7/27 Saturday
We’re
going to explore some potential art museums and galleries today. Bob has
Google-mapped an itinerary from several guidebooks and tourist brochures. Just
as we enter the Old City, there’s a poster for an exhibit memorializing the
Srebrenica Massacre., so we decide to start there.
The
museum is on the fifth floor of a 19th century building. The
elevator opens to a modern, elegant space. The rooms are painted a somber
charcoal grey, and the walls are covered with a matrix of photos of the
victims. The exhibit contains some computer stations, large black and white
photos of scenes from the city and several video programs documenting the
massacre, featuring interviews with survivors, mostly women family members,
mothers and wives of the victims.
We
sit at a computer station to view an incredibly detailed program describing the
chronology of events leading to the days of killing, and the aftermath. It’s
almost an hour-by-hour story of the month of July, 1995. The city of Srebrenica
was declared a safe zone by the UN, and thousands of refugees came to
the remote mountain village for protection. After failing to act during weeks
of encroachment, the small UN security force was overrun by militants,
who went about the process of removing the population, permanently, with
a plan of action that has been classified as genocide. Women and children were
piled onto buses and taken to detention centers, prisons. Thousands of men and
boys took off on foot to try to escape to the city of Tuzla, some 50 miles
through the forests. More than 8,000 people, primarily these men and boys, were
executed over a three-day period, July 11-13th.
A
video documentary describes the efforts to locate and identify the mass graves
and the names of the victims. A DNA identification project is ongoing. This past
July 11th, just a couple weeks ago, a ceremony was held to rebury
some 400 remains from mass grave sites to the permanent memorial cemetery near
Srebrenica. This is all disturbing and informative, and also so important to
experience.
After
spending a few hours in the Srebrenica Museum, we walk over to the Hotel Europe
to see the E&A Gallery. It’s a very swanky Viennese style hotel, the
poshest place we’ve seen so far. The gallery is a small room, only about 10 x
12, on the mezzanine, showing the work of Mersad Berber, a modern artist, who
died just last year, working in a style evoking a combination of Klimt and Singer
Sergeant. The young woman working there gives a very enthusiastic overview of
the artist and shows us several books of his paintings.
We
move on to the National Gallery of Art, but are disappointed to find that it’s
closed on the weekend. Next, we walk through the streets, checking the maps,
looking for the Museum of Literature. We come to a portal into a garden, where
we peer in uncertainly. A group of people are having coffee inside, and get
quite excited to see us, calling a young woman to come talk with us.
She’s
the new director of this fledgling museum, hired just a month ago, and also
working on her PhD in Gender Studies at the University in Bucharest. She gives
us a personal tour of the two small finished rooms holding some of the
furnishings and papers of several important Bosnian writers. She’s excited and
determined to make the museum a success, despite having nearly no funding. In
the Dayton Agreement that ended the recent war, the government entity that
provided funding for several national museums was eliminated, with no future
provisions for the museums. She pulls out a B/H bill, showing how it’s
decorated with an image of an author. “All the money has the writers on it, but
there is no money for keeping the works” We’re very sympathetic to her mission,
so we offer a small donation as our tour fee. She won’t just take cash from us,
though; she wants to make an official receipt for the donation, which seems to
be the first one she’s received. We sit in the garden while she goes to her
office to prepare our receipt, which actually looks like a lot more work than
the little tour we’ve had. She happily returns with two copies of an official
paper showing our donation.
We have a couple more galleries on
our itinerary, but have no further luck. We go to a large college complex, but
it seems to be completely shut down for the summer. Another small photography
gallery is already closed, and a few more just aren’t findable. But we’re
pretty satisfied with the events of the day, so we head back home, picking up
our usual vegetables on the way. The crowds at the apartment have diminished; now
we’re down to just the two women from Denmark, who are out for the evening.
1 Video Included
Writers Museum
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