Better than All of Sweden --Jajce

St. Luke's Church steeple




Walking up to the fortress in Jajce


Jaja in Bosnian is egg, so Jajce means Little Egg, a funny name for a town in Central Bosnia about three hours from Sarajevo. Supposedly it comes from the shape of the rock above the town where a great medieval citadel still stands. I couldn't really tell that it was egg-shaped.

The citadel is only one of the spectacles of this place. There are streets of great old Ottoman-style homes and old-fashioned Bosnian houses with steep tin roofs. In the place where the Pliva River runs into the Vrbas River are the signature waterfalls of the Jajce. The steeple of St. Luke's Church dates to medieval times and beneath it are the catacombs where Tito hung out during the war. He'd hide his men in the middle of Jajce, duck through the catacombs then run along a path that led under the waterfalls to make a mysterious getaway when he had to. In 1943 the treaty that set up Bosnia and Herzegovina as a federal unit of Yugoslavia was signed in Jajce. So the place is kind of a combined Niagara Falls and Philadelphia for Bosnia.

It's in rough shape, however. Everyone we talked to told us how much more beautiful Jajce was before the war. Indeed war damage and neglect is still tragically visible everywhere. Jajce changed hands between Serbs, Croats and combined Croats and Muslims during the 1990s war and remains heavily catholic and Croat today. The paths and railings to the amazing falls are falling down the cliffs and the falls themselves are obstructed by trees and debris that need to be tended.You can no longer get to that path under the falls, although we find nutty boys diving in the cascades just above the big falls.

I went on this trip with Miranda and Dona and Miranda's 85-year-old grandmother who was driven from Jajce by the war. She lives now in Sweden with her children and grandchildren. Sweden provides a pension and security not possible in Bosnia. As we drove into Jajce, she looked out the window and said, "I love Jajce better than all of Sweden."