Hard sniper barriers and sandbagged doorways
Hard barriers against snipers’ shots were improvised from garbage and shipping containers, destroyed cars, tramcars, piled buses, cement blocks or sandbags. The only safe route across these areas would be behind the UN armoured vehicles. In the Grbavica neighbourhood, a strip of containers known as the ‘Road of Salvation’, offered shelter when crossing this most dangerous part of the town. 4 The buildings of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman parts of Sarajevo, except for those along the riverbank, were somewhat sheltered by surrounding buildings whose roofs and front façades were fully exposed to the siege line. The denser morphology of this part of town was easier to shelter by hanging and stretching large pieces of fabric from building to building. 5 Made from big sheets, curtains and canvas, these ‘soft barriers’ depended on their size, availability and the level of protection needed. They could hide passers-by from snipers’ gazes but not bullets. These canvases sometimes fell down in bad weather to suddenly reveal the street and anyone in it. All of the barriers served as canvases for graffiti where residents channelled their messages often in self-deprecating humour: ‘Tito come back’, ‘I am not crazy’ and ‘Everyone is crazy here’. In this sense, the temporary infrastructural response to violence took on a very important role of communicating messages from the citizens of Sarajevo to the rest of the world as they were completely isolated during the entire duration of the siege.
©Milomir Kovacevic Strasni
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4 Mirjana Ristic. Architecture, Urban Space and War: The Destruction and Reconstruction of Sarajevo . Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict. Cham, Switzerland, Springer International Publishing, 2018. 5 Ibid.
©Kemal Hadžic
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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