

The walk centred in the elements of the story: the schools, the punkts, the teachers’ houses, the itinerary. And the “built environment” unfolding along the walk soon became also a feature in the map. The story became double-sided. On the one hand, there is the story of the schools re-organizing under siege; and on the other hand the story of the city itself, where this schooling episode took place.

Matthew Bissen refers to the activity of walking as follows: “Walking yields bodily knowing, recovers place memory, creates narrative, prioritizes human scale, and reconnects people to places” [7]. The walk is a physical act, implying exploration and observation, and in that case, of being part of the daily life of the city: Schooling avoided iconic places and buildings targeted during the war, so the walk was mostly occurring in residential neighbourhoods, stepping on sceneries of the everyday in threshold places where the limit between resident and pedestrian is blurred. These wanderings created a bond with the city.

Often the words of Saint-Exupéry’s fox explaining to the Little Prince the meaning of the word “tame” rang in my ears:

— No, said the little prince. I am looking for friends. What does that mean, tame?

— It is an act too often neglected, said the fox. It means to establish ties.

— To establish ties?

— Just that, said the fox. To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world... »

And a few lines later, on “how to tame”?

— The little prince asked: What must I do, to tame you?

— You must be very patient, replied the fox. First you will sit down at a little distance from me — like that — in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day... [8]

This is how Sarajevo became unique to me. The “walking” is the equivalent of the “taming”: it is a physical act like the one the fox is advising the prince: To sit closer each day...

A need to understand the walked spaces leads to more documentary research enabling to read the city beyond its visible signs. It is this empirical practice to which Nicolas Offenstadt refers to as “An articulation of the exploration of sites with the document readings before or after, that is troubling. […] [9]. The information source for the punkts is diverse: from the two books of David Berman, few schools that mentioned schooling during the war in their website, from oral interviews, in situ visits especially in the case of Treća Gymnazija and Dobrinja. «This”to and from" movement creates a tension between the observed present and the read past, that generates the content of the book. » [10]

This practice leads to the creation of the knowledge, relating to the map or the text. It is how encounters emerge, like for example, when discovering that one of the streets delimitating the line of siege crossing through one of the oldest modern residential neighbourhoods in Sarajevo, is ironically called OsmanTopal Paše, the founder of the first secular school in town, called Roždija, in 1864.

Walking has been a practice that many have explored to shed a light on different aspects of the city: from the Situationists to Robert Smithson and Richard Long, as well as, more recently, collectives like Stalker and the Metropolitan Trails network among others. The aim of each peripatetic is different, but common feature is to explore or enact landscapes on foot and to produce the narratives related to this physical action.

The intention of this project in Sarajevo is to embed a narrative spatially, but it inevitably opens up to the multiple layers and stories composing the walk. After all « One only understands the things that one tames » said the fox.

THE MAP

The map anchors the schooling story under siege in the urban space of Sarajevo. It highlights its spatialities and becomes the physical receptacle of its memory.

It is double sided. On one side, it traces the spatial story of the high school Treća Gymnazija; on the other side, it details the urban and social structure that enabled this specific schooling organization: the Mjesna Zajednice.

Recto front side:

Here, the teaching story of the high school Treća Gymnazija is the feature for mapmaking. The successive locations the school occupied after abandoning its premises are indicated, also the itinerary of two of its teachers from their home to attend class in the corresponding teaching punkts.

Reconstructing the walks and localizing the teaching punkts corresponding to Treća Gymnazija was possible thanks to the recollection of two teachers: Director Emina Avdagić and teacher Gordana Roljić. The itinerary in the map represents their recurrent walking pattern especially between january 1992 and july 1994, when they had to cross the town from one end to another, reaching the Centar area, where Treća Gimnazija first moved within the building of the school OŠ Branko Lazić. After that, Treća Gimnazija relocated in the school OŠ Hrasno which shortened the walking distances and modified part of the itinerary. But in both cases, the professors had also to attend, their assigned punkts in other Mjesna Zajednice, apart from the classes given in the building of the school OŠ Hrasno. Therefore the itinerary underwent variations, but this is its more recurrent form.

This itinerary is one of many that crisscrossed the town under the siege. The punkts are a sample of almost 300 hundred that spread in the city’s buildings. Therefore the aim of this map is not to give an exhaustive restitution of the punkts or of the itineraries, but to bring them into being physically; through the story of one of the schools. Thus, being only a fragment of the whole, they give the map a sense of continuous becoming, open to new additions by its future users and witnesses from that period.

This itinerary uncovers a parallel story, the one of the city: crossing its variegated neighbourhoods, from the most recent developments in Novi Grad dating from the 1980’s until the 19^th century Austro-Hungarian centre. It is a particular staging of the successive developments of the city’s linear morphology, along the narrow plain of the Miljacka river, before housing starts to scatter uphill. The schooling story is embedded in this context, especially in the spaces and buildings of everyday life. The collective housing complexes and residential buildings are a specific feature of the urban composition of Sarajevo; due to their scale they configure whole neighbourhoods and bear a strong sense of community, reflecting the values of socialist architecture.

They represent the second mapmaking feature on the map and are highlighted in black along the itinerary. One highlighted building is not residential though, the Radio Television Building (RTV), due to its crucial role in the story. The RTV was broadcasting schooling programs called “Radio school” every weekday starting at 9’ o’clock. It lasted one hour and consisted of 5 educative blocs of 10 minutes each. Students listened to the emissions especially when conditions were too violent to attend class, teachers walked from various neighbourhoods to the RTV building to broadcast their class.

As for Dobrinja, a neighbourhood encircled by the line of siege, and severed from Sarajevo by the Mojmillo Hill, it endured the “siege inside the siege” and the conditions for schooling were extreme. The teachers under the direction of the improvised Dobrinja War School Center organized autonomously within the neighbourhood especially for primary schooling. Professors were attending around 28 punkts localized within the Dobrinja enclave. The punkts of one professor, Behija Jakić, a teacher who was living and teaching in Dobrinja during that period, figure on the map. Behija had no fixed itinerary, it was constantly changing to the unstable security situation in Dobrinja.

Verso back side:

The Mjesna Zajednice (MZ) or Local Community is the smallest urban unit; it is delimitated spatially by bordering streets or geographical features and has a representative elected by the community of residents. Sarajevo is divided in 4 municipalities, each of which is composed of a number of MZ. In that sense, the MZ are the mosaics composing the urban ground of the city. The need to represent this structure is important to understand how the schools organized so quickly and maintained the teaching activity under extreme conditions. Indeed, the school building dissolved to mould itself to the structure of the city. It became a network of punkts disseminated in the different MZ. Each MZ had to find safe punkts within its perimeter for schooling; and each school was responsible to coordinate the different MZ under its responsability and send teachers to reach for the students in each of the punkts located in the MZ. Social, urban and schooling structures merged.

