Sunday morning in Travnik

The following morning, I wake up early since I have gone to bed pretty early the night before (last night I briefly contemplated exploring the Travnik nightlife but gave up ─ thinking I would need the help of my friends from Tuzla to do this). There is dense fog all around and I cannot see the hills from my hotel room. After breakfast in the hotel, I decide to go for one more long walk in the hills, starting from the cemetery behind the hotel. While roaming around the white marble Muslim tombstones, taking pictures of the surrounding landscape, a guy comes up to me, who, after asking me where I am from, asks me for one KM “to buy cigarettes.” I give him two (that’s what I have in my jeans’ pocket), thinking that I may be risking my safety this early in the morning, by myself, in a place I barely know, but things feel very safe around here and I keep going. I take a walking path going up higher into the hills. The path more or less disappears and although I could keep going, I now remember that I read in my guide book that there still are landmines in the hills around Travnik, so I decide to stick to roads and cemeteries, which I associate with “safe places.” There is complete peace and silence all around with the occasional crow flying overhead with a heavy “flop-flop” of its wings (yet another magical Balkan moment). After walking through the other big Islamic cemetery on the same mountainside and taking pictures of wildflowers which grow amid the stones, I head back towards town and life. Its is Sunday morning, people, mostly older, are streaming out of the Catholic church. There are also people at the flower market and others who start filling-up the terraces of cafes, smoking and drinking coffee. Further on, more people are gathered just outside of the Serbian Orthodox church, chatting with the priest. I walk past them and up the road from which I know I can have one last great view of the town below and of the Kastel (“Stari Grad”) in the far distance. I take a few last pictures and I head back to the hotel to pack, walking all the way along the river Lasva.