Notre-Dame in Paris and the Frauenkirche in Dresden.

The first thought that came to my mind when reports began appearing about the fire at Notre-Dame de Paris was the fall and rise of the Frauenkirche in Dresden.

I last visited Dresden in 1991 (apart from a brief interlude changing trains in 2006). At that time the ruins of the Frauenkirche had been allowed to remain piled where the stones fell after the catastrophic Allied bombing raids in 1945. Dresden was part of East Germany, and the Communists were quite content to use the ruins for propaganda purposes.

Photos: 70 years ago, Dresden was destroyed. Here’s what it looks like today, by Rick Noack (Washington Post)

For decades, the communist regime of East Germany refused to rebuild the most historic and well-known landmark of Dresden -- the city's dominant Frauenkirche church. Its ruins remained untouched as a symbol against war and as a memorial for those who were killed. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the church was finally rebuilt. Together with other sights and monuments, it now dominates the skyline of Dresden once again.

In assessing the prospects for repairing Notre-Dame, the Frauenkirche is a good place to start.

Frauenkirche Expert on Devastating Fire: 'Notre Dame Reconstruction Will Take Years', by Julia Merlot (Der Spiegel)

The damage to Notre Dame cathedral is massive: The roof was destroyed, a spire collapsed and the stone was exposed to immense heat. What will efforts to rebuild look like? We asked one of the engineers behind the reconstruction of Dresden's Frauenkirche church.

In Paris, it could have been worse.

Amid Notre-Dame’s Destruction, There’s Hope for Restoration, by Kriston Capps and Feargus O-Sullivan (CityLab)

Flames consumed the roof and spire of the 13th-century cathedral in Paris. The good news: Gothic architecture is built to handle this kind of disaster.

As the world watched in horror, Notre-Dame Cathedral erupted in flames on Monday evening in Paris, sending massive plumes of smoke rising from the Île de la Cité in the medieval heart of the city. Flames swiftly consumed the entire roof of the structure, and elements of the cathedral, including the central spire over the crossing where the transepts intersect the nave and chancel, collapsed into the blaze. One of the world’s greatest surviving works of Gothic architecture—a monument that had endured for more than 800 years—appeared to be in danger of complete destruction.

But it has survived: While the damage to the interior of the historic building is still uncertain, the fire did not consume Notre-Dame, according to authorities in Paris. The blaze stopped short of the two belfry towers that house the cathedral’s immense bells, the site immortalized by Victor Hugo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. “The worst has been avoided even though the battle is not completely won,” said French President Emmanuel Macron.

That’s the good news about Gothic architecture: It’s strong stuff, built to withstand even an inferno.

“It’s not that they’re designed to be burned down, but it’s designed so that if the roof burns off, it’s hard for [the fire] to spread to the rest of the building,” says Lisa Reilly, an associate professor of architectural history at the University of Virginia and a scholar of medieval architecture. “In the Middle Ages, the thought was that stone vaults [could be] used to prevent the spread of fire.”

The layers to this discussion are many in number, but I'm not interested in taking a position on the "people versus buildings" debate, at least today. After mulling the Frauenkirche's reconstruction, I found myself thinking about my Sarajevo sojourn in 1987, and later seeing the photos of places I'd visited in the city bombed to rubble during the ensuing Yugoslav civil war. It all might be summarized by the fact that not a lot of what you'll see in European cities is "original."

As devastating as this fire is, Europe has been here before: Wars, accidents, and natural disasters have claimed a great many architectural treasures over the centuries.

And a great many of them have been rebuilt, as will Notre-Dame. Here's a view from the roof in front of the belfry towers, which I took in 1985.

30 years ago today: (May 1987) Sarajevo, Mostar and what came after.

Previously: ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

Granted, my 1987 trip notes were sketchy and inconsistent, but they were even less coherent in Sarajevo and Mostar. Maybe I was enjoying myself too much to write (read: drinking too many cheap draft beers).

Day 33 ... Monday, May 18
Sarajevo. "Mickey" $5.50 room, 170 dinar beer, affordable city

Day 34 ... Tuesday, May 19
Sarajevo. Chair lift (Neil/Caren)

Day 35 ... Wednesday, May 20
Sarajevo. Mosque, etc

Day 36 ... Thursday, May 21
Sarajevo. Rain, shut in.

Day 37 ... Friday, May 22
Mostar. Suitable 4,000 dinar room, decent weather

Day 38 ... Saturday, May 23
Mostar. Good day, up to SOC, Mostar's Moberly, sidewalk pivo, etc

A dollar bought around 500 dinar, which helps to make sense of the quoted prices. Beers at a pub were 40 cents, and even less if purchased in bottles at a shop. Meals were two or three bucks ... and so on.

SOC surely means Serbian Orthodox Church (more on this in a moment), and "Moberly" refers to my high school pal Jeff, who used to play acoustic guitar and sing as we sat around the bonfire and drank beer. There was just such a performer playing for tips in Mostar as I drank at a sidewalk cafe overlooking the famous bridge, hence my note.

