Day 1: A Split Decision!

 

Main Page > 2023 Roman da North in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles ! >

 

One of the cool things about this trip was Mike and Bone were trekking into unknown territory without help or a clue! Similar to all their crazy adventures!  So Bone met Mike in Chi-town at O-Hare Airport, where poor Mike had to fly into from GR and go through Security twice for a 12 hour Roman trip to Constantinople, or as the Turks now call it Istanbul.

 

A Bunch of Bull in Istanbul!

On this return trip to Istanbul neither boy got a lot of sleep, maybe 1-2 hours each. Once they landed, they needed to catch their connector to Sarajevo. When they landed, they had about an hour before their flight boarded, and since they were smack dab in the middle of this huuuuge airport, all was good. It took the Boys about 15 - 20 minutes to get to the gate at the very end of the airport. Their goal, was to get there and confirm the gate, then hit the head and buy some coffee and food. To their unfortunate surprise Turkish Air had moved the flight to the complete opposite end of the airport. Mike and Bone with gear in two fast tracked to the complete opposite end of the airport in time to catch boarding, that had just started! Not peeing or getting water, the parched Boys massively irritated, boarded the bus for the small prop plane to Sarajevo!

 

Seeing Sarajevo!

The bleary-eyed Boys dozed on the 2 hour flight to Sarajevo to arrive in a pleasant, cool mountain landscape. Half asleep, they took a Taxi (no Uber!) to the Train Station, only to find out......................

 

A Definition of Terminal, The End of the Road?!

Whattya Mean you Ain't got no Trains to Split!" Rarely does the Google lie. However when Mike and Bone planned this trip they got on a Zoom session and saw the Eurotrain had a train from Sarajevo to Split Croatia! This really did not help the Bosnian Woman, who spoke VERY little English that there were no trains to Split. Just a 8 hour Bus ride that was leaving in 20 minutes. In other words, no time to see the Franz Ferdinand Assassination Museum, one of the very reasons to fly here!

So, typical Mike and Bone style, with no damned sleep, they made a Split (pun intended) decision to rent a car and drive to Split!!!

 

Remembering another Terrible War!

Taking a taxi back to the Airport, Mike and Bone saw a sobering reminder of the horrible Bosnian War. The Bosnian War took between 1992 and 1995, started on 6 April 1992, following a number of earlier violent incidents.

The war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Following the Slovenian and Croatian secessions from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991, the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – which was inhabited by mainly Muslim Bosnians (44%), Orthodox Serbs (32.5%) and Catholic Croats (17%) – passed a referendum for independence on 29 February 1992. Political representatives of the Bosnian Serbs boycotted the referendum, and rejected its outcome. Anticipating the outcome of the referendum, the Assembly of the Serb People in Bosnia and Herzegovina adopted the Constitution of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 28 February 1992. Following Bosnia and Herzegovina's declaration of independence (which gained international recognition) and following the withdrawal of Alija Izetbegović from the previously signed (which proposed a division of Bosnia into ethnic cantons), the Bosnian Serbs, led by Radovan Karadžić and supported by the government of Slobodan Milošević and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), mobilized their forces inside Bosnia and Herzegovina in order to secure ethnic Serb territory. The war soon spread across the country, accompanied by ethnic cleansing.

One of the most horrible example of ethnic cleansing was the massacre of Srebrenica, which in July 1995 there was the genocidal killing of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in and around the town of Srebrenica. The killings were perpetrated by units of the Bosnian Serb Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) under the command of Ratko Mladić.

Prior to the massacre, the United Nations had declared the besieged enclave of Srebrenica, in eastern Bosnia, a "safe area" under UN protection. However, the UN failed both to demilitarize the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) within Srebrenica and to force withdrawal of the VRS surrounding Srebrenica.

Some Serbs have claimed that the massacre was retaliation for civilian casualties inflicted on Serbs by Bosnian soldiers from Srebrenica under command of Naser Orić. These 'revenge' claims have been rejected and condemned by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and UN as bad faith attempts to justify the genocide.

