Jajce
We have been staying in Jajce, Bosnia Hertzogovina. It was once the capital of the Kingdom of Bosnia in the 15th century but is now just a a regional town by a beautiful lake. We have been reading about the long, complicated and bloody history of the Balkans as we travel through. It makes for depressing reading especially the Yugoslav wars that took place here between 1991 and 2001. There is no agreement on how many people died in the wars but estimates range around 140000 with 2 million displaced. The Bosnian genocide was the first wartime event to be classified as genocide since the campaigns of Nazi Germany.
The complexities of the various ethic conflicts go back a long way in history and this area has been not only a battleground for the empires of the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs but also long and bitter ethnic struggles compounded by religious hatred and persecution.
We are passing close to Sarajevo tomorrow where the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a supporter of Serbian independence from the Austro-Hungarian Hungarian empire lit the fuse that ended in the appalling slaughter of the first world War. This region is full of tragic reminders the waste if war, especially on young men. We came across this memorial today. It is unbearably sad to see the deaths were all in such a short period. It made me think of the tens of thousands of Palestinian women and children who are presently being slaughtered or are suffering famine in Gaza. Do we ever learn?
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The town of Jajce is charming if somewhat melancholy. There are many cafes and bars but everywhere was deserted and the chairs remained empty on the terraces. We wandered around the centre but everywhere was closed, there is a spectacular waterfall in the middle of the town and a couple of kilometers outside the town there is a river race with a collection of tiny miller's sheds sitting over the water. .