13-Dec-2023
All our stopover points so far have been interesting and enjoyable, but there's something about little Travnik that has wound itself tightly around my heart.
Partly, it's because you can't walk five metres without stumbling over some history.
From 1699 to 1850, Travnik was the capital of the Ottoman empire's Bosnia province, and its importance was further enhanced by the residency of the Bosnian viziers (all 77 of them). There are numerous mausoleums marking their graves:
We took these on the first day, the snowy day...
... and these yesterday
Vizier Ibrahim Pasha founded this madrasah at the beginning of the 18th century
Ivo Andric's Bosnian Chronicle opens like this: "On the outskirts of the bazaar at Travnik, under the cool and clamoring springs of Shumech, there stands, older than the town's living memory, a little coffeehouse known as Lutva's Cafe..." This is how it looks today
The river still tumbles by
And the graves stretch up the hill beyond
Unsurprisingly, given the contested politics of this region, some of the history is tragic:
A school housing Croatians on one side, and Bosnian Muslims on the other... (There are some details here, but note the story is five years old)
Remembering an atrocity
Travnik Castle, which has its origins in the 15th century, and looms over the town like an all-seeing deity, is a really great place to visit:
Inside, there's an exhibition, which includes some stunning photographs by Mirsad Mujanovic:
Here are just a couple, out of many excellent shots:
The Castle is also a great place to appreciate Travnik's truly awesome setting, which was especially obvious today, as the low cloud of previous days had jacked itself up a bit. Our little town sits deep in a valley with beefy mountains on all sides:
Back down in the town, after our Castle visit today, we did a bit more wandering. Travnik’s Sulejmanija Mosque is generally known as the Painted Mosque, or the Ornamented Mosque (for obvious reasons). It dates back to the 16th century:
The interior is said to be spectacular, but again, unfortunately, the door was shut. We don't have much luck with mosques in this part of the world.
Under the mosque, there's a "bezistan", or small bazaar. We popped in for coffee, thinking that such a richly decorated place, presumably aimed at tourists, would come with a hefty price tag. But no. Two cups of delicious Bosnian coffee came to KM 4 (GBP 1.76):
Here's the entrance. Highly recommended
Overall, Travnik has been enormously satisfactory on the food-and-drink front:
This is THE place to go for Bosnian kebabs (cevapi)
Yesterday's lunch: Delicious sausage-like kebabs, five for me, and ten for Nigel, stuffed into half a flatbread. Add a salad and a couple of drinks, and it came to KM 25 (about GBP 11)
Today we ate here. A nice, simple, homely place, with a short menu of very tasty dishes
This is a stuffed leaves dish, which came with a cabbage salad. We also had a "beef knee" soup; I can't recall the Bosnian name, but the meat was incredibly tender. It cost about the same as yesterday's lunch. It's really not expensive to eat out here
From the baker just round the corner. We've been tempted to visit every day, but nobly held off until today. Here we have a lovely syrupy apple pastry, and the incredibly nice tufahije, which is apple stuffed with walnuts
There has definitely not been enough time to try Travnik's plethora of cafes and bakeries...
Our last bit of history-hunting took us to the museum. It's not the most epic collection, it has to be said, and some of the galleries are closed off, but there are some interesting things on display:
I hope we can come back to Travnik one day. With a little more time and warmer weather, there's lots to be seen in the locality, and lots more pleasant "living" to be done in the town.
But tomorrow (Thursday, or Day 19), we leave for Sarajevo. We'll be getting on the same bus we got off on Monday, and as that was a good experience, we hope this will be too. Fingers crossed...