"Mine clearance in Bosnia and Herzegovina" -- a documentary from Deutsche Welle.

Cronyism, nepotism, venality and corruption -- no, this isn't the Monday morning star chamber meetings at New Albany's ruling party bunker.

Rather, it's the backdrop to land mine removal efforts in Bosnia Herzegovina. Two decades after the conclusion of the civil war in former Yugoslavia, the removal effort lags amid rampant Gahanization. It is thought that up to 500,000 people (15% of the country's population) face the daily possibility of land mine accidents.

A horrible reality: 259 children have died in land mine accidents since the war's end. Land mines are cheap to produce and expensive to remove; tens of thousands of land mines remain buried.

Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Centre

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA MINE SITUATION 2018

Current mine suspected area is covering 1053km2 or 2% of total country area. There are still remaining 75000-80000 mines and UXO in BiH.

The most impacted areas are: Maglaj, Doboj, Zavidovići, Gornji Vakuf, Doboj, Teslić, Maglaj, Usora, Sanki Most, Velika Kladuša, Travnik i Ilijaš.

LIVE TO EAT: The Golden Key Market in Buechel.

If there's no Cyrillic, can it even hope to approach authenticity?

When the herring is finished, onto the black bread it goes.

I'd have sworn this paean to Golden Key Market was posted previously, but evidently it appeared only at Instagram. At any rate, just after our return from Sicily last year I received a message from my friend Burkhard, who has served as my personal German cultural attache since we met at least 25 years ago.

Burkhard's plan was to give me a tour of international community in Buechel.

It is named after John Buechel, a Swiss carpenter and tavern owner who established a post office at his White Cottage tavern in 1883.

There's a big Eastern European and Russian presence in Buechel, manifested by eateries and shops, and after visiting a couple of Bosnian-American establishments for food and drink, Burkhard led me to the intended high water mark of my visit.

The loaf of delicious black rye (above) is the weight of a brick, and the matjes herring from Norway delightful in vinegar and oil with chopped onions, dill weed, salt and pepper. All of it was purchased at the Golden Key Market in Buechel.

My memory was jogged upon running across the informative article linked here. Unfortunately, Buechel's not on my usual route to anywhere, so I've only been back only twice since.

However, by sheer serendipity in August while overnighting in Indianapolis, we found ourselves dining at Gregory's, a Russian restaurant located in a strip mall on 82nd Street. Gregory's is quite near to the site of the late, lamented Chalkie's, and it's great.

When I think about how wonderful the herring tasted last December, it's obvious that a return to Golden Key is in the offing.

EXPLORING THE AISLES: Golden Key Market, by Lindsey McClave (Louisville Distilled)

Buechel’s Golden Key Market offers a treasure trove of goods from Russia, Eastern Europe.

The door had barely closed behind me when I received Oleg Gold’s warm welcome. “Would you like tea or coffee?” he asked, smiling as he ushered me into his compact and vibrant market.

Two glass cases flank the left side of the shop, filled generously with cured meats, cheeses, whole smoked fish, and golden tins of caviar. Four short aisles stretch along the right side of the store, an enticing array of packaged goods decorating the shelves. Any spare space is filled with an assortment of everyday sundries, from newspapers and greeting cards written in Russian, to first aid items in Russian language packaging. There is much to take in, and I am instantly eager to be spirited away by this treasure trove of goods from across the globe.

Specializing in food from Russia and Eastern Europe, Golden Key Market sits somewhat conspicuously at the corner of Bradford Drive and Bardstown Road in Louisville’s Buechel neighborhood.

Gold sets me up with a drink the shade of a brilliant green, an all-natural soda direct from Russia infused with an herb that he isn’t even sure has an English name. I sip and nibble on Turkish tea crackers as Gold shares the story of how he came to own this shop with Arina Safarova, whom he met a few years after arriving in Louisville.

Brčko.

Perhaps the Balkans have held such enduring fascination to me precisely because of the excerpted sentence from the article below: "Bosnia's bloody history."

Certainly the centuries-long Ottoman occupation had something to do with it. Immersed as I've been lately in books about the origins of World War I, it is difficult not to return again and again to pre-war Serbia, the Black Hand, the Russian Empire's indirect complicity ... and it always comes back to these dark, brooding mountains and a Hatfield-McCoy dichotomy which may or may not be relevant.

Then there's Brčko. Success or failure?

Are there such things as EDIT funds in Bosnia?

Welcome to Brčko, Europe’s only free city and a law unto itself, by Peter Geoghegan (Guardian)

Unshackled from Bosnia's bloody history, seemingly thriving as a beacon of multi-ethnicity, is Brčko a model for urban success?

Education has not been the only success for Brčko. In its early days the international community, keen to make the free city work, pumped in cash. Brčko was rebuilt. Between 2001 and 2004, more than 200km of roads were built and 8,000 jobs created. Thousands returned to city. Better pay and conditions paved the way for radical reforms in education and policing.

Yes, but ...

Corruption, too, is a particular problem of the free city. Because so many "national" powers are concentrated in a small cadre of people, graft is even worse than in the rest of Bosnia, where it is endemic. "This is a very small community, everyone knows everyone," says police chief Goran Lujić. "That can be a problem."

Hopeful news: "Sarajevo reopens historic city hall and library destroyed in war."

Another of my pilgrimage stops in 1987 was the library in Sarajevo, which served as city hall in 1914 when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited.

His day didn't end well.

Gavrilo Princip and the June 28 day.

22 years ago, the library was destroyed during the Yugoslav wars that dissolved a country formed after WWI, which Princip's bullets helped start. The Reuters report has good before and after photos.

Sarajevo reopens historic city hall and library destroyed in war (Reuters)

Sarajevo City Hall, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been attending a reception shortly before he was shot dead and which was destroyed in 1992 by Serb shelling, reopens

Sarajevo's City Hall, a stately neo-Moorish edifice marked by the violence of two 20th-century wars, has returned to its old glory after being destroyed by Serb shelling during the siege of the city in 1992.

The building, first opened in 1896, has been restored to mark the centenary of the start of the First World War, triggered by the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand just after he left a reception there in June 1914.

Converted into the National Library in 1949, it went up in flames in August 1992, destroying almost two million books including many rare volumes reflecting its multicultural life under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires.