THE JOURNEY NEVER ENDS, PART II
From time to time I get asked what I knew about Denmark before coming here. Since I was always very interested in geography I knew that Copenhagen was the nation’s capital and I knew that the peninsula of Jutland links Denmark to the rest of Europe. I knew that the country produced and exported a lot of meat and dairy products and that it did not have many natural resources.

So, what is my story in Denmark? In 1994 I started at Skive Gymnasium. I think it was here I first began to learn about the Danish language, society and culture. Later I started working and I learned even more about Danish values and society. In 2003 I graduated from Nordic Multimedia Academy as a multimedia designer, and since then I have worked as a graphic designer in various companies.

Unlike the natives I do not have a particularly good relationship with Danish food. I think it was in 1998 I got acquainted with Danish roasted potatoes. I was at the company’s Christmas party and I saw these delicious brown potatoes. I ignored almost all the other food and filled my plate with the potatoes. When I tasted it all my senses got a shock and I almost literally ended up on the floor, and it was not because of the beer or the schnapps! It was because I just could not dream potatoes could (or should) be sugary, sweet!

Another Danish food I could not eat for a really long time is rye bread. It was hard, dry and did not taste very good. It may well be that the bread is healthier than ciabatta style bread, but I always felt it tasted like wood. However, one thing I think Danes excel at is pastry, fruit tarts, and marzipan: Othello cake, apple cake (everything with apples) and berry tarts.

Although I now have lived in Denmark for 18 years I have still not got used to the Danish weather. We Danish Bosnians say that “even dogs do not bark in Denmark”, but if something is untamed in this country then it must be the weather. I still have a hard time getting used to rain, wind and sunshine all on the same day. The first two I could easily do without but in a way there is a certain charm (do I really mean this?) about the changing and unpredictable weather.

In Denmark I have lived in refugee centres, in a so-called satellite (a house attached to an asylum centre), a townhouse, a house and a number of flats. I think the process of establishing myself in a new country went rather well. It was not easy, I was a stranger and unfamiliar with the surroundings, but quietly my family and I found our place. It was not always easy to get in contact with the natives. This is especially true in the western Jutland where locals are often very reserved towards people they do not know. My experience is that they open up after they have known you some time. In the beginning I had a hard time understanding their reservation towards foreigners, but I got used to it and eventually I realized that’s a part of their way of life.

Today I have my own family; a wife and two beautiful daughters. I tell them stories about my home country and teach them about Bosnian cultural values, but I also raise them so that they tomorrow can be good and valuable members of the Danish society. I am very proud of my family and I know as long I have them with me everything is going to be fine – that is why I will always fight for democracy and individual freedom in Denmark so that my daughters do not experience what I was forced to in those dark, final years of the twentieth century.

THE JOURNEY NEVER ENDS, PART 1.

I was a refugee once. From today’s perspective, as the father of two daughters, I am grateful that I was only a seventeen-year-old boy in that time of turmoil, uncertainty and doubts. What I learned back then was that nobody understands a refugee and his situation unless they, too, are one. You can have a deep sympathy and compassion for a person who had to leave his country, but if you have not experienced what it is like to leave your home, your family and dear friends, you can never truly understand what it means to be a refugee, homeless in a foreign land, completely cut off from the rest of the society, at least in those first months of living in exile. And if that person also has children and a wife by their side, you can only imagine but never completely understand what is going on in that person’s mind, what fears for his children’s future a parent is carrying.

When I was asked to write this column and tell my refugee story I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was mildly reluctant to the idea of writing about my past experience because I knew I had to dig deep into my memory and consciousness. I believe that is a normal human reaction – usually we tend to ignore and avoid remembering unpleasant events from the past. On the other hand, I wanted to give my refugee story as a tonic to all current refugees who might find in it a crumb of peace of mind, or even be inspired to look more positively upon their situation.

So let us start from the beginning.

I was born into a turbulent world, politically destructive between East and West, the sympathetic freedom-loving psychedelia was on its last legs. The Vietnam War had just entered the dark annals of the twentieth century, American spacecraft Viking 1 landed on Mars, and Czechoslovakia won 5-3 against West Germany in the finals of EURO ‘76. I was born in the small town of Bosanski Šamac in northern Bosnia, which was then part of Yugoslavia. I had a happy childhood, went to kindergarten and primary school, and I had a lot of friends I played with around the apartment complex. The town lies at the point where two great rivers, the Sava and the Bosna (which gave the country its name) meet. In the summer I used to spend a lot of time there with my family and friends. Once a year my parents would take my brother and I to the Adriatic Sea, and we would stay in some of the picturesque small towns of the Makarska Riviera. Yes, life was beautiful.

I almost finished first year of high school when the war scene moved from Croatia and entered my country and hometown in April 1992. One night Serbian forces swiftly occupied Bosanski Šamac and soon I had to flee the town with my parents and brother because the new authorities began imprisoning and mistreating the town’s Croats and Muslims (Bosniaks). Non-Serbs became second class citizens, many of whom were either sent to a nearby labor camp in Zasavica or sent to dig trenches. The only thing missing was a yellow band around their arms; just like the one Jews had to wear in Nazi Germany. And so we fled to the neighboring free town of Gradačac, where we had some relatives who gave us shelter.

