Some travel tips to visit the Balkans without fear, from Bosnia to Sarajevo, read the post for travel tips even low cost.
To those who look towards the Balkans with a certain fear and suspicion, I advise you to take courage in both hands and venture - so to speak - in this direction, remembering that this land preserves, in addition to the sad memory of the war, a fascinating cultural stratification and one of a kind. Set aside the prejudices, the curious traveler looking for an "exotic" that is within reach and pocketbook, will discover, for example, that cities like Mostar e Sarajevo (3 hours drive from each other) deserve to be visited and reconsidered, especially in light of the reconstructions and restorations of recent years.
Reachable by plane or by car (convenient itraghetti Italy-Croatia), Mostar is immersed in a natural landscape of great charm, surrounded by the mountains of Herzegovina and crossed by the turquoise waters of the river Neretva. It is a multi-ethnic city, where Christians, Orthodox, Jews and Muslims converge. Walking through the old center now restored to its ancient splendor, in addition to the suggestion of the Ponte Vecchio (sad icon of war), you will find yourself catapulted into the Ottoman atmospheres of Turkey, with its local artisan, its characteristic wooden houses, its mosques and its minarets. Not surprisingly, for its truly amazing position, the dervish monastery Tekija, which stands near the town of Blagaj (12 kilometers from Mostar), near the sources of the river Buna, is worthy of note.
Driving along the state road in direction Bosnia, you will cross mountains, rivers, lakes and orchards. Spectacular and, at the same time, familiar landscapes will parade before your eyes and will accompany you to the outskirts of Sarajevo. Don't be frightened by what you will see once you get here: i buildings still riddled with blows, as if the war had just ended, they will gradually give way to late nineteenth-century buildings, gardens, fountains. Up to the cultural heterogeneity of the old city: from the old Islamic quarter, with its mosques and cobbled streets, to the Christian-Orthodox one, with its smells of incense and its blackened iconostases. Sarajevo will blow your mind. And even more open-mouthed you will remain in seeing, a few tens of meters from the old city, the university scattered in the parks with their wi-fi computers, or the futuristic fountain built to commemorate the children who were victims of war.
I recommend visiting the Bosnia Herzegovina in spring. Visiting Sarajevo in Spring is a joy for the senses and oxygen for hope. Walking its streets, where scents and sounds contradicting each other, where the scent of incense mixes with that of flowering magnolias, where the sound of the muezzin's voice alternates and overlaps that of car horns, you realize you are in the dust of history and in the gear of a car just left again, at the same time. Sarajevo should really be seen in Spring, because here everything is in-fieri, everything smells of rebirth, of youthful experimentation, of new budding beaded with dew after the blanket of winter snow. A city of contradictions, reborn from its own ashes and now throbbing with life, the emblem of a buffer land that is already the Middle East, or perhaps only the Far West.
