Why a Booktrail?
1990s: Life on a Saravejo Steet: One street , many stories
Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street
What you need to know before your trail
For four centuries, Logavina Street was a quiet residential road in a cosmopolitan city, home to Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats. Then the war tore the street apart. In this extraordinary eyewitness account, Demick weaves together the stories of ten families from Logavina Street. For three and a half years, they were often without heat, water, food or electricity. They had to evade daily sniper fire and witnessed the deaths of friends, neighbours and family. Alongside the horrific realities of living in a warzone, Demick describes the roots of the conflict and explains how neighbours and friends were turned so swiftly into deadly enemies. With the same honest, intimate reporting style which won her so many plaudits for Nothing to Envy, Barbara Demick brilliantly illuminates one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, and describes how, twenty years later, the residents of Logavina Street are coping with its consequences.
Locations
Reset- Bosnia - Sarajevo
- A: Logavina Street - north side
- B: Logavina Street - south side
- C: Latin Bridge
Travel Guide
Sarajevo
Why Logavina Street?
“To bring home the reality of war,my editors suggested that, with staff photographer John Costello, I pick s a street in Sarajevo and profile the people living there, describing their lives during the war.
“I knew the street I wanted to write about the first time I walked up it. Even battered by ear, it was a beautiful street, rising uphill at a perfect perpendicular angle from the main throughfare, three white minarets piercing the sky above red rooftops. At the first house I visited, a friendly couple guided me through their garden into a small low room protected from demobbing, and served me a delicious filjan of perfect coffee. There was a problem though: the name was Kaukcije Abdulah Efendije Street. It would hardly roll off he tongue of my readers, or make them think of the streets where they grey up. I explained this to my gracious hosts. But no, the woman of the house told me. That was the name picked by the Communists. They change the name back last year. It’s called Logavia Street.”
Barbara Demick’s coverage of the war in Sarajevo won the George Polk Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. She is now a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, where she has reported from the Middle East and South Korea. In 2010 she won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea. She is currently based in Beijing.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Besieged: Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street
Destination : Sarajevo Author/Guide: Barbara Demick Departure Time: 1990s
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