Producing a map of the MZ was possible because of the existence of a city catalogue from 1987. It contains a naming and spatial ordering of the city parts: all the streets in town are listed and the MZ to which they belong is indicated; also, each MZ is drawn with a basic street mapping defining its contour. During and after the war the authorities changed the names of the streets bearing connotations to the Yugoslav period or to the belligerent ethnic group. In this catalogue, the name of the MZ and of the streets is the original one, dating from the yugoslav pre-war period. To reproduce the patchwork of MZ on city scale, a “tailoring” work was done: it required the coincidence of old and actual names of the streets composing the contour of each MZ to be able to retrace it on an actual cartography of Sarajevo. The restitution of this previous nomenclature is also adding one more layer of “history” to the map.

The backside of the map is thus reconstructed from an assemblage of the independent figures of the MZ figuring in the catalogue. The city’s mosaic is restored; all the MZ are represented to produce the cartography of the city based on its communities at that moment; and address the important role neighbourhood’s cohesion played in the survival of the schooling activity. On this side, primary, high school and vocational & technical schools in town are shown (within the limits of the map) and all the punkts that could have been recovered are represented [11].

A city is a text. Every text survives by repeating stereotypes and undoing them, through trivialities and the dodging of trivialities. By penning a brief footnote to this city, [...]. It is not me, of course, that matters, it’s the footnote. The footnote is a form of survival »
  — Dubravka Ugresić, Fox

Fragments of a city walk

The idea of accompanying the map with narratives originates naturally by the need to write down some impressions and emotions. The physical activity of walking triggers in me a flow of thoughts; it is as if the movement of my legs is rotating an imaginary film reel that is projecting images on the landscape passing before my eyes. Some are related, a personification or materialization of my readings on Sarajevo, some appear as a collage of my own, some are imaginary.

The walk is in itself a manifestation of time in space:

Time, the present, dying with each step further, and the duration, its materialization in a number of hours.

Space, is the sidewalk crisscrossing in between buildings, the fence running along the school yard, this light drop in the terrain, the shadow under a tree.

The walk is for an architect what a chronotope (as defined by Mikhail Bakhtine) is for a writer: a feature suggesting the inseparability of time and space. The way time relates to space or vice versa in this feature will define our perception of the world. The chronotope is very common in narratives that describe the journey of a hero, mostly adventurous, travelling to exotic lands or dreamy, walking around Dublin. [12]

I decided to follow the route of “school heroes” in Sarajevo. The time of this walk is anachronic as it happened 30 years ago, while the city — “the space of the walk” — is anchored in the present. But as Marguerite Yourcenar said once, « the present is a form of memory that has survived. » [13]. This gave way to a special apprehension of the city: I came to know my own Sarajevo along this walk and selected the narratives I wanted to associate to it. A special bound is knot with the city that unveiled one of her secrets to me.

These are some thoughts just put together to keep them from fading along the steps; a footnote, and as Ugrešić would say, « the footnote is a form of survival ». These five selected narratives are intended to give more depth to this two-dimensional map, by opening its space to the narrative:

A boy in the fall of 1992

The boy was in a hurry. His footsteps were resonating in the empty street. Just around the corner and he will be there. But he heard it, like the hissing of a snake, warning of danger. He abruptly stepped back, his back stiff against the building’s wall. The snipper missed him.

Suddenly, he heard the siren of an ambulance; this was the moment. Grasping the handles of his backpack with his clammy hands, he ran. His legs seem to have a life of their own, moving faster than his mind.

A million thoughts were jammed against his temples, but it took his shaking legs a few seconds to reach the door. He opens it. All his friends had their class-books already open. Their feverish fingers were running along the pages, phrases, letters, numbers; nervously.

They had to find it, or all will be lost. Lost in the madness that had taken over the inhabitants of this town. It spread like a virus. It spared the children, as well as some teachers. Children and teachers were meeting in the safety of a basement, an abandoned shop… These classrooms were called punkts. The town counted hundreds of them. In these hideouts they were looking for the secret word: the one that will cure this madness.

The boy cleared his throat, as an announcement and a relief after his dangerous sprint. Yesterday he had found something; the first letter.

Numbers & Buildings: Typography and the city

Let’s start with some reflections from Georges Perec’s book Penser, Classer [14] (In english Thoughts of Sort) :

(T) The alphabet
Many times I have often wondered what logic governed the distribution of the six vowels and twenty consonants in our alphabet: why first A, and then B, and then C, etc.?

The obvious impossibility of any answer is, initially, something reassuring: the alphabetical order is arbitrary, inexpressive, therefore neutral: objectively A is not worth more than B, the ABC is not a sign of excellence , but only at the beginning (the ABC of the profession).

But undoubtedly, the existence of an order is a reason enough for insidiously loading the place of the elements in the series, sooner or later and more or less, of a qualitative coefficient: thus a “B” series film will be considered “less good” than another film which, moreover, we have never yet thought of calling an “A” series film; thereby a cigarette manufacturer who has “Class A” printed on his packages wants us to understand that his cigarettes are superior to others?

The alphabetical qualitative code is not very detailed; in fact, it only has three elements:

• A = excellent
• B = worse
• Z = (« Z » series film).

But that does not prevent it from being a code and from superimposing an entire hierarchical system on a series which is by definition inert.

For quite different reasons, but nevertheless close to our point, we note that many companies strive, in the title of their company name, to arrive at acronyms like “AAA”, “ABC”, “AAAC ". », etc., so as to appear among the first in telephone books and professional directories.

On the other hand, a high school student has every interest in having a name whose initial is in the middle of the alphabet: he will have a little more chance of not being examined.

C1

Painted in green on brown panels composing a wall is a huge letter C, followed by the number 1. It is on the blind facade, only pierced by a single row of minuscule square windows, of a residential tower in the neighborhood Alipašino Polje. As you can guess, it refers to the part C1 of this big scale social housing complex located at the end of the city; in the 4^th municipality of Sarajevo called Novi Grad [15].

The typography is neat and spreads out from one side of the wall to the other, on its lower part, the C being tangent to one side of the façade and the 1 to the its’ other parallel side. Its height is that of a little more than 3 floors so it can be easily seen from a distance or from a car passing by the bordering street Geteova. The building is positioned with a slight set back and even some trees on the front cannot break down the letter and number motif, because of its judicious choice of height. The brown prefabricated panels are horizontal with vertical lines like stripes; they allow achieving the straight angles and diagonal lines to draw up the C and the 1, but not to rendering a smooth paint effect.

This corrugated texture of the lettering catches the sun differently rendering the body of letters with a deeper hue of green and giving a kind of depth to the otherwise flat surface of the motif C1. The C and the 1 are not continuously drawn, but are “sliced” longitudinally, along the panels strips, reinforcing the geometrical construction of the typography also divided in modules, like the prefabricated cladding of the facades, but also highlighting the construction process of the settlement, confronting the individual unit and the mass.

Toponymy in Alipašino polje addresses the three successive phases of construction of the housing settlement, A, B and C;
the C Faza being the last to be finished. It is a practical device to organize newly urbanized territory. Even sub-sectors exist; such as C1 and B2. But this toponomy, that is also taxonomic, doesn’t impose any rule on further place naming or odonymy in the settlement; street names don’t bare any hint to the part in which they are.

