one bloc east

… to one day travel to a country where the radio DJs are ignorant of Nickelback.

I’m beginning to believe that my dream is a hopeless one.

… might be the only city in the world where the following can all happen simultaneously:

• I can drink a beer and eat cevapi during Ramadan and across the square from a mosque;
• The muezzin echoes across the city from minarets while said beer is being drunk and said cevapi is being eaten;
• A girl walks out of a movie theater next door — presumably, from having seen Salt with Angelina Jolie — wearing a translucent, low-cut, white linen dress through which I can see her thong;
• Thong-girl and her friends stroll past aforementioned mosque while singing along to ‘It’s Raining Men (Hallelujah),” which is playing on the radio at the same time as the call to prayer;
• Statistically, it’s more likely that thong-girl and her friends pray to Allah rather than go to Orthodox or Catholic church services.

From Black Lamb and Grey Falcon:

There is a kind of human being, terrifying above all others, who resists by yielding. Let it be supposed that it is a woman. A man is pleased by her, he makes advances to her, he finds that no woman was ever more compliant. He marvels at the way she allows him to take possession of her and perhaps despises her for it. The suddenly he finds that his whole life has been conditioned to her, that he has become bodily dependent on her, that he has acquired the habit of living in a house with her, that food is not food unless he eats it with her.

It is at this point that he suddenly realizes that he has not conquered her mind, and that he is not sure if she loves him, or even likes him, or even considers him of great moment. Then it occurs to him as a possibility that she failed to resist him in the first place because simply nothing he could do seemed of the slightest importance. He may even suspect that she let him come into her life because she hated him, and wanted him to expose himself before her so that she could despise him for his weakness. This, since man is a hating rather than a loving animal, may not impossibly be the truth of the situation. There will be an agonizing period when he attempts to find out the truth. But that he will not be able to do, for it is this essence of this woman’s character not to uncover her face. He will therefore have to withdraw from the frozen waste in which he finds himself, where there is neither heat nor light nor food nor shelter, but only the fear of an unknown enemy, and he will have to endure the pain of living alone till he can love someone else; or he will have to translate himself into another person, who will be accepted by her, a process that means falsification of the soul. Whichever step he takes, the woman will grow stronger and more serene, though not so strong and serene as she will if he tries the third course of attempting to coerce her.

Twice the Slavs have played the part of this woman in the history of Europe. Once, on the simplest occasion, when the Russians let Napoleon into the core of their country, where he found himself among snow and ashes, his destiny dead. The second time it happened here in Sarajevo. The heretic Bosnian nobles surrendered their country to the Turks in exchange for freedom to keep their religion and their lands.

… 

Hence there grew up, well within the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, a Free City, in which the Slavs lived as they liked, according to a constitution they based on Slav law and custom, and defied all interference. It even passed a law by which the [Ottoman] Pasha of Bosnia was forbidden to stay more than a night at a time within the city walls. For that one night he was treated as an honoured guest, but the next morning he found himself escorted to the city gates. It was out of the question that the Ottoman Empire should ever make Sarajevo its seat of government… . Often the sultans and viziers must have wondered, ‘But when did we conquer these people? Alas, how can we have thought we had conquered these people? What would we do not to have conquered these people?’