In 2004, in a unanimous ruling on the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić, the Appeals Chamber of the ICTY, located in The Hague, ruled that the massacre of the enclave's male inhabitants constituted genocide, a crime under international law. The ruling was also upheld by the International Court of Justice in 2007. The forcible transfer and abuse of between 25,000 and 30,000 Bosnian Muslim women, children and elderly which accompanied the massacre was found to constitute genocide, when accompanied with the killings and separation of the men.

Too little too late. In April 2013, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolić apologised for "the crime" of Srebrenica but refused to call it genocide.

Shortly, the Boys were back at the Airport, scouted around, found and rented a car, then drove back into the City to check out the beginnings of another War!

 

Seeing Sarajevo!

Heading back into Sarajevo to check out the World War One Museum and the city center, Mike and Bone observed a pretty but poor mid-sized city nestled in the beautiful Balkan Mountains. The name Sarajevo derives from the Turkish noun saray, meaning "palace" or "mansion." One theory is that the name may have been derived from the Ottoman Turkish term saray ovası, first recorded in 1455, meaning "the plains around the palace" or simply "palace. Regardless of its name or size it is the largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of 275,524. Sarajevo is the political, financial, social and cultural center of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a prominent center of culture in the Balkans. It exerts region-wide influence in entertainment, media, fashion and the arts. Due to its long history of religious and cultural diversity, Sarajevo is sometimes called the "Jerusalem of Europe" or "Jerusalem of the Balkans" It is one of a few major European cities to have a mosque, Catholic church, Eastern Orthodox church, and synagogue within the same neighborhood.

 

Wandering the Streets of Sarajevo!

 

Sarajevo rose in the 15th century as an Ottoman stronghold when the latter empire extended into Europe after the defeat and fall of the Romans at Constantinople Sarajevo has gained international renown several times throughout its history. In 1885, it was the first city in Europe and the second city in the world to have a full-time electric tram network running through the city, following San Francisco. Mike and Bone saw the influences of the Turks in their stroll through the City.

Mike and Bone both remembered that in 1984, Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, which marked a prosperous era for the city. However, after the start of the Yugoslav Wars, the city suffered the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, for a total of 1,425 days, from April 1992 to February 1996, during the Bosnian War. In fact the taxi driver drove the Boys by the Olympic symbol earlier when they first drove in.  Notoriously, Sarajevo was the site of the start of World In 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, which was the museum the Boys were trekkin’ to!!

 

Museum of the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand !

In typically backwards Mike and Bone style, which is the last is first, and the first is last, they finally checked out the place that ignited the torch that was World War One! Now they had checked out Ypres and Flanders Field in Belgium, Vimy Ridge, the Somme, Verdun, Marne, and Compiégne (where the War ended) in France, Gallipoli in Turkey, but not the darned place it started! So this "detour" from Rome gave the Boys that opportunity to rectify that wrong! So off the Boy went to the "Museum of the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand"!

In the pictures above where Mike and Bone stood, is the very place (Gavrilo Princips footsteps included) that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in this very spot was the match that lit the world conflagration that consumer 16 million souls called the Great War (the supposed “Word to end all Wars [ till the next one!]) or what we now call World  War One. On this street corner in Sarajevo is the small, modest Museum of the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand. This tiny museum details how on June 28th 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were assassinated by a Bosnian Serb student, the aforementioned Gavrilo Princip. They were shot at close range while being driven through Sarajevo, the provincial capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which formally annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908.

 

Franz Ferdinand and his Blushing (but Plump) Bride!

(Minutes before they were shot)

Princip was part of a group of six Bosnian assassins together with Mohamed Mehmedbašić, Vaso Čubrilović, Nedeljko Čabrinović, Cvjetko Popović and Trifko Grabež coordinated by Danilo Ilić; all but one were Bosnian Serbs and members of a student revolutionary group that later became known as Young Bosnia. The political objective of the assassination was to free Bosnia and Herzegovina of Austria-Hungarian rule and establish a common South Slav ("Yugoslav") state. The assassination precipitated the July Crisis which led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and the start World War One.