I imagine it can be useful for the postman to distribute quickly the parcels, a postman like the one that appears in Jergovic’s novel [16]; who knows the particular nomenclatures appearing on the postboxes, even when challenged with names that do not correspond to the actual residents. Probably, this postman knew also all the sub-sectors of Alipašino polje. But this referential character so inherent to neighborhoods has almost disappeared from urban life, and with him the related knowledge. Today, few Sarajevan’s know which part is what of Alipašino Polje. Nevertheless, all these toponomies exist on the facades of its buildings. They mostly work as landmarks for the inhabitants and for defining the spatial limits of the different local community units known as Mjesna Zajedenice MZ, for example, MZ Alipašino Polje C1.

Back in socialist Sarajevo, when Alipašino Polje was built, place naming was chosen to highlight the values of the new social ideology. Onomastic research shows that more expressive toponomies were chosen at the time, revealing the relation between space and power: thus, MZ Alipašino polje C1 was previously MZ 25 Novembar [17]. Also, most Sarajevans have forgotten that, now that taxonomic toponomy has replaced the symbolic one.

B3 & B4

Sometimes the rule of correspondence of the toponymy to an MZ perimeter is not observed like is the case for the parts B3 & B4 in Alipašino Polje; that don’t appear in the listing of the MZ of Novi Grad’s municipality. So this sub-division must serve some other purpose... On a photo from 1984, a glimpse is seen of the building with the big letter B, marking the entrance to Alipašino polje, seen from the end of Trg Barcelona, the avenue cutting through the Olympic village located on the Mojmilo hill, on the south-western edge of Alipašino [18].

This B3 typography is more playful as segments from the letters and numbers fold at the building’s corners, aligning to or integrating some of the window openings in its design; or drawing diagonals defining wide planes of color. In this sector of Alipašino an additional color to the reddish-brown of the letters and numbers is added; a pale yellow that frames the buildings’ base and adds a yellowish rectangle in the counter of the B letter and the bowl of the 3. The final effect is also the one of industrialized typography but keeps something of a rough artisanal finish because of the striped rough concrete texture of the panels composing the façade; the kind serigraphy gives to an ink drawing.

These reddish-brown strips extending from the letters and number, once folding around the corner of the buildings lead you discreetly into the inside courts, so distinctive of Alipašino, achieved by arranging the housing towers around a central space of green fields, squares and playgrounds. The strips follow their course crawling up vertically on the facade or underlining its base horizontally, leading you once again outside the sector.

Reflecting on Perec’s remark: “But undoubtedly, the existence of an order is a reason enough for insidiously loading the place of the elements in the series, sooner or later and more or less, of a qualitative coefficient.»

What does it mean for Alipašino’s residents to be in part A, B or C? In the course of time, numbers have become linguistic entities, and probably have absorbed narratives of existence that inhabitants of the sectors attribute to an originally prosaic taxonomy referring to the construction phases of the settlement. The different sectors of Alipašino polje and the majority of the streets were renamed in the course of the war of 1992-1995.

Today, the MZ in Alipašino are all named after the sector to which they belong, A, B or C. The colloquial name “naselje solidarnosti” to refer to this residential complex vanished; giving way once again to the denomination “Alipašino”, originating from the 16^th century. Macro toponymy is less prone to changing, whereas micro toponimies, referring to smaller scale spatial features are more eagerly modified. Size matters in toponymy… and probably in typography.

MII

M is for Mojmillo; the hilltop on the southern part of town, and II, indicates the hosting sector of the athletes competing in the Olympic Winter games celebrated in 1984 in Sarajevo. The settlement of Olimpijsko selo, colloquially known as Mojmillo, because of its location on the Mojmilo Brdo (hill) was originally conceived as a residential complex with 1120 housing units and a kindergarten. But in 1982, the organizing committee of the XIV winter Olympic games, along with the Udrueženim Radom, SIZ-om Stanovanja and Izvršnim Odborom Skupštine Grada [19], decided to accommodate the athletes in the settlement during the celebration of the games.

The area had to provide lodgings and some related facilities which supposed some changes in the layout of Mojmilo’s residential neighborhood. The development consisted in two perpendicular avenues. The main one Trg Barcelona [20], bordered on both sides by the residential buildings, is conceived like a pedestrian prolongation of Trg ZAVNOBIH located in the sector B of neighboring Alipašino.

At the junction point of these two promenades, the main reception and accreditation hall as well as the Sports hall were positioned, marking the main entrance to the Olympic village. Then the buildings are strung out along Trg Barcelona, on both sides, it is the sector II of the Mojmilo settlement until it intersects with the other perpendicular axis of the project, Olimpijska street. At this point a wide rectangular square is formed, framed by the facades of the housing buildings on three of its sides.

This is the referential point of the settlement, with the names of the 3 residential sectors crowning the bare buildings’ tops looking at the square. Here the use of toponomy has a utilitarian purpose, and that is why probably the architects decided to paint these letters not on the lower part of the façade at the passer-by or resident height like in Alipašino but on the extreme upper part, to be seen from far away. The proportions of Mojmilo are very different from Alipašino (12ha for Mojmillo and 65 ha for Alipašino) and the size of topography adjusts cleverly. Also, being the place of gathering for 2400 athlete’s, visibility above the crowd, is necessary. The typography reminds us of mountain peaks, with the M, formed by two right-angled triangles, this abstraction obviously called upon the straight lines of the roman numbers referring to the sectors instead of the arabic numerals employed in Alipašino.

It is a lesson of topography. I find this labelling in Mojmilo very elegant. Although outdated today, they resist desperately with the last drops of color; paint hasn’t been refreshed and the lines and triangles are slowly withering from sight and meaning. Probably this is what happens to Olympic villages, which elements vanish, when the imaginary is replaced by another. In W ou le Souvenir d’enfance, Perec, evokes the Island of W, where life is determined by the rules of Sport, to the point of looking like a concentration camp.

W.M.

During the war, Olimpijsko Selo was bordering the very line of siege, and the village of sport turned to a nightmare. Today, the original name of the settlement is referred to simply as Mojmilo and Mojmilo Brdo for the part on the hill, colonized by individual housing. Only some bullets on the facades remind us of a violent interlude and the washed off letters that witnessed everything from the top of the buildings.

Within very little walking distance are these two neighbourhoods: Alipašino polje and Mojmilo where Letters and Numbers are a toponymic system. There is no intention of disguise in poetic names, often attributed to large housing settlements, in an intent to hide its intimidating scale [21]. It is an omen presage for a catalogue. The right to archive.

Robin Hood in Alipašino Polje

Seen from the highway, Alipašino Polje, a residential neighbourhood at the western end of the city is a stark fortress of towering concrete buildings. The play with different heights and indents of the concrete blocks stuck to each other doesn’t break the heaviness; and the endless succession of square windows and small balconies crawling upwards in infinite lines, accentuate the characteristics of Grands Ensembles aesthetics: height, multiplicity and repetition.

But it is Saturday morning, and in Alipašino people are going to and fro, coming from errands, taking the children out on the bike, or just going for a coffee. The opacity of the massive housing cluster seems to vanish once in the inside. From the main pedestrian and commercial alleys, galleries piercing the housing towers allow glimpses to the inner courtyards formed by the buildings assembled in elliptic shape clusters. Each ellipse is a block (A, B, C1 etc.) constituting Alipašino’s micro-neighbourhood. Motorized traffic is displaced to the outer perimeter of these different blocks so the inner parts open up to wide and calm green zones, with playgrounds for children and some other facilities scattered on the ground floors or in some independent small building.

