You don’t see Sarajevo from the air until the aircraft descends sharply over the last hill and lands into the valley that houses Bosnia-Hercegovina’s beautiful capital city. In fact, as we drive into town from the tiny airport on the outskirts, we discover a city that is built mostly on the surrounding hills—lush green and dotted with red-roof houses. The city has a narrow flat centre which contains the old town of Bascarsija at the eastern end, and through which the river Miljecka flows. It is a geography that catches, and pleases, the eye. But not so long ago, in the early 1990s, it was also a geography which made it easy for aggressor Serb forces to lay siege to Sarajevo—completely gutting the city’s infrastructure and killing and injuring thousands of its citizens—for a period of three long years.

The image of a war-torn country still haunts the tourism industry here, even though Sarajevo has received a fair share of curious ‘war tourists’ since the late 1990s. It is difficult to escape the ‘war’ even if one isn’t here with the intention of being a ‘war tourist’. The city centre is full of buildings, some more than hundreds of years old, which still bear the scars of artillery fire. The ubiquitous ‘Sarajevo roses’ dot pedestrian footpaths in the city centre—places where red cement has been used to fill holes created by the shelling. The Bosnian Historical Museum, an otherwise unimpressive socialist style building, has a very moving permanent exhibit of war-time Sarajevo. There is also a tunnel museum near the airport which contains part of the tunnel which formed the only exit out of the city during the siege.

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