BEFORE I ARRIVED in Sarajevo, the 555-year-old capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, I had no impression of the city beyond the televised atrocities I had seen in the early 1990s. In 1992, the country, once part of Yugoslavia, voted to become independent. Just over a month later, Serbian forces began a siege of Sarajevo that lasted 1,425 days, shelling the city relentlessly. Eventually, NATO air strikes forced the Serbs to negotiate, and the Dayton Accords brought an end to the violence in 1995. Twenty years later, a whole generation has no memory of those difficult times, yet the past lies just beneath the surface of people’s lives.
Most visitors to the city spend much of their time in Baščaršija, the old Turkish quarter filled with mosques, antique stores, shops, restaurants, and shisha…