There’s something about Sarajevo. Step out of the airport, hail a cab for your hotel and a low-key highway a few minutes later makes out into the main city catching you unawares with the impossible spectacle you suddenly behold. Gleaming glass buildings, which could be home anywhere in the heart of Europe, cohabiting with carefully abandoned buildings clearly mutilated by a savage civil conflict -- monstrously shelled by a war out of sight but not out of mind. These bombed buildings seem straight out of a post-Soviet withdrawal-era Kabul.

They call Sarajevo the ‘Jerusalem of Europe’ and the ‘Damascus of North’ for a good reason. The oriental tradition and the ancient memory is strong here but a fin de siècle (end of century) birth imposes an obligatory mandate of modernity on it.

Keep moving, heading towards the city centre and the Bosnian capital’s myriad charms and signature characteristics endow themselves. Discernibly the ancient and the modern interlace into a seamless charming whole. Grey Soviet-era drab residential blocks dating from the Josip Broz Tito era interweave with blue, green and even orange coloured modern architecture. They don’t jostle, though, as buildings do systematically in Western Europe. Calming spaces separate epochs even between buildings.

The city has many parallels with Islamabad in its layout. Like the Margalla in Islamabad, a blue-green hill range, the Dinaric, rings Sarajevo although in this case some parts of the hills are tightly dotted with terracotta roofed houses offering a fairytale ambiance. And like the Faisal Avenue in Islamabad or the Shahrah-e-Faisal in Karachi that serve as the main city arteries, Sarajevo lies on both sides of a long wide road with a tram line running through it, boasting World War era trams cars but efficiently functional and painted in bright colours.

A portion of the road also constitutes the famous Sniper Alley where many hundreds were shot dead from the mountains queueing for bread during the city siege in the 1990s. Imposing mosques and churches on both sides of the road, indicating a deeply spiritual character of the place and its peoples, spring pleasant visual surprises.

Like in some other beautiful European capitals (such as Thames in London, Seine in Paris, Tiber in Rome, Danube in Budapest and Vltava in Prague), a river also runs through Sarajevo -- the Miljacka River -- injecting tranquility with myriad pedestrian bridges and waterfronts lending a visual flair into the proceedings. About a 40-minute drive later, you reach downtown, the breathtaking larger area of Bascarsija and its magical Ferhadija Street chockablock with museums, bookshops, boutiques, tradecraft centres, libraries, Ottoman mosques and Orthodox churches and unending traditional eateries. You need at least a full day in pedestrian mode to fully explore the exotic delights on offer.

Despite inexplicably not being high on the list of oft-visited cities in destination-packed Europe, Sarajevo offers a broad range of other interests and geographic pleasures both within the city proper (such as river cruises, walking tours in the woods and pleasant mountain hikes) and without. Within a two-hour drive radius of the city are historic and politically significant centres Srebrenica and Mostar, as well as the stunning coastal region jutting neighbouring Croatia.

And yet the weight of recent history weighs heavy in the air in scenic Sarajevo. In places and at times, it seeped into my consciousness, stripping away my status of an outsider. Being in Sarajevo was an emotional experience that I haven’t felt anywhere else in all the five continents I’ve explored. Just like the ancient and modern intertwine architecturally here, the political and the personal interface deeply in everyday Sarajevo. The siege of the city by Serbs in early 1990s and its haunting impact, even though over two decades old now, seem too recent in public consciousness to morph into convenient recalls or analysis in academic terms.

There’s not a house in Sarajevo that went untouched by tragedy tagged with the siege. There is a distinct sense of melancholy that strikes your heart. Beware, first-timers can be especially overwhelmed since many of the city highlights relate to the siege and its gloomy realities. Indeed at an award-winning perpetual exhibition on the Srebrenica tragedy, my travel companion on this tour Iqbal Khattak had to tend to me when I became overcome.

Roberto, the owner of the apartment I rented; Narmeen, the young economist-turned-guide who took Iqbal and me on a siege-recount tour of the city; various shopkeepers, librarians, businesswomen, tourist guides, academics and ordinary people we talked to, simply couldn’t talk without either a central or stray reference to the siege that define modern-day Sarajevans. In many cases they would stop in the middle of the sentence as if trying to devise a way of finishing it without a reference to the war, mostly without success.

But it all makes sense. Being a young nation -- independence came in 1992 as a consequence of Yugoslavia imploding -- Bosnia is trying to forge an identity. This identity cannot be crafted without considering the political and personal price of a freedom birthed in blood and savagery. The Siege of Sarajevo and its bitter consequences was always going to be the filter through which Bosnia decided its future. And knowing that, and meeting its people in their homes and offices and shops and seeing how it interacts with its erstwhile fellow citizens in, for example, Serbia and Croatia (and I walked across borders in both places) you realise that Bosnians are demonstrating remarkable foresight and accommodative pluralisms in coming to terms with their experience and limiting the presence of past in their future. Look at how the Bosnians have preserved perhaps one of the most significant landmarks in terms of world military history: the place where Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo triggering World War I.

