Two Museums and One Long Walk

The only good Communist is a dead Communist?
Is that why this statue is lying prone in the courtyard of the History Museum?

A free man in Sarajevo. Unfettered and alive.

This was my only day in Sarajevo with no agenda, no schedule. I had no tours planned or excursions to make. I could do what I want when I wanted. So the first item on my "doing the things I want when I want" list were the national museums.

I saw this interesting looking building parked alongside the Miljacka River. The building with the green dome is the Academy of Fine Arts.

Apparently this is the whimsical part of town.

Three small statues involved in various forms of acrobatics In front of the Academy of Fine Arts was the whimsical Festina Lente bridge: 

I saw what appeared to be a loop de loop on the bridge and I was wondering if it worked like the loop de loops on miniature golf courses. Where you have to go through the loop and you have to be moving at a fast enough speed so that you pass through the loop and you don't fall at the peak of the loop. Alas, it was merely a decorative feature.

If the walk across the bridge is too taxing, there are rest stops at the midpoint of the bridge where you can sit and relax, catch your breath before continuing on the arduous journey across the bridge. What appeared to be a loop de loop was merely protective cover over the seating area.

And then I reach the first goal of the day: the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina:

One of the largest collections within the National Museum are funeral stela, basically headstones and stone sarcophagi:

Even the entryway is decorated with them.

The museum was founded by Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, uncle of the assassinated Franz Ferdinand and the Hapsburg on the Austro-Hungarian at the time Austria started World War I because it didn't like there being an independent Serbian Republic, which the Austro-Hungarian monarchy believed to be an existential threat to the divine right of kings in Central Europe and beyond.

They were proven right, just not in the way they expected.

Mosaics:

Not the intricate, sophisticated mosaics of Byzantine Constantinople, but still worthy of a photo.

And what's a national museum without historic ceramics? 

Bosnia's national museum delivers.

But it definitely delivers on the funereal stela:

And mosaics:

Zeus and friends:

Zeus is front and center, as Zeus always seems to be. I recall reading that that's Minerva on his left. But she's Roman. So either that's Athena or Zeus is Jupiter, since the gods of ancient Greece and ancient Rome did not fraternize. Well, except for Dionysius, who partied with both sets of gods.

And this is ancient Roman glassware:

It's amazing it survived intact. Stone and ceramics exist in fragments, but these glass pieces survived whole? That is impressive.

One of the best parts of the museum was the botanical garden in the center courtyard:

Green space:

These are fruit tree saplings.

Cherry. Plum. Sour cherry (a separate species from sweet cherry). Quince. Apple. I may be missing a fruit or two, but these are what are being grown here.

And, of course, more sarcophagi and stela:

 

Off to the side of the botanical garden was a small building housing the ethnographic museum, showing Bosnian home life in the late 19th Century, near the end of the Ottoman Era, when the Ottoman Empire was well into its "sick man of Europe" phase:

Life actually looked fairly pleasant for the late 19th Century Balkans, at least per the photographic collection in the ethnography building.

The next stop was the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina:

The history museum's collection seemed to be limited to World War II (and the emergence of Tito) and the Bosnian War of the 1990's. But not a lot of depth to either. And the rest of the history of Bosnia was ensconced over in the National Museum.

The sections on the Bosnian War of the 1990's was limited to P.C. revisionism. There was no display of a general overview of that horrible period. There was one section on the role of women allegedly had in ending in the conflict. Lots of pink, not much history. And a section on the "heroism" of journalists. Yes, I do have a jaundiced view of journalists, but what about the role of actual soldiers? Yes, a handful of journalists were killed, but so where huge numbers of the actual citizens of Sarajevo and Bosnia.

The World War II section was far more interesting even though it was relegated to an exterior courtyard.

The fighting in the Balkans in World War II is something that generally was ignored in U.S. history books when I was growing up. I am guessing that is because this theater of the war involved no American, and no western European troops, only a pure fight between the Nazis and the Communists. (Nowadays, I wonder if anything to do with World War II is taught in U.S. public schools.)

I have no idea what this adjacent display was about, but I liked it:

Back to World War II. A photo of local soldiers, basically an ill-equipped ragtag group of citizen-soldiers going up against the well-trained, well-financed Nazi war machine. And winning.

I don't have much good to day about the Communists, but defeating Hitler and the Nazis definitely is one of the few items to place on the positive side of their ledger.

And, of course, no discussion of World War II in the Balkans is complete without this man:

Tito. The one man who could unite the Yugoslav people -- the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosniaks, the Slovenes -- into a single nation. And the whole experiment collapsed within a decade of his death.