Trees in Sarajevo

Interview 29: Four Old, Leaning Poplars "Four poplars, south side of the Miljacka, close to where the front line begins [as] it meets the river. These trees are heavily scarred. They also lean away from the road and hang over the river a bit. Someone wrote "ARM ZDG" on it." Location: Aleja Lipa, Sarajevo 71000. 

Interview 32: Wounded Lindens along the Miljacka "Trees exposed to open fire were spared as they were too dangerous to be logged. As a consequence of the shelling, they still bear traces from shrapnel and bullets. If a tree is wounded physically by the shelling it creates scar tissues around the wound or even around the piece inside it, similar to scar tissue that forms knobs and bulges. In protected places some trees were planted, presumably fruit trees for food, as well as fast-growing conifers for firewood."   From an interview with Sead Vojnikovic Location: Vilsonovo šetalište, Sarajevo 71000. The Heroes of Treca Gimnazijy: A war school in Sarajevo, 1992-1995: "Carrying all these nice memories from my school days in Treca Gimnazija, memories of endless laughs and the fun we had - playing soccer in the backyard, holding hands and strolling down Wilson Promenade with my high school sweetheart, I was deeply saddened and horrified when I f

Interview 26: Young Linden Along Terezija "Tree 26 is part of a group of young lindens that have been planted on the street where the Dom Mladih mall is situated [and which runs parallel to the Miljacka]. It is quite out in the open, so we were doubting why there [are] young trees here. And we think the answer is that there were containers placed here in the war and that gave [the citizens] enough shelter to cut down the [existing] trees for wood. To be investigated." Location: Terezija, Sarajevo 71000. Cropped image: FAMA, Survival Map, 1992-96.

Interview 24: Circle of Blue Spruce    "We're standing inside the room made by five variants on coniferous pine trees. These are all young because they are hidden behind a large building. So, you have the triangle [of concealment to the] north of the building, and beyond this triangle's [area] are larger trees. The inside here is barren and the floor is made of pine needles. I wonder if people hang out here. I see a pigeon bone." Within Park Mirze i Davora there is one triangularly shaped area that would have been shielded from sniper view by neighbouring buildings. Today, most of the trees in this park are between 150-200 years old and were likely planted during Austro-Hungarian Times. However, there is one exception to that assessment: the five spruce trees within the triangle of protection. In the place of trees cut for firewood, these five spruce were planted in their stead during the war. See the article excerpt below. The Location: Park Mirze

Interview 21: Protective Plane Trees in Front of Government Office "is this a plane? "Yeah." It is a plane. It has a kind of base, like it has been plopped on the ground, or its roots have been moving and pushing up. It has this knob on the northern side. It's so big that we can all just hold hands around it, the three of us. Speculations on why it remains: it is exposed, I think, to the observatory actually... maybe not. It also might serve as protection for the Roman-looking buildings behind us. It has a face on it - the tree is smiling. The tree is bigger than the building. This whole park is all plane trees; it's a Austro-Hungarian plantain. A ministry is behind it. "Vanjskih Poslova." Also known as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs" Location: Park Mirze i Davora, Sarajevo 71000. Sarajevo: City Under Siege (1994) BBC documentary ~35:00 militarized trees, “We didn’t know anything. We hid behind trees.”

Interview 3: Protective Horse Chestnut In Front of Apartment  "Large Chestnut tree situated across from the Bosnian Ministry of Finance. It's planted within a private garden, but we wonder why it still stands as the other trees around it are quite young. Jonas could fit his entire arms around this tree. It's quite old and pretty twisted; some spider webs. And, it is close to a building... maybe it was used as protection." Location:  Mehmeda Spahe, Sarajevo 71000.

Interview 12: Young Birch in an Overgrown, Private Garden "A young birch tree sits with another birch trees and many other trees, some ivy, some weeds, and a very angry crow who is maybe territorial and doesn't like that we are here. These are all quite young, in an overgrown garden. It's pretty typical for Sarajevo: one big Robinia [also known as black locust], a lot of elder trees, and a kitten, a walnut tree, and another cat." As a young tree in a private garden, it is likely that during the war trees were felled here for firewood. Location: Pruščakova, Sarajevo 71000. Sarajevo: City Under Siege (1994) BBC documentary: ~22:59 women cut down birch tree, “Leave my birch alone!” “It’s too late. We’ve already cut it.”

The image above depicts a draft version of our archive as a fold-out map. Our walk and the 31 interviewed trees are drawn sectionally along the long paper. Relevant archival photos, taken photos, stories told by residents of Sarajevo, article quotations, and video stills. This assemblage is proposed to be reformatted and presented in an atlas format, with the addition of the tree interview text and contextual drawings.  The image below is a diagram of our working method, showing how the different parts of our process come together in a 'Tree Atlas of Sarajevo' (that we're currently working on).

Explore our walk in Sarajevo. We interviewed and photographed 31 trees along the way. The walk itself occured between the two main locations of our trip: the Balkan Han Hostel and History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The google map below contains the archive of our walk. The dark green dots indicate the trees that we 'interviewed'.  The lighter green dots indicate places of urban gardening during the siege, that we visited now. If you click on the dots, archival and recent photos will show. The pink dots mark the places where we interviewed people: a woman collecting elderblossoms to make lemonade, for example, and forestry professor Sead, who showed us how to find 'scars' in the bark of the trees. Interviewing trees might seem a peculiar method: after all, trees can't speak. During the interviews, Nicole made a voice recording to note our observations and hypotheses about the stories this tree could tell. Jonas stood close to the tree, and made photo

Understanding Sarajevan trees and former war gardens as silent witnesses and as archives, we aim to tell/make visible/sensible the story of these species that became militarised bodies during the Siege of Sarajevo. We investigate the connections of interviewed trees with their specific relations to human stories and adjacent architecture in effort to understand the roles of trees as nonhuman, involuntary participants in war. Traces of the war are still visible today in the scarred tissue of trees that were wounded by ordnance and by the damage of a chainsaw stopped short by guilt. The narrative of the necessary felling of the urban forest is made more complex with the understanding that Sarajevo had a special relationship with trees before the war began. Azra Nuhefendic writes, “we had a cult of trees and forests. In the eighties, together with others, I was guarding the Miljacka bank in the night to prevent vandals from destroying freshly planted linden trees along the bank just to