A route to visit a country that doesn't exist

BarcelonaBorn in Bosnia to Croats, the writer Ivo Andric died in Serbia, where he was buried. He wrote in Serbo-Croatian and considered himself Yugoslav. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and many people say he was one of the great storytellers of a state that no longer exists: Yugoslavia. It's true that Yugoslavia no longer exists and that today it's difficult to find people who speak Serbo-Croatian, but we must bear in mind that his stories are immortal. He used to write stories of the past, from the years of Ottoman rule, and he remains a good travel companion through the Balkans, regardless of flags and borders. A land that seems impossible to unite. He believed it could be done, perhaps that's why in his great book he speaks of a bridge.

One of my dreams has always been to make a route through the scenes of Andric's life and books. I haven't been able to do the whole thing, but I've been taking pieces. The final destination is Belgrade, where he lived in the last years of his life, and where you can visit his beautiful apartment, near Kneza Milosa Street. His Nobel Prize is kept here, and you can see the library, which houses some editions of Don Quixote, a book he admired from his time at the Yugoslav embassy in Madrid. The street where the apartment is located now bears the writer's name. And a statue of him commemorates him right next to the door. You can also visit his grave, in Belgrade's new cemetery, in an area that was created to house the ashes of great Yugoslav heroes. An area with military personnel and scientists.

The city most closely associated with his life and work, however, is Visegrad, on the border between Bosnia and Serbia. When his father died, young Andric was sent to stay with relatives in that city, where he grew up seeing the famous bridge over the Drina, to which he dedicated his book. Many people visit Visegrad to see the bridge built by the Turks in 1577, as well as the house where Andric grew up. Today, Serbs control the area after the war of the 1990s. 33% of Visegrad's population was Muslim, but they fled or were killed. In a complicated area, both sides of the bridge are now Serbs. But they are distinct states, Serbia and Bosnia.

One route Andric takes would take us to Travnik, where he spent some time and wrote a book. And to Sarajevo. One of his saddest stories is Titanic Cafe, which tells the story of two dull men: a Sephardic Jew and a Bosnian Croat. With the outbreak of World War II, everything changes, and one of them becomes a murderer.

Andric visited the Jewish cemetery in Sarajevo after World War II and was struck by the tombstones in Ladino, the language of the Sephardim expelled by the Catholic Monarchs from the Iberian Peninsula. A world that had almost disappeared during the Holocaust. In his books, Andric tried to bring to life the Balkans he dreamed of. Little would he have imagined that in 1991, the Jewish cemetery would be occupied by the Serbs to bomb Sarajevo. Thank goodness he didn't see the death of his country.

Recommendation for traveling to Bosnia

Book: Titanic Cafe

Author: Ivo Andric

Publisher: Acantilado