This luxury of free spaces, the easiness of pedestrian connections in between and the proximity of schools, kindergarten and shops elude the feeling of living in alienating collective housing towers; instead, the sensation is belonging to a neighbourhood. Even a cemetery between Alipašino Polje A and B, by the street Nerkeza Smailagića, found its ineluctable place in the settlement. The tombstones testify of its existence before the residential development, dating back to mid XIXth century. First, an orthodox cemetery it was used until the late 1970’s when it fell in disuse and invaded by vegetation as well as by eerie stories. It recovered its initial function during the war (1992-1995), when it became the final resting place for victims in the vicinity, access to other cemeteries was difficult within a besieged city [22].

On venturing inside of one of the clusters, from a passage at nº8 of the alley Trg ZAVNOBIH (Zemaljsko antifašističko vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Bosne i Hercegovine, State Anti-fascist Council for the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina), a verdant hill erupts in the midst of raw concrete. The small hand holding mine slips instantly; my 6-year-old daughter is already climbing her way up the top, jiggling at the sight of this unexpected challenge. This is Che Guevera Field in Alipašino B2. Me, it was Robin Hood Gardens that came to my mind. Although miles away, in Popular district, London.

Both near a river: Thames and Miljacka, and conditioned by a nearby motorized highway: A102 and Šeste proleterske brigade [23] (now Bulevar Meše Selimovića). Both with a green tumulus in the centre of the buildings, offering an uncanny feature of untamed nature within the city. Both, avant-garde experiments in social housing; despite their difference in scale.

When in 1964 Alison and Peter Smithson were finally able to put in place their new ideas related to social housing; first experimented in the unrealized project Golden Gate Lane (1952), in Tito’s Yugoslavia, a similar search for new housing morphologies for the masses flocking to the city was occurring. The need for urgent social housing after the destructions caused by WWII was a challenge for Europeans, either on the eastern or western block.

Within the welfare state in the United Kingdom of 1960´s the a preoccupation with social housing for the working-class was also associated with the redevelopment of worn-down neighbourhoods and brownfields near industrial areas in the capital. This new architecture had to solve the pressing housing issues but also was announcing a new way of life and citizens’ relation to public and communal spaces. Nevertheless, the architects were reticent to the success of such operations and worried of acts of vandalism. This is how Alison Smithson puts it in an interview for the BBC in 1970:

The society asked architects to build these new homes for them, but I mean this may be really stupid, we may have to rethink the whole thing, maybe that we should only be asked to repair the roofs and add the old bathrooms to the old industrial houses and just leave people where they are to smash it up in complete abandon and happiness so that no one has to worry about it anymore» [24].

Probably, social housing as a state politic was seen as a buffer holding back the appeal of the labour revolution occurring in the other “half” of the world, in the midst of precariousness, migrations, social exclusion and unrest. And this buffer was vulnerable.

The socialist and communist regimes brought a dream of grass-rout change: our way of life in contrast to the capitalistic/others way of life. In the Yugoslav Republic, urban planners working in the 1960’s were convinced that planning is a “science” to build a new city but also a new society and means of production. When researching on the socialist settlements in Sarajevo; I was surprised at the “scientific” aspect of the books on the history of urban planning; filled with data, tables, numbers etc. it was clear that minimal space design and cost control were crucial.

This will culminate in industrialized and prefabricated housing elements which will allow experiments in the functional design of the apartments as well as fastening the production.

The Centre for the Improvement of Building in Yugoslavia “has drawn up the ’Federal Rules of Obligatory Application of Modular Coordination in Housing’, as well as the ’Instructions for the Design of Dwellings in accordance with the principles of Modular Coordination’” [25].

Organizational and financial measures were also adopted. The creation of the worker’s self-management units, the residential common fund which resulted in public housing becoming a social good, meant that inhabitants “use” a socially owned flat without the need to buy it [26].

Alipašino polje was constructed by the workers brigades, volunteering to work to create a social asset: housing. Occupying 65 ha and counting 8250 housing units, it is designed in 4 mega blocks along 2 perpendicular axes, the two halves are symmetrical. On the ground it occupies a 23.25 % of built space, 23.72% occupied by roads, and 53.03% is left vacant [27].

Buildings range from ground floor+4 to ground floor+18 with commerce and facilities in selected buildings. The settlement has 4 primary schools and 6 kindergartens. It is a city fragment on its own. Its planning is based on the precepts of the CIAM, eluding the socialist realism monumentality of the Soviet vision of cities; as it is expected.

After the breakup of Yugoslavia from the URSS in 1948, the Association of Yugoslav Architects, meeting in 1950 in Dubrovnik for the first time, decided to abandon socialist realism and adopt western modernism architecture, this was reinforced by a visit to the international architecture exhibition Interbau in Western Berlin [28] in 1957. The sixties and seventies will be the decades where thousands of apartments were built across Yugoslavia, and will configure all the residential settlements that are still under scrutiny today, and have their detractors as well as defenders.

But there is also a local modulation of the modernist planning ideas influenced by the emergence as soon as 1967 of «a socialist literature critical of modern urban planning ideas» [29]. The independent ribbon blocks surrounded by greenery are accused of reducing the neighbourly character of cities and in highlighting collective frustrations in contrast to individual desires.

Urban planning, already considered a multidisciplinary task in Yugoslavia, where the Yugoslav Association of Urban planners relevantly maintained its independence from the Yugoslav Association of Architects; sociologists, particularly, adopted an important role in the configuration and critique of the new settlements. In the 1969 issue of Pregled they reproached planners to resorting to “technical solutions to resolve systematic problems” [30].

The same questioning done by Alison Smithson was echoed by architect Milica Janković who described the landscapes created by the functionalist, modern city, as destructive of a lost rural way of life while not ensuring a social sense of belonging and connections with the environment, thus producing a place for dwelling and not only living. The magical ingredient for curing this, she calls ambijent (ambiance), a kind of genius loci that can be achieved by a more intimate and sensible study of the spatial and social qualities already existing in the city. The Smithsons were clearer and defined the new public space within Robin Hood Gardens as the New Georgian square, adapting “familiar” spatial features to new urban developments.

This definitely had implications on architectural design, the laying out of settlements had to adopt a new shape, to favour social interactivity. Gradually, the independent ribbon settlements surrounded by greenery gave place to the grouping of housing towers around communal spaces, some settlements even included independent or low-rise housing. Also, facilities were introduced after witnessing the failure of some residential settlements in becoming places of living because of the inexistence of everyday’s life infrastructures like schools, shops, etc. Especially after the students’ revolts in the different federations composing Yugoslavia in June 1968, with claims for a more just socialism, even at the level of housing, as the “red bourgeoisie” and the “apparatchiks” had more advantages to the detriment of other sectors of the population in access to social housing and facilities. Alipašino Polje is an infant of such idea.

