Vareš // Will You Smile Again for Me
© John Bills
There is a short documentary about Vareš on YouTube. Wow, John, insightful. That is a sentence straight out of an English language learning textbook. My name is John. Imam jednog brata. Clifford is a big red dog. She is from Guadeloupe. What is the time?
The documentary is about 25 minutes long (short?) and focuses on Yugonostalgia, a phenomenon alive and well in Vareš. A small town some 45km north of Sarajevo. Folks are interviewed about Vareš, specifically the differences between today and the Yugoslav years. As your ever-so-sharp mind has assumed, in almost every metric, things were better back in the day. Employment, living standards, societal relationships, mood, everything. How telling that employment comes first there, right?
It should come as no surprise that nostalgia is alive in Vareš. For starters, nostalgia is alive everywhere, and dismissing that is naive. In Vareš? Why wouldn’t nostalgia be alive in a place that has lost 60% of its population over the last 30 years, a number that isn’t slowing down? Vareš is a town with many factories in and around it, but most are long dead. If anything, it would be weird if nostalgia wasn’t alive here. Nostalgia is very addictive.
© John Bills
Nostalgia was once considered a disease. Treatments included leeches, inciting pain and terror (horribly vague, that), public humiliation and purging of the stomach. In 1733, the Russian Army threatened to bury any soldier displaying symptoms alive, and they weren’t empty words. In 19th century France, only hysteria attracted more attention from those curious about mental diseases. Nostalgia may now largely exist as a personality trait, but it hasn’t always been so meek.
I ambled around Vareš in search of nothing in particular, happy to let whim dictate the direction, hoping that history would reveal itself as I did. To cut a long story short, it didn’t, because the reality of time is that our humble human creations are no match for forbearance. New becomes old becomes gone. Vareš looked tired, neglected, irrecoverable. Even (Croatian) Wikipedia takes a shot, stating “Današnji Vareš na prvi pogled izgleda kao gradić koji je nada napustili”. Basically, Vareš looks like a town that has abandoned hope.
But, and that ‘but’ must be underlined and emphasised with bolded text, it is patronising and insulting to lay the blame for that at the feet of Vareš. The small city of 10,000 or so people, home to the oldest preserved Catholic Church in Bosnia (the fascinating Church of St Michael, which houses curiosities including a human skull), the centre of Tvrtko’s Bosnian kingdom, the birthplace of 18th century friar Grgo Ilić, 20th-century writer Novak Simić and others, the town in which Bosnia’s first blast furnace was built, it isn’t to blame for its own plight. Vareš developed because of the riches underneath, but those riches weren’t distributed around the town with long-term development in mind. More often than not, those riches went elsewhere. A dance as old as time, a dance as old as time. Vareš opened its door to the world and allowed new rooms to be constructed, but those rooms were tied to the whims of a world that doesn’t care for small-town Bosnia. Nostalgia isn’t a disease; it is the emotional equivalent of oxygen. Hiraeth, to put it in a word the Welsh will understand.
© John Bills
I wandered towards Lake Smreka, also known as Jezero Nula, Lake Zero if we are working in English. The lake magically (not magic, but allow me this exaggeration) formed in the surface burrow of the Smreka iron ore mine in the early ‘90s, and from the industry came the largest well of drinking water in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Basically, a small stream slowly filled a surface pit with groundwater, and from tiny acorns, mighty oaks grow, or, in this case, large lakes. There are machines trapped underneath the water, although using the word ‘trapped’ feels presumptuous. After a lifetime of working from morning to night and beyond, maybe the machines are happy to enjoy their underwater retirement. Don’t put words in the mouths of others, be they machine, be they human. It was cold, and the lake was frozen.
Two kids were on the ice, throwing stones out onto the frozen water, stones that made a strange sound on contact. It wasn’t a clang, it was more of a cartoon boing. There’s no other way to describe it. The boing was quickly overshadowed by a timbre coming from the direction of Vareš, as the Asr call to prayer rang out across the valley. It is always a beautiful sound, but it took on a different grace when echoing across a frozen lake. At that moment, for me and I alone, Vareš was the most beautiful place on the planet.
Well, me and the two boys, but give me this, at least.
© John Bills
People will never flock to Vareš. It will never be Barcelona, it will never be London, it won’t even be Sarajevo. It will be Vareš now and forever. But, you know what? You can keep your London, your Barcelona, even your Sarajevo, because there is no serenity that those cities can offer that comes close to the echo of a call to prayer across a frozen lake. Nothing comes close. If you are travelling in search of peace, you aren’t going to find it in the celebrated cities of the world.
You will find it in Vareš, on a cold February afternoon, next to a frozen artificial lake, as the legacy of Bilal ibn Rabah rings out across a neglected valley. You will find it by a lake that is (arguably) the only positive legacy of the 20th century here. You will find it in a town known for iron and nostalgia. The cure for nostalgia is serenity. I headed back to Vareš and the warmth of Mlin, ready for Tuesday night pizza. For the record, the pizza was fantastic.
