Goran Stefanovski’s Sarajevo or Sara in the Horrorland

GORAN STEFANOVSKI'S SARAJEVO OR SARA IN THE HORRORLAND Naum Panovski There were many others who have sang about you but there was no one who has sang and cried about you while touching your silver soul like an open wound -Abdulah Sidran can't think of any other playwright from the former Yugoslavia's theatre environment who could have written as compassionate a play about the death of Sarajevo as Goran Stefanovski has.1 I rather expected him to do just that. He was practically predestined to write this poignant play about the city.we all love so much. Macedonian by birth (born in Bitola, the Republic ofMacedonia, in 1952), theatre artist par excellence by family tradition (his late parents Nada and Mirko were well-established theatre artists), Yugoslav by education (he educated himself everywhere he could in the former Yugoslavia: on streets, in restaurants, in theatre dressing rooms, in coffee bars, at rock concerts, in cinema clubs, in friends' backyards as well as at two universities in Skopje and Belgrade), British by marriage (married to English-born Patricia Marsh, who translates his work into English), European by artistic achievements and recognition (many of his plays are performed to audiences worldwide: from Tashkent and Moscow to Sarajevo, Skopje, Paris, and Caracas), intercultural by parenthood (his two bilingual children Igor and Jana grew up both in England and Macedonia, influenced equally by both ofthese cultures), and Humanist by belief,Stefanovski is in fact the kind of multi-ethnically aware and deeply humanistic playwright who could have comprehended the ongoing disaster in Bosnia with both sublime objectivity and necessary artistic passion. Sarajevo had a special place in Stefanovski's artistic work. It has a special place in his heart as well. For him, as for many of us who felt at home in pre-war Sarajevo, this magnificent city was not only the geographical center ofour former country that fell apart overnight, nor was it just a place where many of our good friends and kinsfolk lived, but it was also an important symbol ofour multicultural coexistence and tolerance. To Stefanovski and to many others, Sarajevo meant, in fact, many things: it was a place of braided cultures and religions, languages . 47 and alphabets, ideologies and beliefs, races and ethnicities; it was a city where different worlds met, a place where the past met the future, and where politics competed with the arts. Sarajevo was also an Olympian city with an enormous heart open to everyone, a "targija"2 place with an inspiring sense of humor, a "raja"3 place with a heartbeat felt all over the country, and a music place like no other music place. In Sarajevo, people could have spent all night long in the heart of Europe (both metaphorically and literally sitting in the garden of the old Hotel "Europe"), dreaming about anything. There, at the new dawn, people would have the last strong drinks of the night or their first cups ofTurkish coffee listening to the bells from the nearby Roman Catholic cathedral to the north, the sonorous bell from the Orthodox church to the south, the voice of the muezzin's morning prayer from the mosque at the east, or to the rabbi's song from the west. There, in that magical garden, people dreamt of their future and of new projects, and were happy and alive. Sarajevo was a city of dreams. Was... In that time, in the midst ofthe Sarajevo nights when people were dreaming of our cultural and economic integration with Europe, few could have imagined what lay ahead. People deeply believed that there would be no more wars and insanity, no more genocide and holocaust, nomore W.W. II images. They really believed that war would not come again to that Balkan Babylon. For many people, for several generations, living and creating in times ofpeace and detente, war was something that belonged to the past. At least, so it seemed, in civilized Europe. Unfortunately, they were blind to the avalanche of nationalism and hatred. The cruel and violent dismemberment of Bosnia, its destruction and mass extermination ofits citizens, clearly showed that W.W. I and W.W. II were not over...