When Milan Medić with Namik Muftić and Jug Milić (1974-1979) laid out the urban plan for Alipašino polje in 1974, Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar district in London had just been occupied by its future tenants.

Did the Yugoslav planners read or knew about the Smithsons’ project in some travelling magazine and were inspired to create also a central hill? For the Smithsons this green mound was to prevent people from playing football and avoid noise in the centre of the settlement onto which the bedrooms overlooked. But this was not Alipasino’s planners concern, because of its scale; other places were destined for football. The inspiration, if any, must have been simply that of a ludic feature taking advantage of landfills produced by the works on the construction site, and bringing this “ambijent” dear to Milica janković.

On january 22 of the year 1994, Alipašino polje was covered in snow. The silky white folds of the hill in the middle of the residential towers were very tempting. Children went out sledging. Six never came back [31]. In 2018, Robin Hood gardens have been totally demolished. Both are an example of the disenchantment with the potential of architecture in shaping social relations. Both settlements are the site of tragedy, of a shattered social dream. But Alipašino polje has survived.

References:

Anatomy of a street

Put Života is a street running behind the university campus of Sarajevo. It is a stretch of a long street lying at the edge of the Marijin Dvor and Novo Sarajevo neighbourhoods, as if to separate the plain from the ubiquitous adjacent hills. This long street actually starts where Sarajevo’s centre ends; sprouting out of a crossroad carrying the sarajevans to different parts of town along wide boulevards after abandoning the narrow street meanders of the old centre. The street starts impetuously with the name Kranjčevićeva and crosses through significant features of the city. First, the Hastahana [32] park a large public space which existence is owed to Ottoman times when it was the sight of a hospital.

In front of the park, at nº2 in Kranjčevićeva, the modernist Red Cross headquarters [33] that also lodged the famous Sutjeska Kino and where, in wartime, the artist Nusret Pašić organized the exhibition Witnesses of existence in the burned down building.

Then Kranjčevićeva continues; winding behind the Marijin Dvor’s Austro-Hungarian blocks on one side and in front of the Central Hospital complex on the other. At one point the two twin towers of the city, colloquially known as Momo & Uzeir, and formally as the Unitic towers stick out from behind voluminous L shaped buildings on the newer part of Marijin Dvor.

Pointing their corners towards the street and displaying their rear façades; they create a backdrop for this iconic part of town; seen not from the prospettiva nobile; where the twin towers, the legendary hotel Holiday In, the Parliament and the new commercial centres are carefully staged; but from the backstage.

It is as if these iconic buildings, seen from behind, acquire a more “human” scale from this vantage point. This is how we discover the primary school Isak Samokovlija with its students out in the playground at the feet of the twin towers; an assortment of small cafés, fast-foods, ćevabdžinica and buregdžinica, variegated houses and motels. All is less fancy and arranged informally.

If you look a little upper following the hill slope you will glimpse vestige of the interwar Crni vrh settlement [34], one of the first residential area to be built in the modern spirit, on a hill over the city.

After this entertaining interlude, the street abruptly stops at the intersection with the wide Halida Kajtaža street. On the right corner looms the twisted Avast tower a new icon in Sarajevo’s cityscape, in front, the Glavna Željeznička Stanica, the Central Railway station built in 1949 and boasting in 1967 the first electrified trains in Yugoslavia, on the left the fenced compound of the US embassy and beyond it, fragments of the National and the History of the City museums are glimpsed.

At this point Kranjčeviceva widens and changes its name to become Put života a wide boulevard, the kind you would find on the outskirts of towns. After passing the interminable high wall with suspicious cameras of the US embassy, you reach the University campus. The Kampus is the vastest public urban site in town, extending from Put života until the main avenue in the city: Zmaja od Bosne. Occupying originally 30 ha on what was marshlands and the Gypsy quarter, on the outskirts of town, the military barracks complex under Austro-Hungarian rule was designed by Karl Paržik and Ludwig Huber in 1902. During Socialist Yugoslavia this complex was the seat of the JNA [35] forces and came to be known as the Maršalka by the Sarajevans.

After the war of 1992, a portion of its eastern part became ownership of the US Embassy in 2005 and severed from the whole by the street Roberta C. Frasurea [36]. In winter, nature is naked and you can get an unhindered view inside the perimeter at the elongated buildings with repetitive rectangular windows giving your pace the tempo when all seems uniform under the heavy grey sky. In spring, lush bushes bordering the campus allow spasmodic snapshots onto the interior. On both cases the length of the buildings is an important feature of the street profile on one side, while on the other, the linear visuals are marked by the railway line crowning the hillslope; springing from the central station and running behind the battery of the central station’s buses.

Again, it is only from this view from “behind” that you can get the breadth of these XIXth century austere buildings; whereas the 70m strip of ornate gardens and tall trees on the forefront of the principal facades on boulevard Zmaja od Bosne breaks the linear image of the whole. Not all the old barracks buildings are occupied, most bear war scares on their rear façades, and some are lying like an old carcass with frameless windows and graffiti of abandon. An alley cuts through the whole complex, linking both rear and front side, bordered on both sides by linden trees. It’s ideal for a stroll but few venture on foot here, I only come across parents bringing their child for a bike ride. The alley looks like a forgotten feature of a bygone use now piercing through fields colonized by wild grass, a kind of heterotopy [37] too wide to be only invested by some faculty buildings and awaiting to be assigned a new imaginary.

The complex is a “history mine”; it is inside these barracks, in the Garrison Court and Prison, where Gavrilo Princip and others collaborators were judged for the murder of the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife; eventually leading to the swap of the name Filipović lager of the Austro-Hungarian barracks for Kasarna Kralja Aleksandra under the Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs starting from 1918, after WWI.

Once the campus behind, Put života ends on a trivial roundabout: On one side the building of Volkswagen distributor, on the other slightly uphill in what is Pofalići neighborhood, the green and yellow blocks composing the large complex of the Fabrika Duhana Sarajevo, a tobacco factory built in the 60s, and in front the building of the emblematic Energoinvest [38] company founded in 1951 for the design of hydro and thermal energy facilities throughout Yugoslavia. Starting from this building, the street now bears the name Krupska.

Successively and monotonously passing by ugly alucobond [39] commercial buildings, looking more like industrial sheds with their corresponding big parking lots; we wonder how come they are located in such a central part of town. The monumental chimney still standing near the Energoinvest building hints to the previous function of this site known as Vaso Miskin Crni factory complex.

On the map of 1932 [40], adjacent to the barracks is a big perimeter; this was the location of the railway workshops for the first central railway station in Sarajevo, Glavni Kolodvor. Located in this new part of town, on what is now the street Kolodovorska, the railway was inaugurated in 1882 linking Sarajevo with the industrial town of Zenica, and later to different cities in the country.

On the 28^th of june 1914 the station Glavni Kolodvor witnessed the arrival of archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie from neighbouring Ilidža to make their tour visit in Sarajevo; on the day after their bodies departed from the same station to Vienna. Implemented in the late 19^th century, Vaso Miskin Crni is an indicator of a very intensive period of industrialization related to the modernization of transports and the deployment of railway lines for the circulation of raw materials in the territory.