There is considerable melancholy attached to my recollections of what is now independent Bosnia Herzegovina, given the country didn't exist in 1987, and was subsequently created only after the Yugoslavcivil war, a horrible conflagration that killed thousands.

The country then known as Yugoslavia always was intended to be a high point of the 1987 trip, and it definitely filled the bill. Just four years later, all of it went up in flames as I watched from America via television news. There hasn't been a return trip to the region during the decades since, although we keep talking about beginning the cycle anew with a tour of Slovenia.

Of all the places I've been, none seem as surreal in retrospect as this corner of the Balkans.

Roger, seeing as you were in Yugoslavia in 1987, only four years before the tragic and murderous civil war began, can you tell us all about the rampant warning signs you noticed?

Actually, no, I can't. I was entirely oblivious.

It should have told me something important about Yugoslavia that in the 1980s, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, still was considered essential pre-trip reading. West's book, a survey of travel and history in the region, was published in 1941.

In fact, I did read it, and came away from the 1,000+ pages with an image of the Balkans as not dissimilar from Appalachian stereotypes about the Hatfields and McCoys. Between West's book and my university studies, I arrived in Yugoslavia with a passing knowledge of the country's history as a tacked-together Great War creation, a jumble of multi-syllabic Balkan peoples, religions and languages cast together into a "Kingdom of South Slavs."

At conception, Yugoslavia suffered from a feudal Ottoman legacy of impoverishment, turbulence and suffering. Nowhere in Europe were urban residents and rural dwellers so far apart. History simply had not dealt these people a very good hand.

However, by the 1980s an entirely new narrative had emerged. In it, the non-aligned socialist government controlling Yugoslavia following the viciousness of World War II had admirably succeeded in molding a cosmopolitan "Yugoslav" identity, as opposed to separate ethnicities and faiths. 

Tito in Sarajevo.

Marshall Tito (Josip Broz) was the hero of moment credited with had put an end to the bickering, and in many respects he genuinely had, partly through an instinctive understanding of the human terrain in a difficult neighborhood (the Balkans), partly through an aptitude for judicially rendered totalitarian methodology, and partly through the common Communist trick of keeping ordinary people so relentlessly busy in pursuit of the tiniest details of reasonable life that they were too tired to rebel.

But, yes, Tito kept things together for so long as his heart was beating. When it stopped, in 1980, the genies began creeping from their prison bottles. Those few short years later, when the country went up in smoke, and an unbelievable stream of abuses and horrors unseen since World War II took a crumbling Yugoslavia back to medieval times, I asked myself the question dozens of times: What happened to make these seemingly ordinary people leave their homes and go berserk?

On the other, apart from the stock hellos, goodbyes and how much, I came utterly without communication skills … and, apart from people like Radojko Petkovski of Skopje and a handful of other natives closer to my own age, Yugoslavia in 1987 was not the exact a patch of Europe where one could find great numbers of English speakers.

Consequently, although it was always possible to get by, and sometimes even deeper insights could be gleaned, conversations of greater depth with natives were seldom possible. I met other tourists, but when one communicates with another tourist, especially an English speaker, there is a natural tendency toward self-fulfilling prophecies, and to reinforce what already is known, rather than to ask questions and learn the score … and most of us had read from the same elementary tour guide playbook.

There are hundreds of answers, but the point to me is that when I was there, the question wasn't being asked, and if it was, I didn't hear it.

Shame on me.

---

The psychological highlight of Sarajevo was the chance to commune with the ghost of Franz Ferdinand, but my room was so cheap and Mickey such a genial host that I stuck around for two more aimless days of wandering, drinking local beer while reading the official vacation novel, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and plopping myself atop benches to watch urban life roll past.

I vaguely remember Neil and Caren, who were from Minnesota. They were following traces of their Jewish heritage; we became acquainted while riding a streetcar, and I joined them for their explorations. We had a meal far out in the suburbs, drank beer, and eventually found the chairlift. The recollections end there. Wherever the two of you are, I hope you're well.

I was headed for the coast on Friday, and Mostar was the next stop, three hours by train from Sarajevo. It was during this ride that Yugoslavia's mountains became a tangible, visceral presence.

One of my memories of this trip was a long period when the train stopped and sat, apparently waiting for another train coming in our direction to pass over a stretch of single track. Here's the view from my window.

I was in the compartment nearest the toilet, which in the typical European fashion of the time usually involved a foot pedal and trap door which deposited one's leavings onto the track.

However, some Yugoslav trains didn't have a commode, just a hole in the floor. Mine was one of them. It remains difficult for me to imagine squatting on a moving train, and perhaps this is why, with yet another contingent of soldiers on the train, as we sat stock still atop the high mountain pass for an hour, they marched one by one to the WC, and ...

