Another Jerusalem
by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07
On my last trip to Sarajevo, I went to hear a concert. It was a part of the city’s annual Winter Festival, which started during the 1984 Olympics and continued even through the dire years of siege. I followed the crowds through the concrete expanse outside the Skenderija cultural center, a bunker-like complex near the downtown. Many of the stairs up to the Skenderija have collapsed—you could easily stumble off the jagged brink into a ravine of brick, twisted rebar, and flattened cigarette packs. Inside, though, a renovated concert hall was appointed like an Atlantic City nightclub: small round tables, white vinyl cushions, lavender and crimson lights, two bars on either end. Like almost every other indoor space in Sarajevo, the room was thick with smoke.
On stage that night, a group of Korean musicians were seated in a semicircle, wearing stark black and white. The music was austere, slight. A dancer accompanied on a few numbers; glowing under a spotlight against a darkened stage, wearing funereal robes, she could have been enacting the flickering moments between life and death.
Then the lead musician announced, in English, the evening’s promised centerpiece: a new song dedicated to the people of Sarajevo. The crowd—which included men with expensive-looking glasses, bearded art students, and plenty of women wearing colorful hijabs coordinated to tailored suits—all leaned forward together. The Koreans sang a simple melody, in unison, in their own language. At the chorus, they repeated the city’s name again and again: Sarajevo. Sarajevo. Sa-ra-je-vo!
The audience, which understood nothing, erupted with applause. They were on their feet. At the end of the concert, all the evening’s performers returned to the stage and played the song again. The crowd instinctively rose with a kind of reverence, like they were hearing their own anthem. They sang along to the only part they could—their own name: Sarajevo.
After everything, Sarajevans still have a deep sense that their city counts for something; that their experience—all their suffering included—matters beyond the margins of their own small world. They still say the name of their city like a kind of code: an invocation, a bargain with each other. It may be harder today to agree on the meaning, but Sarajevans keep speaking it incessantly.
As I walked out of the Skenderija and back towards the river, I thought of another line from Ivo Andric: “From whatever corner you set your sights on Sarajevo—you always, and without specific intention, think the same thing: that is a city.”
