Welcome back to my Yugoslavian Travel Series! In Part I, we took the bus from Germany and traveled to the Bosnian capital city of Sarajevo, where we checked into a beautiful WWI themed hostel and went on to explore the old town: Baščaršija.
The shops and restaurants of Baščaršija offer a wonderful view on the mountains – in addition to great and affordable service.
We can not leave Baščaršija without visiting its main and most iconic landmark. You will see it dozens of times on T-Shirts, keychains and other tourist accessoires that are sold in Sarajevo before you even get to the actual place. Of course, I am talking of the Sebilj.
The Sebilj is an ottomanesque fountain made from beautiful woodwork. I say ottomanesque because it was built in the 19th century by an Austro-Hungarian architect named Alexander Wittek. The current Sebilj was designed as a replacement for an older 18th century fountain which was lost in a fire in 1852.
The fountain originally provided water for travelers (the Turkish word "Sebil" means road), which is why Sarajevans have a saying according to which everyone who drinks out of the Sebilj will eventually return to Sarajevo. Either for the fine water or for the souvenirs that are sold all around it, I suppose.
In the background, you can see the Emperor's Mosque – the oldest mosque of Sarajevo. It was built in the 15th century, only a few years after the fall of Constantinople.
I visited Sarajevo during Eid and the mosque was so crowded that I didn't didn't get a good picture. This one is taken from islamicspots.blogspot.com.
Before we are going to finally leave the old town of Sarajevo, let's revisit the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque we already saw in Part I and check out its beautiful illumination at night. It is certainly a sight worth seeing after dark!
Entrance to the mosque with illuminated arks.
Water fountain in front of the mosque.
Well, enough of the old town! It is very nice, but I can't fill two whole blogs with it! Let's go visit a museum instead, but before we can get there, we run into this strange pipe installation. I would say we check it out, shall we?
I have literally no idea what this is and what it is supposed to signify, but me and my Argentinian friend ran into this bizarre art installation and found it extremely cool. I hoped to find out more about it or at least who the artist was, but all the Google searches I tried out returned exactly nothing.
It is some sort of steel pipe artwork adored by gothic looking gargoyles in the shape of lions or distorted human faces. I don't know whether it was intended, but the graffity (which are inevitably found on everything in the Balkans) actually add to the overall gothic-industrial aura of this piece. It also looks a bit spooky, though.
And why the hell is there a chess board? o__O
Very mysterious place! If I'm lucky and someone in the comments knows more about this installation, I will put the info in this post and credit you with helping me out!
TO BE CONTINUED
Okay, so we are going to make a cut here, but this is by for not the end of our stay in Sarajevo! Next time, we are going to visit an exhibition about the Siege of Sarajevo during the Yugoslavian War and climb on one of the surrounding hills to get a bird eye's view on Sarajevo! I hope you are going to stay with me. If you like my posts, please resteem them and follow me. :)