I was very glad when the train started moving again.

As with Sarajevo, my room in Mostar was in a private home. It was roomier and slightly more expensive. The lure of Mostar was the city's multicultural reputation and its Stari Most, or old bridge.

Mostar is situated on the Neretva River and is the fifth-largest city in the country. Mostar was named after the bridge keepers (mostari) who in the medieval times guarded the Stari Most (Old Bridge) over the Neretva. The Old Bridge, built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, is one of Bosnia and Herzegovina's most recognizable landmarks, and is considered one of the most exemplary pieces of Islamic architecture in the Balkans.

As many readers already know, and as referenced in a previous installment, the bridge was destroyed during fighting in Mostar (1992-94) and later rebuilt. For more information on crimes against Yugoslavia's cultural and religious heritage committed during the civil war, visit Targeting History and Memory.

There were stray intact bits of the old Ottoman central district.

The market area.

The Serbian Orthodox Church (preceding and below; officially, known as the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity) was positioned on the hillside overlooking the heart of Mostar.

This Orthodox church was completely destroyed during the fighting, and its reconstruction finally was coming close to conclusion as of last year.

Travel writer Rick Steves offers this observation in a piece about Mostar, which looks as though it was written in 2007.

Now the bridge has been rebuilt and Mostar is thriving. It happens to be prom night. The kids are out, and Bosnian hormones are bursting. Being young and sexy is a great equalizer. With a beer, loud music, desirability, twinkling stars — and no war — your country's GDP doesn't really matter.

And yet, strolling through teeming streets, it's chilling to think that, just a few years ago, these people — who make me a sandwich, direct me to a computer terminal in the Internet café, stop for me when I cross the street, show off their paintings, and direct the church choir — were killing each other.

I know the feeling, although in reverse -- a few years after, not before.

Since Steves wrote, Mostar continues creeping up lists of must-see destinations. Cheryl Howard's 2014 account brings you up to date with text and wonderful photos.

I admit that Mostar took me by surprise. There is so much more to Mostar than the Old Bridge. From hiking through the nearby forested mountains, to taking in holy sites, posing with weird and offbeat statues, walking through medieval towns, swimming under waterfalls, exploring abandoned ruins and hunting down street art, I couldn’t help but wonder time and time again, why Mostar is not on more peoples’ travel radars.

I'd love to go back.

Next: Dubrovnik long before those trendy thrones and games.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

ON THE AVENUES: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Today's column is one in a series documenting my 1987 summer in Europe. Previously, Slobodan Praljak's suicide prompted a digression about war crimes during the 1990s-era Yugoslav civil war. Coming next, Sarajevo yielded to Mostar as I traveled toward the coast.

---

So young ... so thin.

50 pounds and 30 years later, during the summer of 2017, I had the brilliant idea of using newly digitalized slides from my 1987 European travels to guide a daily narrative about the trip.

This being Roger and not a trained librarian, hiccups were many, and the project wasn't undertaken with the Colin Powell doctrine in mind. Both planning and execution left much to be desired, although I managed to finish the narrative -- or so I thought.

As it turns out, I'd posted photos on social media but not the blog, omitting most of the Yugoslavian portion of the trip. With 2017 drawing to a close, I'm determined to make sense of this so I can move forward to the 1989 slides -- which I'll digitalize first, then start telling the tale at the beginning.

Seriously, I can get organized; I just can't remain organized.

---

Picking up the story on Monday, 18 May 18 1987, I'd arrived in Sarajevo from Zagreb and found cheap, legal lodgings ($5.50 per night) in the spare room within the apartment of a man named Mickey (real name: Milenko Ćurčić). At the time, the street address was Ulica J.N.A. 37, or the Yugoslav People's Army Street. Now it's Ulica Branilaca Sarajeva 37 (the Defenders of Sarajevo Street).

Dinner was taken at a down and dirty workers' cafeteria, and local draft Sarajevsko Pivo (beer) then gratefully consumed for roughly 25 cents per mug.

On Tuesday morning, my Franz Ferdinand obsession took root, and I embarked on a self-guided walking tour of those parts of Sarajevo's core that prominently figured into the fateful day in 1914 when the Habsburg heir and his wife were killed. The following, originally written as part of my 1985 beer blog travelogue about Vienna, hasn't been published at NAC previously.

---

The Habsburg dynasty reigned in various European configurations and locales from the 1400s through its war-ravaged finale in 1918, famously stockpiling its geographical components through strategic marriage ceremonies far more often than armed conflict -- which the Habsburgs often lost.

There’s something to admire in wedding banquets as opposed to bloodletting, although unfortunately, hard-learned lessons were forgotten at the very end.

By the dawn of the 20th century, the Habsburg Empire had been rebranded as Austria-Hungary, and occupied a large chunk of Central Europe – from the Alps to what is now Belarus and the Ukraine, and from Poland to the Adriatic.