 

The Weapons the Assassins Used

The assassination team was helped by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret nationalist group; support came from Dragutin Dimitrijević, chief of the military intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, as well as from Major Vojislav Tankosić and Rade Malobabić, a Serbian intelligence agent. Tankosić provided bombs and pistols to the assassins and trained them in their use. The assassins were given access to the same clandestine network of safe-houses and agents that Malobabić used for the infiltration of weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.

The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. In total twenty-five people were indicted. All six assassins, except Mehmedbašić, were under twenty at the time of the assassination; while the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four of the indictees were Bosnian Croats, and all of them were Austro-Hungarian citizens, none from Serbia. Princip was found guilty of murder and high treason; too young to be executed, he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, while the four other attackers also received jail terms. Five of the older prisoners were sentenced to be hanged.

 

Gavrilo Princips & the other Assassins

The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. In total twenty-five people were indicted. All six assassins, except Mehmedbašić, were under twenty at the time of the assassination; while the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four of the indictees were Bosnian Croats, and all of them were Austro-Hungarian citizens, none from Serbia. Princip was found guilty of murder and high treason; too young to be executed, he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, while the four other attackers also received jail terms. Five of the older prisoners were sentenced to be hanged.

 

The Serbian Murderers Weapons

The assassination team was helped by the Black Hand, a Serbian secret nationalist group; support came from Dragutin Dimitrijević, chief of the military intelligence section of the Serbian general staff, as well as from Major Vojislav Tankosić and Rade Malobabić, a Serbian intelligence agent. Tankosić provided bombs and pistols to the assassins and trained them in their use. The assassins were given access to the same clandestine network of safe-houses and agents that Malobabić used for the infiltration of weapons and operatives into Austria-Hungary.

The assassins and key members of the clandestine network were tried in Sarajevo in October 1914. In total twenty-five people were indicted. All six assassins, except Mehmedbašić, were under twenty at the time of the assassination; while the group was dominated by Bosnian Serbs, four of the indictees were Bosnian Croats, and all of them were Austro-Hungarian citizens, none from Serbia. Princip was found guilty of murder and high treason; too young to be executed, he was sentenced to twenty years in jail, while the four other attackers also received jail terms. Five of the older prisoners were sentenced to be hanged.

 

The Latin Bridge that Princips Shot the Arch Duke

The Museum is really small, after 10 minutes the bleary Boys headed out in the quaint streets of Sarajevo, to check out the quaint old town of Sarajevo, but only for a few blocks. They had a 6 hour drive ahead of them!

 

Cruisin' the Balkan Mountains to Croatia!

Mike and Bone headed west (which was the direction of most of the trip!) out of Sarajevo in to the iconic and mountainous Balkan Mountains! The Balkan's are rife with history. These ancient mountains have been a major part of human history tracing back to the ancient Greeks. For example, the Macedonian dynasty of Alexander the Greek started in the foothills of the Balkans. The Romans traipsed back and forth for over 1,500 years from the Republic all the way through till 1453, when the Turks overtook Constantinople and into the Balkans. Hundreds of battles by Roman Emperors, Norman Leaders, and Turkish Sultans. In fact, before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire the Balkan Peninsula was a synonym for European Turkey, the political borders of former their Ottoman Empire provinces.  Unfortunately for the Boys, there was no easy 4 lane freeway, Mike and Bone, on zero sleep, drove the narrow, two-lane switchbacks through the Balkans that reminded the Boys of the scrubby mountains of Southern California.

 

Cruisin' the Balkan Mountains to Croatia!

