Another Jerusalem
by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07
In just a few hours, I had traveled the distance between Sarajevo—Europe’s Jerusalem, as it’s been called since Sephardic Jews first settled there after their expulsion from Spain—and its namesake in the heart of the Middle East.
I walked both cities’ streets in the same day—the two cities I know on the planet where churches, mosques, and synagogues seem equally at home; where almost every turn points you towards another history, another ethos, another dream. These are places where multiplicity and division seem to taunt each other, where purity and synthesis make opposing claims on the cities’ authentic nature.
The displaced Spaniards who made their home in Sarajevo saw reflections of the Jerusalem they knew only in their minds’ eye. Somehow the analogy stuck. It’s become a central part of the story that Sarajevans tell about themselves and their city. In my time there, I heard it repeated by Jews and Muslims and Christians, by both locals and foreigners.
It’s the kind of comparison I would normally resist: there should always be room in the world for a Jerusalem, but how many can we take? Still, as much as both cities have changed over the generations, you can see the commonalities. In fact, the congruence has probably only deepened over time, and in ways that no one ever expected or intended. As I spent time in Sarajevo, I found myself thinking more and more about Jerusalem.
A familiar composition of shapes: domes and spires, points and spheres. A stubborn disagreement between line and plane, where nothing meets at perfect corners. The endless stone. The hills and valleys, the encroaching nature.
Both Jerusalems—Balkan and Levantine—are places with dramatic centers of gravity, linked by neglected corridors. In either place you’ll find the same kind of narrow, crumbling passageways that always seem to be connecting, and yet somehow ending in exactly the same place. You need only take a few steps off the most trafficked streets to feel that you’ve walked over the edge of organized urban life. What lies beyond are intimate, derelict spaces. Not quite functional, not quite for public consumption. They are filled with the spillover from the private realm: garbage, laundry, food scents. Just a few feet, and you seem to have wandered off the map entirely.
And then, suddenly, you are somewhere. In Sarajevo, it might be the Gazi Husrev-Beg mosque—totally out-of-scale in its surroundings but still obscured from most angles (except for the spire; though in my experience, it’s never exactly where it appears to be). You might be at the carved-wood fountain at the heart of Bascarsija, the old Ottoman market. Or maybe it’s the National Library—at least the charred remnants of it, the extravagant shell—on the banks of the Miljacka River. The Miljacka, during the day, is shallow and muddy. At night, though, it catches the streetlight palette of gold, pale green, and ghostly white. The river glows, charged like a current running through the city; the headlights of cars streak past like stray sparks.
Both Jerusalems run a visual gamut from eternal to merely convenient. They are palpably divided into old and new cities. The historic centers are cities-in-miniature, packed closely with religious symbols and historical layers. In Sarajevo, the demure, slanting stone structures of the Ottoman era abruptly give way to the grand and ornate Austro-Hungarian buildings. Sarajevans say that their Muslim, Jewish, and Christian houses of worship are closer together than anywhere else in Europe. Closer than anywhere in the world, possibly, outside of Jerusalem. But Sarajevo’s old city is really the hub of activity—not walled off or frozen in time. As a result, Sarajevans navigate daily—or, at least, sample at will—the city’s ethnic and confessional matrix in a way that Jerusalemites typically don’t.
The newer sections of the two cities are mostly brutish, occasionally kitschy, always hasty. Whenever they are built, they usually look gray and outmoded just a few years later—they are not equipped for the passing of time like the old sections, which are worn but still feel vital. Beyond the cities’ iconic core, everything starts to feel like an afterthought. Maybe it’s just impossible to relate imaginatively to places like Jerusalem or Sarajevo in the present tense—or to envision a worthy counterpart to the mythic stature of what is already there.
Jerusalems are largely inward-looking places. They are host-cities, receptors, magnets for visitors and attention. Both have been shaped by conquerors, exiles, marauders, thrill-seek- ers, and true believers. The world comes to them.
In Sarajevo or Jerusalem, locals rarely distinguish between personal welfare and the fate of the city as a whole. Each place is such a consuming and complete emotional universe—with manic swings between buoyancy and sadness, between higher callings and bitter letdowns. To live in cities like these is something of a full-time job.