In this early period of railway transport, repair workshops were necessary along the lines to ensure the proper functioning of the rolling stock. In workshops small repairs could be done; but damaged locomotives and wagons had to be sent in Zagreb or Budapest.

The Central Workshop, Central Werkstätte was founded in 1890 by the Austro-Hungarian administration to enable repairs locally and thus avoiding additional costs. It started with several workshops, a boiler-house, a foundry, a sawmill and a carpenter’s workshop, and by 1918 new greater railway pieces and features were starting to be built in situ, and the corresponding buildings extended. The need for specialized technicians became urgent leading in 1889 to the founding of the first Technical Secondary School, in the vicinity of the complex. During WWII, the German soldiers occupying the Central workshops destroyed most of the buildings before abandoning the city.

It is during the Yugoslav period that the name of the workshops changed to Vaso Miskin Crni, a hero partisan and a member of the collective of railway workers. In 1950, the complex’s management was transferred to the Worker’s Council and the Steering Committee and the railway workshops transformed progressively into an industrial complex under the management of Energoinvest. Today, little is left of the Vaso Miskin Crni industrial complex, the buildings were severely damaged in the war of 1992, and what remains is a 10ha area of urban rags adjacent to the university campus and situated behind Novo Sarajevo settlement, built between 1972-1982, of which you can see from Krupska, the central heating chimney with blue and red strips; emblematic of Sarajevo’s new settlements.

The outdated railway station on Kolodvorska was destroyed in 1971 and the lines shifted location. Today, on the other side of Krupska, the hill of Pofalići is ripped on its lower side by the railway line originating from the actual central railway station; this line splits the back of the city in two: plain and hill. Above the railway line, housing starts to colonize Pofalici’s hill up until the Hum Telecommunication Tower “land-marking” the hilltop of the same name. Krupska ends in the intersection with Ložionička street, known before as Živko Jošilo. Živko Jošilo worked at the Railway workshops and was arrested by the Ustaša [41] after distributing communist pamphlets in 1938 and sent to his death in the concentration camp of Jasenovac [42], probably from the same railway station on Kolodvorska.

https://visionscarto.neocities.org/2024-darine-sarajevo/fragments/anatomie/018-anatomy.jpg size=medium title=“Marka Marulića street.” credit=“Photo : Darine Chouéiri” right link>

If we look down Ložionićka, towards Zmaj od bosne and beyond towards the Grbavica neighborhood, across the Miljacka river, we are in the visual axis of the street once called Mašića [43], ending at a bridge once called Klaonički for connecting to the Kloanica, the first slaughterhouse in the city inaugurated in 1881. This part of town had long been the outskirts, where peripheral facilities were being implemented to support Sarajevo’s urban centar, it will not develop until the late 40s, when the city decided it needed more space for its inhabitants.

After crossing Ložionička, the street narrows significantly and its name becomes Marka Marulića. The sensation of being in the backyard of the town intensifies. Marka Marulića delimitates a borderland where the urban fabric of the city thins out and becomes characterless.

After coming across a lengthy housing block with multiple entries from the socialist period, and a new trivial apartment building the street continues in a peri-urban landscape split in two: on one side, few old abandoned houses by the road, very tall trees intermittently shading the narrow sidewalk, garden fences, dead end streets; on the other side scattered residential towers overlooking lost, but resilient, houses with their yards. This last stretch of the street delimitates a ragtag composition where reminiscences of the old urban fabric are getting invaded by new settlements. Beyond this fragmentation, on the horizon, the dense city is perceived.

Marka Marulića ends in front of the parking lot of a construction company before finally turning at 90° and reintegrating the city’s pattern, becoming a street like the others.

When the two teachers of Treća gimnazija first delineated their itinerary on a map I had bought of Sarajevo, and drew this long stretch going from Marka Marulića to Kranjčevićeva, on the “rear side of town” they told me it was considered safe then. When walking this stretch on my own, following their footsteps I felt totally unprotected especially when reaching the vast disintegrated area of Vaso Miskin-Crni complex and the University campus, with its barracks set back quite a distance from the street, I felt I was totally exposed, an easy pray for a sniper.

Why did they take this street? It was by spotting Kranjčevićeva Street on a 1932 map of Sarajevo and looking at old postcards that I understood. Once the imposing military barracks’ buildings bordered the entire stretch of today Put života street, but this “anatomy” changed. All the northern wing of the barracks was amputated, demolition ended on the 17^th of october 2018 of what was the building of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food in Sarajevo. The barracks’ buildings that acted as a protective shield for the teachers and many sarajevans who owe their lives to this piece of street, have disappeared. What remains is the name, Put života, street of life.

It starts with the 15^th century’s figure of the Croatian humanist Marko Marulić who first coined the term psychology to describe the science studying the psyche. It ends with 19^th century father of Bosnian poetry and literature Silvije Strahimir Kranjčevićeva. Kranjčević was such an important figure that in the map of 1932 of Sarajevo all the street running behind the town: behind the kasernas and the Radionica Drž Želj was named Kranjčevićeva; even the street’s ramifications which ventured briefly uphill were named Kranjčevićeva čikma [44].

At some point it will be become Skopljanska where new patterns for the city were being conceived. Kranjčević was the editor of the literary magazine Nada (meaning hope); probably anticipating on the role that the street that bears his name will play in the course of history.

References:

Tango in Sarajevo

29 November 1913. Saturday night. We are on the edge of the town, the part called Hiseta Gornja and Magribija Mahala that was starting to be inhabited by dense Austro-Hungarian residential blocks under the impulse of the Austrian entrepreneur August Braun. On arrival to Sarajevo, Braun opened the first brick factory in Koševo, on the site today known as Ciglane, and also launched the first Viennese-style large apartment blocks development on the grid-patterned streets laid out in this new part of town, partly on the Gysy quarter the Zigeunerviertel, between the Koševo stream marking the end of the city, at the time, and the barracks on the outskirts, and in front of the tobacco factory (1880).

This grid-pattern of streets projected in the area, was followed by the construction of residential blocks within the regular plots of the grid at the end of the XIXth century, after one of the streets Kralja Tvrtka street was laid out around 1898. In this part, it was easier to achieve a good distribution of the apartments around a central courtyard than in the downtown where the first Austro-Hungarian blocks in secessionist style were already aligning on what was Čemaluša, now Maršala Tita str. These new urban palaces adapted to the western lifestyle, often with shops on the ground floor, had to circumvent the small size and complex interweaving of plots in the old town, for the layout of the apartments. Some managed to achieve a central courtyard like the Salomova Palata at No. 54, the Musafija Palata at No. 34 or the Napredak building at No. 56 by Dionisio Sunke [45], in a simulacrum of alignment with the street; because once inside, we realize that the impassive secessionist facade hides the irregularities of the old urban fabric.

But the Marienhof, the residential building dedicated to August Braun’s wife Maria, built in 1885 and known as Marijin Dvor, was the most imposing with its nine entrances and café and commerce on the ground floor. The Tramway stop just a few meters from Marienhof, inaugurated in 1895 marked the integration of this part to the city. Tonight, behind the lit windows of the Café Marienhof the band is getting ready. Not any band. It was the Wienner Elite Damenorchester [46] R.H.Dietrich, composed of 10 women musicians and three men.

