Sarajevo is the first place we’ve been that didn’t smack us in the face with it’s awesomeness. Krakow has Wawel Castle, Berlin is modern and magnificent, Prague has the prettiest wedding cake streets, Budapest is embraced by the beautiful Danube, and I practically went blind from all the gold leaf in St. Petersburg. Even Mostar, my least favorite stop so far, has a pretty awesome bridge. Sarajevo, on the other hand, has far more subtle charms, but the longer we spend here, and the more desserts I eat, the more affection I feel for this small, mountainous city.

Maybe it took a little longer to warm up because of our chaotic day getting here. We maneuvered out of Mostar (it only took about a 36-point turn and a strained transmission to gun our rental car out of the hostel alleyway) and enjoyed a gorgeous (literally surrounded by a green river gorge) drive here, only to find out that several of my key possessions had been left at the hostel or–I kid you not–dropped at the toll booth. D’oh! When everything you own is in a backpack, losing key wardrobe elements feels like a catastrophe. So making our way to Sarajevo, my nerves were already frayed–and that was before we drove in to the city. *NOTE: Both my essential trip sweater and my rainboots have been retrieved. The sweater was lying in the road no worse for wear, and a kind fellow traveler brought my boots to Sarajevo. Thanks, universe!

My mother will point out that she warned us about renting a car in Europe when we were enthusiastically planning our ambitious Balkans road trip agenda, and I am here to publicly state that my mom is, once again, 100% right. She claims to find no joy in this, but that queen is always right, and this situation is no exception. I consider myself a good driver, especially at the wheel of a manual car. My dad taught me to drive a stick shift all over the steep hills of Salt Lake City, and I used to parallel park my Honda Fit all over Baltimore, for crying out loud. However, NOTHING can prepare even a great driver for navigating Europe and the Balkans. The tiny, tiny streets, the hairpin acute angles, the fact that house numbers and street signs seem optional, the pedestrians who prefer walking in the street to the sidewalk, the trams, the infernal honking and zooming scooters like wasps buzzing around your stressed out little car. By the time we finally found the parking area for our Air BnB and played Tetris with our rental car to get it into the little garage, I was already making plans for an evening spent with a bottle of wine and seriously considering just leaving the damn car in Sarajevo.

So I wasn’t in the best mental state to appreciate this place on our first day, and honestly, it takes some digging to love this little city. It doesn’t have the most stunning architecture, the most charming boulevards, the most slick transportation system. It has graffiti, stray animals, and some sad old buildings pockmarked with damage from mortar shells. Sarajevo, of course, suffered a terrible siege from 1992 to 1996, and the scars of that horrific war are all over Bosnia. We had visited the Museum of War and Genocide in Mostar, and while the museum was very well-done and informative, it was by nature graphic, disturbing, and hard to stomach. Combined with all of the Holocaust sites we had been visiting, I was feeling like the world is just a horrible place full of horrible events and horrible people who kill other people, and when we first got here wanted to hightail it back to Denver and hide under the covers.

However, the next morning when I was holed up in our Air BnB, I looked out the window and felt my grumpy heart soften. The views here are out of this world, and coming from Salt Lake City, I’m a view snob. In fact, no other place has reminded me so much of my ancestral home as Sarajevo, with the neighborhoods stretched all over the steep green hills like a residential sweater. I could spend all day looking at this view, and a lot of my time in Sarajevo has been spent on the patio of our funky Air BnB, looking at the hills through sunshine and rainstorms, coming alive with church bells and calls to prayer.