 

It was a tortuous 6 hours, driving through increasingly smaller and fewer little villages with Mike napping, then Bone, often when driving!! (Mostly joking) Mike and Bone only knew when they passed from Bosnia into Croatia when they pulled up to a single little Border Crossing and a half-awake border guard stamped their passports and returned to his afternoon reverie! The entry into Croatia, wasn't really that much more interesting. He simply asked the Boys where they were going, then stamped them into Croatia! Eventually the desert-based Balkans gave way to a beautiful scene, the teal-blue waters of the Adriatic Sea and the Italianesque green of the shore. With a 30 minute further drive south, Mike and Bone entered the very cool town of Split! The city of Split was founded as the Greek colony of Aspálathos in the 3rd or 2nd century BC. It became a prominent settlement around 650 CE when it succeeded the ancient capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, Salona. Split became the center of the Roman world when the Roman Emperor Diocletian (ruled 284 to 305 AD) selected the site of Spálathos (anglicized into “Split)” after a local plant, chose the site for his palace to rule the Empire. The palace was built directly fronting the sea with a secure port and immediate access to the open sea in the case of attack.

Later, after the fall of the Western Empire, and the Sack of Salona by the Avars and Slavs, the fortified Palace of Diocletian was settled by the Roman refugees. Split became a Eastern Empire (AKA Byzantine) city, to later gradually drift into the sphere of the Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of Croatia, with the Byzantines retaining nominal suzerainty. For much of the High and Late Middle Ages, Split enjoyed autonomy as a free city, caught in the middle of a struggle between Venice and the King of Hungary for control over the Dalmatian city-states.

Venice eventually prevailed and during the early modern period Split remained a Venetian city, a heavily fortified outpost surrounded by Ottoman territory. Its hinterland was won from the Ottomans in the Morean War of 1699, and in 1797, as Venice fell to Napoleon, the Treaty of Campo Formio rendered the city to the Habsburg monarchy. In 1805, the Peace of Pressburg added it to the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy and in 1806 it was included in the French Empire, becoming part of the Illyrian Provinces in 1809. After being occupied in 1813, it was eventually granted to the Austrian Empire following the Congress of Vienna, where the city remained a part of the Austrian Kingdom of Dalmatia until the fall of Austria-Hungary in 1918 and the formation of Yugoslavia. In World War II, the city was annexed by Italy, then liberated by the Partisans after the Italian capitulation in 1943. It was then re-occupied by Germany, which granted it to its puppet Independent State of Croatia. The city was liberated again by the Partisans in 1944, and was included in the post-war Socialist Yugoslavia, as part of its republic of Croatia. In 1991, Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia amid the Croatian War of Independence.

These days, it is a well-known resort town with the Palace of Diocletian being the entirety of Split’s Old Town! After a loooong day Mike and Bone were hunger and thirsty! What better way to start trip than Pizza and Drink!!.  Finding a very cool restaurant on the waterfront, right outside of Diocletian's Palace, the Boys chowed on pepperoni pie with wine and beers!

 

"Err, Where are we sleeping Again!"

After being awake for close 30 hours, Mike and Bone probably did not need much alcohol to be fuzzy in the head, but they added liberally to that "fuzz" with drinks till the sun set. Finally in the dark the Boys decided to find their AirBnB. The directions were vague on Google Maps and the Boys drove around a few times and Mike finally thought it would be a good idea to let him find it on foot while Bone found a parking spot. Unfortunately the 30 hours of no sleep, pizza, and beers fogged up Bone's head enough that after driving around for 5 minutes on one way streets with a lot of traffic behind him, Bone had no idea where he was, and how to get back to where he dropped Mike off! Worse! Mike could not get into the Build, that had no lights ! By sheer serendipity, Bone found himself back to the right street, and a place to park.  Parking one block away, Mike met Bone and they dragged their stuff up a hill to an apartment complex that held the AirBNB. Bone saw Mike's issue of no lights in the building, and with some cajoling and frankly begging residences coming back to the build, were give the code of the Building in order to get in, and more importantly help call the owners of the AirBnB to get the proper entrance code!

After 32 hours, Mike and Bone turned the air on, dropped their stuff, and passed out at 11:00 PM !!!