The empire was populated by numerous ethnic groups speaking just as many languages, representing most major religions and a few minor ones, and held together largely by a steadily eroding inertia, otherwise known as “divine right” in the person of the venerable emperor, Franz Joseph, who was 84 years old in 1914 and had ruled since the age of 18 in 1848.

His own son having committed suicide, Franz Joseph’s successor was his nephew, Franz Ferdinand – and Franz Ferdinand was a famously complicated individual.

The history of the Habsburgs was a major reason for my visit to Vienna in 1985, with the single most important objective being the city’s military history museum, appropriately located in a complex of 19th-century buildings called the Arsenal. I wanted to learn more about Franz Ferdinand’s life, and chose to begin with his death.

Upon arrival in Vienna, and after the cursory stowing of gear at the Hostel Ruthensteiner and a quick coffee, the Arsenal was my opening afternoon attraction. Happily for an inexperienced tourist often too disorganized to eat, the museum boasted a small, efficient canteen operated by its citizen support arm.

The counter was manned by an elderly mustachioed gentleman who served fat local sausages with a roll and mustard, accompanied by a blue collar Schwecator lager, and all of it available at a very reasonable price. Restored to metabolic equilibrium, it was off to the exhibits.

First came the obligatory suits of armor and medieval skull-busters, followed by racks of muskets, Napoleonic-era uniforms and affiliated ephemera. Modern times drew steadily closer, and then I spotted the relics that occasioned my visit: Franz Ferdinand’s blood-stained tunic, the restored Gräf & Stift automobile in which he rode to his murder in Sarajevo, and numerous facsimiles of photographs taken before and after the assassination.

This was one of the images, and it triggered a lasting personal obsession.

Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie are shown exiting the town hall in Sarajevo. In little more than ten minutes, they’ll be dead, dispatched by two improbably well-placed gunshots fired by a youthful Serb terrorist, Gavrilo Princip.

When the photo was taken, the Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo already had careened far off the rails. It was about to get even worse, with misfortune ranging far beyond the shortened lives of the royal couple, to victims all over the world about to be claimed in an unprecedented conflagration.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to us as a blunt, obnoxious, violent and generally unlikable human being, who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the flimsy guise of hunting.

But had Sigmund Freud been asked, the Viennese doctor surely would have pointed to deeper currents. While not exactly enlightened, Franz Ferdinand’s views on the future of the empire were not at all uniformly in sync with those of his uncle’s conservative coterie. He had his own ideas and advisers, and chafed at waiting his turn, at least in part because of an under-appreciated aspect of his character.

Improbably, Franz Ferdinand was a closeted romantic, and he did something decidedly uncommon among his royal brethren: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman of minor nobility who was decreed by the hidebound royal court as inadequately marriageable for the esteemed likes of Franz Ferdinand -- and so of course, he married her anyway.

Doing this triggered severe sanctions from Franz Ferdinand’s own family. He was humiliatingly compelled to endure a morganatic marriage, renouncing the path of succession for his two young children, and explicitly acknowledging that Sophie could not ever participate in the intensively choreographed trappings of royal life.

To the otherwise boorish Franz Ferdinand, who perversely was the perfect family man at home, the sheer idiocy of dynastic protocol became a daily slight. It was an unceasing and mocking insinuation that his beloved wife did not even exist, and it isn’t surprising he nursed a collection of smoldering grudges.

In 1914, Franz Ferdinand had the chance to attend military maneuvers in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a disputed region of mixed ethnicity once occupied by the Ottoman Turks, and recently annexed by Austria-Hungary to the growing dissatisfaction of the neighboring Kingdom of Serbia, where there existed a body of opinion that all Serbs should be united under direct Serbian rule.

In such a highly charged atmosphere, the war games seemed a provocation to many people in the region. It was not necessary for Franz Ferdinand to make the trip, but naturally he did.

Among the reasons for Franz Ferdinand’s decision was this: As defined geographically by the same royal court protocol the heir detested so intensely, Bosnia-Herzegovina was outside the reach of official mandated etiquette. It was a veritable loophole, allowing what amounted to a pleasure trip on company expense, and a chance for him to treat his wife to the perks otherwise denied her. No doubt he chortled at the clever turnabout, and her servants began filling crates.

Meanwhile, this background meant nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators, who were being trained and financed by the Black Hand, a covert group of Serbian army officers. As the days passed prior to Franz Ferdinand’s arrival in Sarajevo, a motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted a tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

As Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade rolled through Sarajevo, one of the inexperienced terrorists managed to keep his wits and inexpertly toss a bomb. It bounced off the hood of the Archduke’s car and ignited atop the vehicle behind it, injuring a subaltern.

The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the knee-deep river; thwarted, he then tried to ingest poison that wasn't poisonous enough. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip – a true believer if ever there was one – adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

But ominously, he kept his gun safely in his pocket.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, the supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish his official visit at Sarajevo's town hall, where his epic tirade ended only after soothing words from the always helpful, calming Sophie.