Once I started eating in Sarajevo, the love affair truly blossomed. I’m ready to say that Sarajevo currently holds the crown for tastiest city we’ve visited (that phrase sounds…weird, but I’m sticking with it). I’m sure Italy, India, Thailand and Japan will have something to say about that in the coming months, but for now I have enjoyed stuffing my face here more thoroughly than any other city. This can be attributed to the low prices, the coziness of the restaurants we’ve been to, the mouth-watering crust of of burek, and the abundance of baklava. We had one of the best meals of the trip at Zara is Duvara with heavenly stuffed peppers, enjoyed panoramic views along with a bottle of wine at Kibe, gobbled up vegetable soup on a rainy day at Dveri, and have been back to Sac, the reigning burek place in the Baščaršija (market) twice. The burek is by far our favorite street food of this journey. It is a pastry filled with cheese, meat, or spinach, but it is cooked in a immense fiery oven with orange coals, and the crust is a sinful combination of soft, crunchy, charred, caramelized. Best of all, you get a burek the size of your head for about $2.

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And I haven’t even gotten started on the desserts. The combination of Ottoman Turkish and Austrian Hapsburg influences here have made for a messy and bloody history…but also the most mouth-watering sweets I have ever experienced. Baklava on every corner, hazelnut cakes, apple strudel, a pastry shop next door that sells the most beautiful little creations for about $1….sugar heaven.

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In between grazing and adding inches to my waistline (Orange Theory is going to be so torturous when I get back), Sarajevo has some very cool, weird, and quirky sights–although again, it doesn’t WOW us tourists immediately like the other places we’ve been. However, Sarajevo is a compact city where we walked or took a very creaky old tram to everything, and there is a lot to see.

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To stand at the exact spot where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated is eery: it seems like such a small, inconsequential corner, yet had such major, MAJOR consequences.

The Jewish museum was a quiet and lovely old stone synagogue, with a simple wooden bimah and a tears-causing exhibit on Kristallnacht and the Holocaust in Bosnia.

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The now-traditional free walking tour on the first day was excellent. We did the “War Times, New Times” tour, and our guide Neno shared his own experiences growing up in Sarajevo during the siege, along with sniper sites, wrecked buildings, and the heart-wrenching memorial to children killed during the siege. Chillingly, they were all born right around the same time as I was, and to think that while I was flourishing in my safe, loved cocoon at Eastwood Elementary, these kids were living in a war zone…words fail me.

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Neno ended the tour at a satirical statue made by a local artist of a can of beef, “thanking” the United Nations for the food rations provided to Sarajevans during the war. I know it was an extremely complicated situation, and I’m sure there were reasons that the United States and the international community didn’t get more involved with the conflict in Bosnia. However, I know if it was me, and my family…I would want help. To think that help arrived too little, too late for so many people who call this place home eats me up and is hard to take.

Another highlight was the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is a really delightful, creaky old pile that is oddly unvisited: except for the room where the Sarajevo Haggadah is housed, we had the whole place to ourselves, with galleries of Roman artifacts and a beautiful botanical garden, and a rather creepy exhibit on life in Bosnia in the 19th century. The building had that great dusty smell and I far preferred this museum experience to fancier, more crowded spots.

Speaking of the Haggadah, seeing the illuminated pages in person was a thrill both from a Jewish perspective and a Geraldine Brooks perspective. People of the Book is one of my absolute favorite books by one of my favorite authors, and seeing this colorful little piece of history in person did not disappoint. Looking through the illustrations on a nearby touchscreen, we tried to figure out where each illustration fit in the Torah narrative. It was like Jewish Where’s Waldo: “That’s Noah building the ark!” “That’s the binding of Isaac…I think?” “Didn’t Jacob have a ladder?” “That’s definitely Moses bringing the commandments down…”  The colors, details (why are there dragons in this Haggadah!?), and facial expressions in the illuminations were so captivating and I could have thumbed through the pages of the reproduction for hours if it weren’t such a popular spot.

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Ultimately, I’m so glad we holed up here for several days. It may not be the shiniest, fanciest place in Europe, and the recent war makes this a heavier spot to visit than others, but there are a fraction of the tourists and it still feels off the beaten track. With the views, the desserts, and the funky sights, Sarajevo won my heart…just like this photo opportunity suggests!