From Sarajevo, a city surrounded by the bosnian mountains, it is possible to reach the Olympic site built for the Winter Games organized by the city in 1984.

On that year, Sarajevo was unveiled to the world, and proudly revealed its culture to TV viewers around the globe.

 

Nicknamed " The Little Jerusalem" at the time, Sarajevo was a place of perpetual conflicts between East and West, before it became a symbol of fraternity between all the Slavic peoples of the South. This particular intermingling between the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian populations, gave its inhabitants this feeling of Pride of being Sarajevian above all.  

 

Sarajevo organized in 1984 these last moments of harmony among Yugoslav peoples before the collapse of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

By a sad twist of fate, the city became a few years later the starting point of a bloody fratricidal war.

 

April 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence and its capital Sarajevo was suddenly surrounded from the heights by the Serbian armies until February 1996.

Three years of bombing, sniper rifle murders, and psychological torture of an innocent population.

 

Since then, the city has disappeared from televisions.

Cemeteries have mushroomed on the hills and the memories of the fraternal past are gradually dwindling, while the diplomatic cars pass by, fading into the scarified urban scenery.

 

It is impossible for the foreigner passing through Sarajevo to not be reminded of the suffering of the besieged city, its population trapped and tortured in sight of the whole world.

 

Strange sensations on the tarmac of a forgotten martyr city.

 

A painful frustration surfaces, tinged with the irony of its inhabitants, resigned to suffer in silence from a political system now governed by nationalist selfishness and ethnic absurdities.

A society in which the duty to remember muddles up with the War trauma; fertile ground for subtle manipulations based on this famous mixture between nationalism, religion, and corruption.

 

Since then, the Love of the Sarajevians for their city has embraced their disdain and weariness for their dead in the water country.

25 years ago, the hourglass stopped and the horizon froze.

The still hope for a better future is thin, while laughters and folk songs ring behind the scarred walls:

 

"Sarajevo, My Love"

 

The Olympic city is no longer, but beyond the drama, lingers the hope that Sarajevo 84 will become much more than a vacuum-packed memory of a Yugoslav city where life was good.

The experience of this living together seems to have forever etched a destiny for this city, a yet unattainable future: the first pages of a Bosnian society cleared of all Identity fetters. freed from the clutches of the past.