Although my hometown was occupied by Serbian forces it was possible to enter and leave the town for a few days at the beginning of the occupation. Since my mother was a store manager she believed naively that she should hand over the keys of the store. The same day that she went to our hometown the new authorities closed down all the roads to and from the town. Therefore my mother could not get out and return to us: her husband and two children – and we were not going to see her or know anything about her situation for the next 7 months.

A few weeks later, Serbian forces began attacking and shelling Gradačac. Those days were probably some of the worst of my life. The small town was bombed to pieces from all possible directions, from earth and air. It was the middle of September when my father was fed up worrying about the lack of security for his boys, that he decided we should try to leave Bosnia. We had to travel south down the entire Bosnia-Herzegovina on an improvised route to Dalmatia and then to Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, where my father’s aunt lived. We traveled through war-torn cities and towns, through forests and mountains and improvised roads and even places where it seemed the war had taken place just minutes ago. I remember at one point driving through a small town where there were many houses on fire, a few crying people in the streets. It felt as if there had been a fight only a few hours before we arrived. We traveled some 1,400 km through the whole country of Bosnia and a large part of Croatia. To illustrate how difficult and dangerous the trip was it usually takes only 230 kilometers to go from Bosanski Šamac to Zagreb!

In December 1992 my father, brother and I were finally reunited with my mother – at the Prague train station. Her journey from our war-stricken hometown to Serbia and on to the Czech Republic deserves a book of its own. A friendly Serb working at the hospital engineered her exit. She had to pretend to be a Serb nurse in her passage from Bosnia and, as she waited for clearance to cross the Drina river, she was given board for a couple of days at the house of an elderly nationalist Serbian woman who was led to believe my mother was a Serb. I can only imagine how it was for my mom to be there during those days listening to hateful speeches from her host, unconscious of the real identity of her guest.

We left the Czech Republic and arrived in Denmark in late April 1993. The first three days we were stationed in the Gentofte asylum center. We then spent one month on the southern island of Langeland. Our language quickly gained a new word, “muving” (eng. moving). People were constantly being relocated to other centers. Where the Danish Red Cross would send you was a big deal. In late May my family got a “muving” to Hagebro in the middle of the Jutland peninsula. It was a former hotel and its long, yellow-brick structure now accommodated around 110 Bosnian refugees. We called our new home Opticon, after the former hotel’s name. The little Bosnian colony had good times together and with the Danish staff from the Red Cross. There were a number of activities for children and adolescents, perhaps to keep our minds from wandering home. I know that many fellow refugee residents look back at those days with a certain nostalgia, because, despite living in small rooms and the adults being tormented of their war-torn home country, there were good things to look back on; people were kind to each other and children played together. One recalls a sense of solidarity: we were all in the same boat. I cannot forget the tremendous efforts of the staff to offer us various activities, taking us on all sorts of trips. I know now that all they wanted was to give us a little break from worrying about families and friends who still were in Bosnia.

To be continued…

Follow Fahrudin Dino Avdibegović and his journey to Denmark in part II, which will be published 17.2.2012.

I rarely write about other people’s online writings, and probably never about interviews, but this interview simply brought so much joy and pleasure while reading, and sort of optimism into the future and mankind itself, that I simply had to write at least a word or two about it.

So who’s Nihad Hasanović? According to the interviewer’s website, he’s a “Bosnian writer, one of the most interesting and intriguing young writers in the space of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language”.

As the interview progressed, which consists of five parts, I found Nihad Hasanović a very interesting person with strong opinions and vivid thoughts on life, literature, philosophy and society pretty much identical to my own ideas.

“[Danilo] Kiš was very important also because he encouraged me to think of literature not just as belonging to a particular nationality, nation, ethnicity, but as belonging to humankind.”
This is simply joy to my ears, a wonderful, albeit still somewhat utopian, idea, but nevertheless it’s great to see that the idea of cosmopolitanism is still alive even in these turbulent times of globalization and all those nationalistic, local reactions to it.

The writer is really full of “sugar puffs” (guldkorn) as they say it in Danish; Mr. Hasanović has very interesting, progressive and firm thoughts on literature, language, politics, science, moral and religion. He’s a great opponent to religion and its influence in society: “In a very cunning way religion have usurped the moral and empirical experience that humanity has accumulated over the course of history and pre-history.”
In religion he sees evil deed rather than a good one. He mentions the Catholic Church, its Inquisition and all the atrocities and genocide committed in Latin America in its name.

He sees “the suppression of freedom to interpret the Qur’an” and attacks on those who bring humor and satire that involve Islam as a very serious problem along with Muslim slave-traders in history. Furthermore he mentions Serbian Orthodox Church which had a huge role in shaping Serbian nationalism and chauvinism that later started a dissolution of Yugoslavia and all those bloody wars in the 1990′s: “Serbian Church has its hands soaked to an incomparably greater extent with the blood of the last war.”

