These are stories. My stories. Experiences, writings, thoughts on travels to the heart of Bosnia. People, culture, food, politics. Photography, current events, war, recipes. I like to post commentary from books, film, Twitter, newspapers regarding Bosnia, it makes me happy thinking that people will learn more about a place I love.
As a little girl, I listened to my grandfather's tales of old Bosnia. I fell in love with those stories and with the people in those stories. My grandmother weaned me on her apron stings with steaming plates of soup and gloriously delicate pita, Baklava, palacinke, and the sparse kisses of a sparrow. I miss her every single day.
The stories and the food, often take on mythical proportions in Bosnia and in my memory. Fierce, funny, exaggerated, ridiculous, passionate, hot tempered, sometimes completely insane, hardly ever delicate except when singing, drunk with love, always hard workers, truthful, righteous, tearful, obstinate, obtuse and playful. Women dancing, laughing, singing, smoking, boys drinking homemade rakija, children running, lamb and pig on the spit in the back yard, tanned arms, the smell of wood, fire and men discussing Tito and women making coffee, with the miris of "how life should be".
There is more of course. That's what I go back for. The rest of the story. We were not always refugees. Great farm lands and forests managed by wit and backbreaking physical labor, intellects and pious men, church builders and factory owners, hunters, foresters in the service of the Empire and secret spies on the lam. Mixed marriages, though not many, orphans tragedies, stoic mustaches, embroidering girls in nunneries, gaggles of children, saints and beatings, the saving of the Jews. War and chance changes everything.
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