Sarajevo City Hall (Vijećnica).

Hence the photo: A bedecked Austrian royal, veins still visibly bursting, descending the stairs while local minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in ancient black and white. A bad moon is about to rise, and they all seem to know it.

Confusingly, the motorcade resumed. Although Franz Ferdinand’s staff had altered the return route to make it safer, the changes were not communicated to the drivers. The Archduke’s Gräf & Stift made a wrong turn, and its driver was told to halt.

The car stopped on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target, seated stock still only 20 feet away, as though serenely posing in the cross hairs. He managed just two shots, each inexplicably perfect, and within moments both heir and wife were gone.

Princip's supposed foot steps,
and the commemorative plaque.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination provided the pretext for European hawks to settle accounts. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia as a heavy favorite, but was mauled repeatedly by the outnumbered Serbs until German forces came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the nasty unforeseen consequences of which endure a century later.

In retrospect, irony abounds. Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure, and yet his unquestioned love for his wife was in part responsible for their passing.

Moreover, he understood perfectly what so many of his royal compatriots did not: Austria-Hungary was not at all equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Counter-intuitively, the first casualty of war was his country's prime voice for peace.

Soon millions of others would perish, although initially, only two funerals were required. In death as in life, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary went his own cantankerous way, with a little “help” from his hidebound royal family.

That’s because as noted previously, Franz Ferdinand’s final resting place is not among the Habsburg bloodlines deep within Vienna’s Kaisergruft. The same infuriating protocol forbade the presence of Sophie in the crypt, so Franz Ferdinand’s testament called for the couple’s burial together at his family’s castle in Artstetten, a half-day’s bicycle ride up the Danube from Vienna.

In 1985, I was just getting to know Franz Ferdinand’s story. By 2003, almost two decades later, I’d visited several other places connected to Franz Ferdinand: His chateau in Benesov, Czech Republic; the official residence at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna; and of course Sarajevo, where I followed the motorcade route and saw the scene of the crime.

In 2003 a friend and I bicycled to Artstetten. As we were leaving, I mentioned to the gift shop attendant that in 1985, I’d gone to Vienna looking for Franz Ferdinand's grave, only to find he wasn’t there, which was the reason I’d finally made it to Artstetten.

There was no public access to the final resting place of the Habsburg and his wife, and I didn’t ask for favors.

She handed me the key, anyway ... and I had my moments with them, alone.

---

Following are a few other 1987 photos from Sarajevo. It can be safely assumed that much of what you see in these views was damaged during the fighting during the siege of the city in the early 1990s. I haven't been back. Maybe some day.

---

Recent columns:

December 7: ON THE AVENUES: Say goodbye to all that, and expect the bayonet.

November 30: ON THE AVENUES: The 29 most influential books in my life.

November 23: ON THE AVENUES: A few thanks to give before we return to our regular resistance programming.

November 16: ON THE AVENUES: Harvest Homecoming chairman of the board David White replies to Cisa Kubley's column of November 2.

THE BEER BEAT: Praljak, Yugoslavia's civil war, the brewery in Sarajevo and the bridge in Mostar.

This article is one in my series of 1987 travel recollections. Previously came an introduction to Yugoslavia in Ljubljana, then Zagreb and the way to Sarajevo. 

Next in the series: My Franz Ferdinand heritage trail, 30 years ago in Sarajevo.

---

We'll be taking a look at an informative Atlas Obscura article about the Sarajevska Pivara's (Sarajevo Brewery's) heroic role during the siege of the Bosnian city amid the horrendous Yugoslav civil war of the 1990s.

First, there'll be an admission of editorial incompetence.

Earlier this year, it abruptly occurred to me that those 2017 dates steadily ticking past me on the calendar had become synchronized with the very same ones from way back in 1987, serving to recall the day-to-day progress of my summer-long backpacking adventure in Europe during the penultimate year of Ronnie Raygun's second term.

Consequently, without preparation or much of a plan, I launched an exceedingly disjointed "30 years ago today" retrospective here at NA Confidential. The accounts didn't proceed chronologically because the project didn't begin in earnest until June. Eventually I settled on a system, commenced digilizing the ancient slides, then backtracked to pick up what had been missed.

However, as of roughly an hour ago, there is an urgent need for me to dive into the 1987 series again and reorganize the whole shebang, seeing as time spent in the former Yugoslav cities of Zagreb, Sarajevo, Mostar and Dubrovnik was completely omitted from the narrative.

It is beyond the scope of this column to make the necessary corrections all at once, so let's begin with the brewery in Sarajevo, which dates from 1864 and remains in operation today. I drank the typical golden lager beer back in '87, although remembering exactly what it tasted like is another matter entirely.

