A Memory Journey: Road Tour from Sarajevo to Srebrenica
A Memory Journey: Road Tour from Sarajevo to Srebrenica

Author(s): Hasan Nuhanović
Subject(s): Cultural Anthropology / Ethnology, Transformation Period (1990 - 2010), Politics of History/Memory, Wars in Jugoslavia
Published by: Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava Univerziteta u Sarajevu
Keywords: Bosnia; Genocide; Srebrenica; Memory; Mass graves;
Summary/Abstract: This paper offers a personal and ethnographic account of traveling the Romanija route from the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo to Srebrenica—a road imbued with layers of trauma, memory, and post-genocide silence. Through an autobiographical lens, the author reconstructs a “memory journey” that intertwines personal grief and loss with the collective memory of Bosniak survivors, many of whom were displaced or otherwise affected by the atrocities committed during the Bosnian war (1992–1995). As the journey moves through towns and village on this route, the paper documents specific sites of massacres, disappearances, and war crimes—places that remain largely invisible or unacknowledged by the local Serb population and broader public. Drawing on theoretical insights from memory studies, the narrative emphasizes how landscapes become repositories of pain and remembrance, and how acts of silent or selective forgetting perpetuate the divisions of Bosnia’s postwar society. The journey, while practical in function, becomes a ritual of mourning, resistance, and remembrance. It explores how survivors navigate physical and symbolic spaces of trauma, grappling with the enduring presence of the past in everyday geographies. Ultimately, the paper illustrates that for many Bosniak survivors, the simple act of driving from Sarajevo to Srebrenica becomes a deeply embodied, political act of memory work—where time becomes place, and landscapes speak of lives lost and justice deferred.

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