This was not a common line-up, and such bands performed especially in restaurants and café; where the repertoire could range from popular to classical music, marches, operetta and even… Tango. El choclo, the famous tango by Argentinian composer Antonio Villoldo was first played in Sarajevo on this night. Tangomania, a musical phenomenon storming through the European capitals at the start of the XXth century had reached Sarajevo. Ernest Ružić, the owner of the Marienhof café, standing discreetly in one corner had a satisfied smile on his face. It was worth engaging these ladies for the winter season musical program [47].

Tango for some mysterious reason fascinated the Europeans; especially the eastern part was fond of this unruly music and dance that crossed the Atlantic with Argentinian immigrants to Paris. First looked at scornfully and banned in some circles; it soon developed its own composers and productions. The craze was such that even some composers had Spanish pseudonyms like Camillo Morena aka Carl Elias Mieses, and some tango tunes became real musical hits like Tango from the operatta Katonadolog of the Hungarian composer Béla Zerkovitz, the success was such that it was even versioned by gypsy singers as well as by military brass bands. Of course, the Wienner Elite Damenorchester R.H.Dietrich played it also at the Marienhof café during the winter musical season of 1913-1914.

A few blocks further, in today’s Sarajevo, in the neighborhood of Marijin Dvor which now alludes to its developer, August Braun; the architecture is not that of Austro-Hungarian historicist or secessionist style and cafés aren’t belle époque. It is a mix of 70s international style and 80’s postmodern the whole flanked by the iconic twin towers of the city. All these free-standing buildings are federated by the public ground over which they are scattered among lush greenery and old tall trees. Two of them are most elegant, identical, elongated, with rectangular modular windows flattening the whole facade under a screen of metallic frames that takes off the weight off concrete. They are in total accordance with the international style of architecture, in their search for lightness by freeing the play of the facade from the structure: a vertical slab fragmented in modular coloured panels and resting on a gallery of pilotis surrounding the blind block of the ground floor entrance.

Across, three L shaped buildings, in post-modern architectural register of heavy blocks with volumetric reinterpretations of the building’s base, body and cornice, enclose the space into successive triangles. The shade and the spatial embrace these buildings achieve make the cafés on the ground floor most enjoyable, opening to the surrounding space; in contrast with the enclosed garden or patio of early century buildings. But a street, piercing diagonally into this careful arrangement of blocks [48], and designed by Juraj Neidhardt as a perspective axis on the Trebević hill, pointing in Sarajevo’s hilly cityscape, bears the name Franca Lehara (Franz Lehár) and brings us back to early XXth century tango in Sarajevo.This street was designed by the architect Juraj Neidhardt with the intention of having a perspective on the Trebević hill, pointing in the hilly landscape of Sarajevo, but also as a regulating axis of this part of town where on one side the Parliament building also designed by Neidhardt will be placed, and on the other the twin towers by architect Ivan Štraus.

April 1914, the Teschen town theatre ensemble plays Franz Lehár’s operetta Die ideal Gattin (The ideal wife) with a Tango scene. Franz Lehár is a Viennese composer that became famous for his operettas especially Die lustige witwe (The Merry Widow) composed in 1905. But soon, music will stop in Sarajevo. On the 28^th of june 1914, the Viennese Fledermaus Cabaret troupe is performing the first tango dances in Sarajevo. On New Year’s Eve of the same year, a few streets farther downtown, on a bridge near Grand Hotel Central, the archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are shot. This tango interlude in the Bosnian city is interrupted by the break of WWI on the quays of the Miljacka river.

Now; the street Franca Lehara is not dedicated to the composer, but to his father, also named Franz Lehár, who was the military chaplain conducting the orchestra of the 50^th Infantry regiment during his stay in Sarajevo. But I prefer to think of F. Lehár’s son when walking this long diagonal street, an ideal scenery for his 1921 operetta Tangokönigin (Tango Queen), and imagine tango dancers trained by Mika Katarivas and Janko Stjepušin [49] swirling around. The musical tunes of Tango are not lost forever in this part of the world; Boris Kovać and Ladaaba Orchestra brings it back along with folk, gypsy, and waltz, Turkish an ethnic music form the region in their disc entitled The last Balkan Tango. Also, Asphalt Tango Records, founded in 1997, leading in Gypsy, Balkan brass and Eastern European Music pays tribute to Tango, present in the Balkans since the last century.

References

• Borislav Spasojević, Arhitektura stambenih palata austrougarskog perioda u Sarajevu. Rabic, 1999, Sarajevo.
• Mary Sparks, The development of Austro-Hunagarian Sarajevo, 1878-1918. An urban History. Bloomsbury, 2014.
• « Colonial, Silenced, Forgotten: Exploring the Musical Life of German-Speaking Sarajevo in December 1913. Risto Peka Pennanen. », Chap 7 in Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions, Vesa Kurkela, Markus Mantere. Routledge, 2016. London.
• Old map of Sarajevo
  

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Architecture uphill

There is a hidden golden quadrant in Sarajevo. The ratio between its sides isn’t Phi but it produces the same effect of delight as this coefficient of golden geometry. It is invisible, and it will unveil to you while walking along its segments. Start from Maršala Tita str [50] that sets the limit for the Austro-Hungarian part of town in its expansion westwards; it was laid out in 1919 to connect the ottoman centre with the new residential area of Marijin Dvor.

At the level of the mosque Ali Paša begin walking Alipašina str. upwards towards the Koševo neighbourhood. You are walking above the Koševski potok stream that was set underground to gain space for urban development in the late 1940s. Some sections are still visible, intermittently, before the stream dies in the Miljacka river a few meters past Ali Paša mosque.

In Alipašina str, at the level of the street Danijela Ozme, be sure to look to your left at the two multistorey cuboids looming over the stone wall bordering the sidewalk. Maybe you would venture along Ključka stairs and passageway to get a closer look before continuing to the right to take Kemal Begova str. At its end it intersects with the street that bears the name of the most famous architect in Sarajevo under Austro-Hungarian rule, Josipa Vancaša.

Take it and sneak in to your right between 3 long dull pink ribbons (linear free standing buildings) with protruding rounded loggias on their short side, oriented toward the street, and linked together by glazed footbridges. After wondering in these interstitial spaces and discovering the access footpaths to these three free standing buildings, you will go out on Džidžikovac str. slightly downwards and walk on the periphery of the park extending on a soft slop. This is Veliki Park; on its lower side further to the right lays Mali park. Both are the first urban parks designed in Sarajevo on the site of two Muslim graveyards: Čekrekčijina and Kemal beg i Šehitluci; in 1886 by Hugo Krvarić an official of the Landesregierung. I am sure you will go wonder between old and new tombstones, scattered here and there, check who is the man of letters whose bust is carved in stone and the memorial fountain and sculpture on the lower flat part of the parc. Now you are back on Tina Ujevića the street bordering the park on its upper side, when you reach a pistachio building with creamy window frames, take a small alley on your right that seems to be leading nowhere.