Significantly, it would be difficult for any brewery anywhere to continue brewing without predictable supplies of barley and hops, but since old-school breweries were built in proximity to their water sources, the wells kept functioning -- and helped keep people alive.

As an added bonus, the author's explanation of the complicated Yugoslav civil war's origins is brief, yet sufficiently clear.

The Bosnian Brewery That Saved a City Under Siege, by Stacey McKenna (Atlas Obscura)

The springs of Sarajevska Pivara became a sole water source for many Sarajevans

IT’S NO SECRET THAT WATER sustains life, and that a lack of it can just as easily rip life away. That’s especially true of the natural springs that run beneath Sarajevo’s Sarajevska Pivara, which have been crucial to the brewery’s crisp, malt-forward beers since its founding in the 19th century: The vitality of the underground waterways goes well beyond brewing.

In 1994, as Sarajevo found itself under a siege that would outlast any other in modern warfare, Sarajevska Pivara—and its water—became a lifeline. Creeks dried up, rivers became polluted, and both water and power lines were sabotaged, but Sarajevska Pivara continued pumping water and distributing it to locals ...

 ... Nowhere was safe, and even collecting water could be a deadly task. In 1994, a disaster relief worker for the International Rescue Committee estimated that 90 percent of the deaths in the city happened along the exposed banks of the Miljacka River, where families sourced non-drinking water. Yet Sarajevska Pivara’s pump continued to draw water from its deep underground wells.

(Sarajevo native Haris) Hadziselimovic recalls trekking to Sarajevska Pivara each day with his parents to help them bring water home. “We were simply taking canisters of whatever type we had, and loading them on a bicycle or a sleigh in the winter,” he says. “We walked for about an hour to the brewery, then lined up with people for several hours.”

By the time Yugoslavia devolved into bloodshed, Rich O's Public House was underway. I remember reading accounts of the siege and being appalled, having visited the city only seven years before. The regulars would ask me if I saw "it" coming, and of course the answer was no; a few days on the ground couldn't possibly be enough to predict the gruesome future.

Now the "future" is more than two decades in the past, except it isn't gone, because we've only recently witnessed a considerable aftershock when the Croat commander Slobodan Praljak publicly committed suicide by drinking poison following the confirmation of his verdict by the International Criminal Tribunal at the Hague.

I highly recommend this article.

The Cultured Destroyers Of Culture, by Gordana Knezevic (RFERL)

Before the war, Praljak had been a writer and film director. He had also been the director of various theaters, including in Mostar. With the outbreak of the war, the man of culture became a general and an adviser to Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. He was eventually accused of command responsibility for the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar, one of the most striking Ottoman monuments in the Balkans, and a jewel of Bosnia's Islamic heritage.

Where did I go immediately after Sarajevo?

Mostar, where the Croats led by Praljak destroyed the famous 16th-century bridge over the Neretva River.

Yes, these are my original photos of the beautiful and (then) peaceful scene. In 1987, I spent several hours on each of consecutive days drinking draft Sarajevsko Pivo at a cafe overlooking the Old Bridge, which was rebuilt in 2004.

In closing, here are a few photos and a passage from a piece I wrote approximately ten years ago about my 1987 arrival in Sarajevo. It will be rewritten and expanded (with additional photos) when I get around to completing the 1987 travelogue.

---

In 1987, the most recent translation of the Bible – that most valued of possessions, otherwise known as the Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable – showed a main line running from Zagreb to Vinkovci, then another line branching off southward Sarajevo, through Mostar.

The map showed trains finally reaching the Adriatic at Kardeljevo, now known as Ploce, where I’d been told a bus could be taken to finish my journey to Dubrovnik, the famous walled city widely known as the “Pearl of the Adriatic”.

Sarajevo and Mostar were projected as stopovers for me after departing Zagreb, Croatia’s largest city, where’d I’d stayed for only a day owing to the youth hostel’s unavailability.

In truth, I was eager to move toward salt water … and time wasn’t at all an issue. It still was May, and I had until the last week of June to be in Budapest, Hungary. Before that would come Bulgaria, and maybe even Romania.

Safely aboard the train, and foraging from the sandwich cart, it soon became evident that mile after mile of the route through Bosnia-Herzegovina would be filled with jagged, unforgiving mountain terrain, evoking stories of the murderous internecine conflict between ideologically disparate partisan forces fighting against the German invaders during the Second World War, as well as just as frequently against each other in the bloody positioning for postwar supremacy.

Marshall Tito’s Communists eventually triumphed, and a non-aligned Yugoslavia became a well-known player on the Cold War stage, but as we all too sadly know, the full bill didn’t come due until the cataclysmic civil war of the 1990’s, which brought with it the disintegration of the nation as well as wanton death and destruction in Sarajevo, Mostar and many other towns and cities too numerous to name.

As a foreign visitor in 1987, there was no indication of the approaching conflagration, and in fact, memories of my time in Sarajevo are fleeting. As noted previously, my primary reason for visiting was to examine the place where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.

