Our Walk Through Sarajevo

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 photos 'looking out', documenting the trees 'view' - focusing particularly on whether the tree was in a secluded area or potentially exposed to sniper fire. Catherine took 'portraits' of the tree itself, mostly focusing on the bark.

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Method & Archive Organization

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).

Trees as Resource

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 Mirz...

On our research

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 ...

Trees in Sarajevo

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