Anyway, there are many additional interesting themes and areas covered in this lengthy interview such as influence of Latin writers, importance of learning a foreign language, criticism of post-modernism, Bosnian and South Slavic literature, religion, lack of scientific presence in literature, politics and much more.

As I mentioned before, I was overjoyed while reading the interview. I felt almost like reading a good book I didn’t want to end. I will most definitely look forward to read more about and of this very interesting Bosnian writer and thinker, and I can only thank Jasmin Čaušević for this great interview which should be read by anyone interested in literature, Bosnian and the Balkans affairs, religion and the criticism, science, language, philosophy, moral and just plain humanity and common sense.

Links to the interview: part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V.

A free chapter (in Bosnian) of Hasanović’s new book “O roštilju i raznim smetnjama” (Concerning barbeques and various interludes) can be read at publisher’s website – pdf.

You are a Bosnian when:

• you begin most sentences with “jebi ga” (fuck it).
• you can not explain what “bolan” means, but you use it all the time.
• your mother insists that “promaha” (draught) will kill you.
• older people call you “sine” (son!) although you are a girl.
• your mother tells you to wear “podkosulja” (undershirt), no matter what the temperature outside.
• you tuck your “podkosulja” into your underwear.
• your father refers to all politicians with “djubrad”, “lopovi” (thieves) and “kriminalci” (criminals).
• your mother threatens you with “samo cekaj dok ti caca dodje kuci” (just wait till your dad gets home).
• you are 6 and your father sends you out to buy him “Drina” and “Sarajevsko” (brands of cigarettes and beer).
• you start your day with a cup of coffee and a cigarette
• your mother won’t accept the fact that you are not hungry
• you have “pita” (Bosnian food that is like a pastry puff filled with salty fillings like cheese, meat or potatoes) for dinner at least 4 days a week.
• you have “sarma” (stuffed cabbage) for dinner the remaining 3 days
• a loaf of bread is eaten for lunch every day
• your neighbor comes over every day uninvited, for coffee
• you have 17 consonants and 2 vowels in your last name
• your mother tells you not to sit close to TV, and not to use cell phones, because you will get brain tumor
• your mother tells you that you will get sick from drinking cold water
• your parents have “goblene” on their walls, and “heklanje” (fine handmade lace) on every piece of their furniture, including the TV.
• the time is divided into “before” and “after” the war

The list is not final. The best part is – I haven’t done any of these things yet.

Near the city of Visoko, 30 km north of Sarajevo, there is a stone pyramid of monumental size, claims the Bosnian archaeologist Semir Osmanagić, who lives and works in the USA.

After several months of geological and archaeological research, Mr. Osmanagić concluded that under the present hill of Visočica hides a stairs-like pyramid, about 12,000 years old.
Osmanagić, who intensively researched on pyramids in Americas, Asia and Africa for the last 15 years and wrote several books on the subject, says he’s quite sure he found the first pyramid in Europe, which is quite similar to ones in the Southern America.

He believes that the project would completely change Bosnia’s significance in the world of archaeology.

On the top of “Bosnian pyramid of Sun” was a temple, built by pre-Illyrians, people who lived, according to Osmanagić, 27,000 years ago.

Mr. Osmanagić thinks he will solve the “Bosnian pyramid of Sun” in the next five years, but also prove the existence of “Bosnian pyramid of Moon”, lying under the neighboring hill of Križž.

According to BBC, the leading Bosnian newspaper “Dnevni Avaz” writes:

“The pyramid is 100 meters high and there is evidence that it contains rooms and a monumental causeway … The plateau is built of stone blocks, which indicates the presence at the time of a highly developed civilization,” the daily explains.

“Archaeological excavations near the surface have uncovered a part of a wall and fragments of steps,” it reveals.

“Visocica hill could not have been shaped like this by nature,” geologist Nada Nukic tells the daily. “This is already far too more than we have anticipated, but we expect a lot more from further analysis,” she concludes.

Watch Reuters TV-report at Politiken.

My brother, my friend and I will travel to Bosnia this summer. I have not been in my homeland in two years, my brother since 1999 and my friend Bjarke has never been there. So, I hope it will be an interesting trip to a multifaceted country with many nationalities, cultures, gourman flavors, musical branches etc.

Since my friend asked me what to bring, here’s the list (it will be constantly changed):

• passport(visa not required for EU citizens)
• money (I suggest taking Danish kroners)
• sygesikringsbevis(health insurance)
• T-shirts, short pants and sandals (it is hot like hell in Bosnia during summer)
• sun glasses
• sun protection (factor…)
• bathing suit
• sweater (during night in the car or eventual rain)
• backpack
• cellular phone (if you’re afraid of not being connected)
• photo and video camera
• reading material (book)
• notebook and pen?
• binoculars

Interesting and relevant links:
Stop in Bosnia
Info about Bosnia-Herzegovina
Info about Sarajevo
Tourism Association of Sarajevo Canton
BH Tourism

• pita sirnica (cheese pie)
• pita zeljanica (nettle pie)
• pea
• rise in some cool souce
• chicken with the turkey bacon
• salmon
• baklava and apple cookies…
• and hmmm, coca cola