Wintertime in Bosnia: Exploring Sarajevo’s Abandoned Winter Olympic Sites
A winding dirt track through Sarajevo’s vast sprawling pine forests.
Our arrival in Bosnia & Herzegovina came as a pleasant surprise.
After following the craggy walls of the mighty Tara Canyon all the way through Montenegro it led us straight into the capital city of Sarajevo. We weren’t here to see the war ruins, nor had we come to try and find the best burek (although that was debatable). No, with just seven short days in this intriguing country that was once one of the most fundamental parts of the Yugoslav Republic, there was only time to explore one thing: the remains of Sarajevo’s Winter Olympics venues.
We pulled up after a long day of inter-country driving, arranging of SIM cards and fawning over foreign foods in a new supermarket, next to a long, snaking and heavily graffitied piece of concrete. We’d seen photos of the abandoned bobsleigh track online but never for one minute did we imagine we could drive into it, let alone camp. The place was perfectly secluded amongst the pine trees, at the top of a mountain which gave a spectacular view over the city. As night fell we rested underneath the Sarajevan sky now studded with stars.⠀
Come morning we noticed a distinct chill in the air, and threw open the door to discover a blanket of snow all around us. We’d had no inkling snow was coming, and had been lamenting the day before how incredible it would’ve been to see the bobsleigh track as it was during the 1984 Winter Olympics.
We bundled on our boots in pure excitement and piled out of the van to make tracks in the fresh, untrodden snow and explore the lengths of the snaking concrete track which wound its way in and out of the pine forest. At times we were completely hidden by trees, shrouded in fog, appearing at regular intervals in view of a road or a place where spectators would’ve gathered in years gone by before the war changed the face of Sarajevo forever.
Fingers suitably numbed, we headed back into the van to warm them with coffee.
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What does it say about me, to prefer the icy kiss of winter to the warm blush of summer? To revel in cold and solitude?
I’m a fickle soul, really; when Autumn falls I declare it wholeheartedly to be my favourite season, but I would say the same of summer and then winter too in turn.
I embrace each of the seasons, but nothing fills me with such wonder and comfort as a fresh white blanket of snow. A world turned black and white, the colour and imperfections bleached out, contrasted against dark outlines of pine trees and buildings. The snow mutes all sound, pauses all life, and the unexpected surprise of finding ourselves snowed in creates such a simple yet wondrous pleasure, an inexplicable feeling of comfort that comes only from true aloneness.
But with this beauty comes challenge; minibuses weren’t designed to deal with snow. The cold creeps in at night through gaps in the windowpanes and the tyres skid to and fro on icy slush, but the biggest challenge we faced over the winter was simply getting our van to start.
Each morning since leaving Albania we fought with it, the engine too cold and too reluctant to start without a kettle of hot water and a squirt of EasyStart. With numb fingers and snow in our hair we coaxed our van back into life, coughing and spluttering, each time fraught with the fear of being stranded in a place few people ever ventured.
Only once the van was running, engine chugging away, heater blower on, could we relax and enjoy the snow with a mug of hot coffee in hand to warm our bones. Only then could we appreciate all over again the simple blissful comfort of being snowed in.
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Later that day we left the concrete jungle behind us, stopping briefly to examine the bullet-studded remains of an Olympic-era hotel alongside a coach full of tourists.
Driving through the snow-covered mountains which encircled Sarajevo, it was hard to imagine this beautiful area as a war zone, even less so one that had existed in our lifetimes. Yet the scars leftover from the war were omnipresent; they were in every bullet hole-strewn building, in every road surface struck by a mortar, in every man who hobbled past us on wooden crutches. We had arrived in Bosnia & Herzegovina with the intention of seeing beyond its past, but found it quite impossible to ignore.
Perhaps most poignant of all the lingering remnants of war were Sarajevo’s abandoned Olympic venues; the bobsleigh track once filled with spectators, now a crumbling relic; the angular lump of concrete that was Hotel Igman, whose rooms had not been filled since the siege began. Most chilling of all perhaps, were the former Olympic ski jumps, located on the buffer zone across Igman ridge, laced with mines and used as a site for executions; this is where we would sleep for the night.
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As our boots crunched through deep snow only the eerie silence in the air betrayed the area’s dark history. We’d spent the night at Hotel Igman, although not as its designers had intended; we’d camped up in what would’ve been its car park, or so we had presumed as it was buried under a foot or so of snow. Having woken up to find the bobsleigh track and surrounding pine trees painted white the previous morning, it gave us an enormous sense of comfort that the mountains on the opposite side of Sarajevo were also covered. This would be the last snow we’d see for many months, dusting the communist concrete structures and turning them into things of beauty, the snow and infinite forest of pine trees muffling all sounds as we slept beneath a blanket of white.
But now the snow was melting, icicles dripping all around us and soaking into our boots as we explored the remnants of Sarajevo’s ski jumps. It seemed metaphorical almost of our time in the Balkans; simplistically beautiful, all too brief and now slowly coming to an end.
We had just a few more days in Bosnia before our compass would point us North, and we would make our reluctant return into Western civilisation.