It was a bonus that the city, the center of Muslim life in Bosnia, had a historic reputation for tolerance, and housed mosques, various Christian churches and synagogues. Reputedly, budget accommodations were easy to find, along with burek, pleskavitsa (local delicacies), strong espresso-style coffee and pivo (beer).

It will surprise you to learn that I didn’t write a journal back then, although some photos were taken, but unfortunately, the film later was developed into slides, not prints, and these snapshots are no longer easily accessible without resorting to a 30-year-old slide projector that has a tendency to mangle to precious relics. It’s true that whenever I drank a different brand of beer, I’d record it, and the list documenting my drinking record survives intact, helping to explain where the money went.

In a scrapbook there is somewhat of a paper trail. As a card-carrying pack rat, I've always seen to it that ticket stubs, receipts and the like are stashed – even before they became the basis for tax deductions. These receipts show that on the chilly and overcast May afternoon when I stepped off the train in Sarajevo, I took a bus or streetcar to the vicinity of the central tourist office.

As was the case throughout my early travels, the very first objective when arriving in a new city (after the imperative to get there as early in the day as possible) was to master local logistics, and most important among these considerations was finding a place to stay, one in my price range, which at the time was no more than $10 a night.

In Yugoslavia, this could be achieved in two ways, both of which were legal (although the same could not be said for all the countries in the Bloc), and involved accepting the offer of what was called a “private room” for tourists.

On way to accept this offer was to book the room formally through the local tourist office, which kept the officially sanctioned list. The other way was to haggle with the housewives who typically met train and bus arrivals for the purpose of taking in visitors and making a bit of petty cash on the side.

In Sarajevo and Mostar, I chose the official route. Later, in Dubrovnik, the unofficial path was taken. All of them worked out quite well.

Naturally it was important to be oriented and to have a map, and one was acquired at the same office, along with directions to the high-rise building where I’d be staying. It was within easy walking distance, but as was often the case for an unworldly non-urbanite, navigating the perplexing numbered system of buttons for ringing the occupant took some time.

My initial rings were not answered, so I went window shopping nearby for a while, sniffed around the entrance of what appeared to be a tavern, returned to the building, and had better luck the second time around.

And so, after climbing w few flights of stairs, I stepped into the tiny foyer of an equally minuscule apartment occupied by a man nicknamed “Mickey,” whose coffee table boasted copies of tourist phrase books in English, French and German, and whose first words after greeting me and looking at my receipt was to ask whether I’d like slivovitz.

Before I could answer, and in a fashion that I would come to regard as routine in the Balkans, the bottle and glasses already were place between us on a tray. With the help of the distilled plum juice, we were briefly acquainted.

I was shown to my closet-sized room, and noticed immediately that nearby there was a washing machine. This was critical for a shoestring traveler who had been rinsing articles of clothing in Woolite and hoping they’d dry before the next morning, a system that usually works with t-shirts, socks and underwear, but fails miserably with jeans and larger items.

Mickey was happy to start a load of laundry for me, and he gave me perfect directions to a restaurant down the street where I could grab a meal, it now being early evening and the slivovitz settling queasily on an empty stomach.

At the eatery in question I was introduced to an institution that would be a constant throughout my ensuing Eastern European travels: The thoroughly egalitarian institution of the Socialist state-owned self-service cafeteria, a place where a foreigner was just as welcomed as the natives, and could point with ease to foodstuffs without the bother of an indecipherable menu … and, usually, a place that served cheap draft beer -- in this case, Sarajevsko Pivo.

I recall the lettuce being brown, the meat gray, and the beer sufficiently cold; moreover, the price for a plate of passable grub and a couple of half-liter mugs came to less than $2.

Sated and sleepy, I returned to my lodging to study the map and get a good night’s rest, because on the following morning, there was much Franz Ferdinand lore to indulge.

---

Tangents.

They remain a problem of mine.

Make that 102 years.

History.

It just refuses to end.

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

"Sophie, Sophie, don't die! Stay alive for the children."

This is the image that started it all for me. It shows the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife, exiting the town hall in Sarajevo and unwittingly preparing for an appointment with destiny via two well-placed gunshots from Gavrilo Princip.

It was 100 years ago today, and the people pictured above are not happy. It was about to get worse.

The irony of the Archduke's death is that it provided the pretext for the cataclysm of the Great War (now known as World War I). Franz Ferdinand may have been an unsympathetic, disagreeable figure in many ways, but he understood what so many other did not: His empire was not equipped to fight a modern, industrial war. Six weeks after his death, Austria-Hungary invaded tiny Serbia, and was mauled repeatedly by the Serbs until Germany came to the rescue. Meanwhile, general conflict had erupted throughout Europe, the consequences of which endure a century later.

From 1985 through 2006, the life of Franz Ferdinand was a recurring motif in my Central European travels. In 2008, I attempted to explain it, at least in part. It is my hope some day to have the chance to retrace these steps, all in one trip through the former Habsburg lands.