After trampling on some pavement grass and wild flowers you will reach the beginning of stairs tumbling down until Pruščakova str.and holding in their movement the landslide of the slope.They are called the “musical stairs”, punctuated with long black strips like piano keys. The stairs pay tribute to the nearby cultural centre Sloga, home for the famous musicians of the 60s and 70s. When going down the stairs, be sure to pass under the first building on your left. You will reach Dalmatinska str. after a strange passageway, common in Sarajevo. Once on Dalmatinska, you will definitely feel the urge to trespass the portals number, 9, 11, 13 or 15 indicated on a low white wall from which three cantilever white blocks, with deep balconies outlined by rows of flower pots. Do it! It seems private but you can go inside and wander. When finally, you decide to go out from the labyrinth of terraces and footbridges behind the odd entrances on Dalmatinska, take the street upwards. At the end of your perspective, sticking out from the crossroad you will see the old Jewish synagogue of Bjelave, built for the Jewish Sephardic community already settling in this part of town from the end of the XIXth century. When in front of the synagogue take Mehmed-paše Sokolovića str. and reach Kaptol str.

The street will quickly transform into stairs, these are known as the “poetry stairs” cutting through yellow blocks striped with vertical lines of rounded white balconies and pierced by passageways. From the top of the stairs, and undoubtedly from the rounded balconies too, a beautiful vista of Skenderija’s neighbourhood on the opposite hill unfolds, while looking downwards a high-angle view of Mehmeda Spahe street depicts the usual hustle and bustle of city life. At the end of the stairs take Buka str. a few steps upwards and sneak in between two buildings. The slit is not accidental, but is carefully calculated, with a soft curve, like an embrace, and marked on the ground by an arrangement of stairs and soft ramp, with a green handrail. It leads you at the feet of a long residential building pierced with loggias and balconies with a decorative arrangement of bricks acting as sunscreens and joyfully combining their play of shadow to that of the happy children in the rectangular playground, at the foot of the stone wall, on which the building rests. This is where the golden quadrant closes up.

All perched uphill, differently accommodating to Sarajevo’s topography. You have been across masterpieces of modern to postmodern architecture. By order of crossing:

• Ansambl [51] Alipašina by Juraj Neidhardt (1947-58)
• Ansambl Džidžikovac by Reuf & Muhamed Kadić (1947)
• Naselje Sunce [52] by Ivan Štraus (1966-72)
• Ansambl Kaptol also by Ivan Štraus (1969-75)
• Milivoj Peterčić’s building in Mehmeda Spahe (1956)

Sarajevo has little space left on both sides of the river Miljacka that splits the town in two. On both sides of the banks, the city ground gradually gains height to become small hills overlooking the city plain. The Austro-Hungarian had already filled up the flat space, from the right bank of the Miljacka until the heart of town extending it, beyond the Ottoman core, slightly to the west. They started disseminating some isolated villas along the steep streets of Mejtaš neighbourhood and others on the hill overlooking Veliki and Mali park; at the time filled with fruit orchards which inspired the name Džidžikovac to the neighbourhood, džidži meaning ornate, florid. And this is where the 3 buildings of the Kadić brothers are found, in the tradition of the modern residential ribbon buildings layout: having their small facade diagonally facing the street, and thus turning the main facade and access towards the interior of the block occupying a green sloping plot: they constitute the first example modern multi-storey housing following the precepts of the Charter of Athens regarding the independent building block.

Besides the two elongated blocks of Juraj Neidhardt in Alipašina street and the one of Milivoj’s Peterčić in Mehmeda Spahe str., the way to tame the slope is by positioning the buildings opposite the gradient, allowing more open views from each façade, and bringing more light into the apartments. This feature of modern architecture is explained by the training of these three architects: Neidhardt has been a close collaborator at Le Corbusier’s atelier 35 rue de Sèvres after working with Peter Behrens in the 1930s. The Kadić brothers studied at the Prague School, the centre of Cubist architecture on the 1920s and later collaborated in the firm of Dušan Smiljanić in Sarajevo. Smilijanić along with Helen Baldasara inaugurated the Moderna architecture movement in Sarajevo with the Damic’s Apartments in Radićeva str. in 1927. Milivoj Peterčić was a Croatian architect that studied in Zagreb but practiced in Sarajevo, later on he will lay out the first big scale residential neighborhood in the fashion of the modern german Siedlungs in Grbavica.

But it is Ivan Štraus that will introduce a new way to adapt to the slope, the residential block is fragmented into volumes that cling to the slope like a wicked child climbing and finding his way over a steep terrain. Naselje Sunce is the first example of terraced housing where the modern pure ribbon block gives way to postmodern volumes in response to an architectural regionalism and local topography. Straus will receive his first Borba prize for this modern mahalla as he defines it, adding up on Sarejvo’s natural amphitheatre; the mahalla being a small unit of houses grouped around a mosque in the Ottoman fabric of the city [53].

All this building movement upwards, on the hillsides of Sarajevo, was engaged by the existence of the Veliki and Mali park which encouraged Austro-Hungarian officials to build their villas nearby to enjoy nice views over the greenery but also to be close to the newly inaugurated building of the Austro-Hungarian administration the Regierungspalast [54] facing Mali park. Hugo Krvarić [55] saw it right. He was from Dugi Selo, a city near Zagreb but made his studies in Vienna. He came to Sarajevo after the Austro-Hungarian occupation and had a son Kamilo Kravarić, who attended the newly built First Gymnasium in town, Prva Gymnazija. Kamilo became a renowned theatre critic and moved to Osijek where he became the redactor in chief of the Hrvatski list. After WWII, because of his proximity to Ante Pavelić, he flew to Argentina where he died in exile. Did he enjoy tango there, as it was enjoyed in fin-de-siècle Sarajevo?

Everyday urban fabric & the right to archive

The other archive

This is where the anodyne deserves a mention: A moment in the life of a child is kept in a street number; where some day between 1993 and 1995, he learned what an equilateral triangle was. A 150 m long common building has found its architect. Nikola Nešković, the architect of the first experimental school in Sarajevo and so many other schools is remembered.

This last part of the book is the claim of everyday urban features for the right to archive; in part to keep a register of a story, in part to give the city a depth of reading. Like a thickening of its walls with a layer of narrative and a lengthening of its sidewalk with a worn-out itinerary.
I make this part in intent for these pieces of information to escape oblivion.

They are beacons to navigate the city, like Predrag Matvejevic’s posts in the venetian canals, indicating passage routes and adorned by “small alcoves containing figurines of the Virgin Mother and vases of Murano glass with flowers or candles inside” . In Sarajevo they are discreet holders of other prayers, other stories but are here to lead the way in the history channels of the city.

These indicators constitute a restitution of small stories, they are scattered in the memoirs of some citizens, frozen in some pictures or schoolbook, they make sense for a common person. They escape History to make a narrative.

They are an archive in the sense that is given by Arlette Farge:

The archive is a breach in the fabric of the days, the tense glimpse of an unexpected event. In the archive, everything focalizes on some instants of life of ordinary people, rarely visited by History […]» [56]

Arlette Farge, Le goût de l’archive, Editions du Seuil, 1989.