---

Readers of history already know the emperor Franz Joseph's nephew, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as the man whose 1914 assassination in Sarajevo lit the fuse for the Great War. As for me, since my very first visit to Europe in 1985, when I made a visit to Austria's national military museum for the sole purpose of viewing the Archduke's blood-splattered tunic and the automobile he and his wife were using to drive through Sarajevo when Gavrilo Princip's bullets ended their lives, visiting the various Central European locales on the Franz Ferdinand heritage trail has been a constant attraction.

The military museum was first, and also in 1985, I walked through the crypt of the Austrian emperors in Vienna precisely to see where Franz Ferdinand and his wife are not buried – and this absence is a very important part of the overall story.

The Archduke was a blunt, obnoxious, violent, unlikable and repressed human being who in his spare time enjoyed slaughtering wildlife under the guise of hunting.

He also did something decidedly uncommon among his brethren European royalty of the age: He fell madly in love, and remained just as madly in love, with a woman decreed by the royal court to be inadequately marriageable for an heir to the throne, and so he married her anyway, even though doing so forced him to renounce the path of succession for the children, and to acknowledge that Sophie could not participate in the normal trappings of royal life … or enjoy an eternal resting place alongside the properly accredited Habsburg family members.

Inexplicably, the otherwise indefensible Franz Ferdinand was transformed into the perfect family man at home in various estates and castles scattered throughout the realm … but, not unexpectedly, his perceived mistreatment at the hands of protocol rankled, and he nursed a smoldering grudge until the end of his life, which came in Sarajevo during a journey of largely unnecessary semi-official business that was undertaken because it geographically placed he and his wife outside the direct control of the court, inside a province that had been annexed only a short time before, and enabled him to provide his wife, albeit it briefly, with the "official" perks denied her otherwise.

All this meant less than nothing to a young group of nationalistic Bosnian revolutionary conspirators who detested the empire and were being trained and financed by a covert arm of the independent Serbian kingdom's military arm in Belgrade ("Black Hand"), and thus we are brought back to Sarajevo, where the motley crew of inflamed and malnourished terrorists plotted their tragicomic ambush of the Archduke.

To start, a bomb was inexpertly tossed. It bounced off the hood of Franz Ferdinand's car and ignited on the one following it, injuring a subaltern. The bomb thrower sought first to drown himself, jumping from an adjacent bridge into the two-foot-deep river, then, thwarted, tried to ingest poison that wasn't poison. He was quickly arrested and the group dissolved in panic, with Princip adjourning to the curb outside a coffee house to morosely consider the failures of the botched performance.

Meanwhile, in spite of the bomb attempt and further warnings that security could not be guaranteed, a supremely annoyed Archduke elected to finish the official visit to Sarajevo's town hall, resulting in one of the most incredible photos you'll ever see, with the bedecked Austrian royal visibly bursting veins while minor officials in vests and fezes offer tepid and embarrassed salutes. The fear in their eyes is palpable even in the ancient black and white photo. A bad moon is about to rise, and they know it.

But nothing can be done when it comes to fate, especially in the Balkans.

Sure enough, perhaps an hour later, the motorcade resumed without the Archduke's staff having communicated to the lead driver a slight change in route undertaken to make the return safer. Having missed the turn, the cars were halted on the street directly outside the coffee shop where Princip now emerged to find his original target stock still and seated only 20 feet away, posing for the crosshairs. Princip fired two shots, one each for Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, both inexplicably perfect in aim, and within moments, the heir and his wife were both dead.

Throughout my subsequent travels, I've visited the Archduke's "hunting lodge" in Benesov, outside Prague, consumed the beer brewed in his name nearby, returned to Vienna to tour the Belvedere Palace (his official residence), and finally in 2003, arduously climbed the steep side of the Danube valley on a bicycle for the privilege of seeing the ancestral castle at Artstetten, and being presented the key to the mausoleum by the lady on duty so that after twenty-two years, the couple's graves could at last be viewed and my respects offered.

But Sarajevo in 1987 remains the benchmark. The town hall, the bridge and the museum located where the coffee shop had been … the footprints in the concrete sidewalk to show where Princip stood when he struck his blows against the empire … and the ambience of this strange old town with minarets and church spires both Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, not to mention synagogues, nestled together on a hillside, with the sprawling newer town encompassing a winter Olympics complex.

I miss Sarajevo.

The videos below are almost pornographic in their depiction of human stupidity. I browsed for them after stumbling across a link to photos of what's left of the 1984 Olympic site in Sarajevo, three decades later.

I haven't been to Sarajevo since my lone visit in 1987, which is described in these essays from the archive.

Red Stars, Black Mountains: What’s Habsburg got to do with it? (Part 5).

Red Stars, Black Mountains: Sarajevo on $10 A Day (Part 6).

Let's not forget the official video.