My temporary apartment overlooking the place shows a non-descript bridge, open to pedestrian traffic with just a small plaque indicating the event. And that’s it. No grand statement by way of a monument or anything. A simple plaque.

The siege of Sarajevo by the Serbs lasted well over four years (more than 1,400 days) as punishment for dreams of sovereignty. This is the longest siege of a city in all of modern warfare. Death, mutilation, starvation, cold and lasting psychological trauma stalked the city and consumed its people with a documented average of over 100 bombs slamming into the city between 1992 and 1995. Had Bill Clinton not bombed the Serbs into decisive surrender after the United Nations with its agonising four years of talks and spectacularly failed peacekeeping, there probably wouldn’t have been a Bosnia, as Narmeen our guide said. Other than the heroic resistance of the Sarajevans and Bosnians in general, that is.

Sarajevo wasn’t the Bosnians’ only trauma. Srebrenica where over 2,000 boys and men were murdered in a single day and Visegrad where a major hotel served as a ‘rape centre’ (historians say over 20,000 Bosnian women were raped during the war with many forced to take their resulting pregnancies to term) are etched in their memory. Because Srebrenica, the worst single atrocity after World War II in Europe, happened on the watch of a Dutch contingent of UN peacekeepers, Bosnians have a discernible disdain for UN calling it "UN: United Nothing". T-shirts sell everywhere in Sarajevo with this sloganeered opprobrium. And they don’t quite encourage discussions about all things Dutch either.

And yet, how are Bosnians forging their identity? Internally, by a unique ‘three presidents’ system of governance that accommodates the three key ethnic identities in power sharing. "Three presidents means triple trouble, of course, but we want to jettison the status of our region as a magnet for war through accommodation instead of focusing on our differences which tore Yugoslavia apart," said a young scholar whose name now sadly eludes me. "World War I started from here. World War II consolidated here. Then we had the War of Freedom in 1992. This is all too much, we’ve decided," he added.

In places in the Bosnian capital, where there were mass casualties in the city from Serb bombings or shootings, they have etched into ground red splashes of colour that now they call ‘Sarajevo Roses.’ This is dignified internalisation of cruel memories. I saw several in the city, including at the Markale Market (which now sells fresh fruits, vegetable and delicious bottles of freshly-squeezed pomegranate juice) where a single strike killed over 60 and injured more than 300. There’s one near the first site on my list of must-sees I went visiting -- the Vijecnica, one of the first buildings (constituting the Sarajevo Library and City hall) wantonly destroyed in the Siege and the first building the focus of restoration after the liberation of the city. Over two million books, manuscripts and historic documents were destroyed in the library.

Externally, Bosnians have made peace with the Serbs despite 1990s. Trade and political relations are aggressively pursued with Belgrade. Citizens from these countries travel to each other often (Sarajevo and Belgrade are a four-hour scenic drive away, which I also took) and some have families on both sides. This whole not-forgetting-but-readily-forgiving attitude made me envious of Bosnians because Pakistanis in particular (but also Indians-Pakistanis-Bangladeshis in general in South Asia) are used to feeding on their twisted hatred borne of the events leading to 1947 and beyond to pursue a fruitless outcome and an non-accommodative collective future.

When you leave Sarajevo, as I did with a rather unusual reluctance, you leave with a strong sense of awe at the quiet but rich dignity of Bosnians who endured so much pain with grace under relentless pressure. And yet, they don’t much crow about how they survived Sarajevo’s appalling siege but that’s quite a hair-raising heroic long story in itself. One small glimpse: Well into the siege, a group of people, led by a young architect named Nedzad Brankovic, built an audacious nearly 1 km-long tunnel right under the only small sliver of land which served as the airport and which was not surrounded by the Serbs. This one-metre high and one and a half metre wide tunnel should have allowed the Sarajevans to escape the crippling siege. What they did instead was to use it to bring in supplies, food, some medicines and weapons to stay put in the city and defend it, refusing to run away or surrender when they easily could have.

What glorious heroism! Through this tunnel also came into Sarejevo weapons and humanitarian aid from Pakistan to help its citizens resist.

It was first called the Tunnel of Life and now the Tunnel of Hope. The non-descript, ordinary looking house close to the airport runway from within which, hidden from view, it started to be dug is now a heritage site and houses a museum. Big things sometimes come in small packages: it’s just a 10-marla establishment! I went in and climbed down into the claustrophobic but now well-lit tunnel, my tall frame allowing me to only crouch on my knees. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life.

"The people of Sarajevo are one big family, their union forged, during the siege, through sacrifices by members of each house in the city. We loved our city too much and while defending it we’ve just buried too many of our loved ones here to ever leave or lose," Narmeen, my guide said.

And I just crouched in the tunnel taking in the screaming silence.

This is the first of a 3-part series on a journey of a peripatetic Pakistani in the Balkans. Spotlight next week: Belgrade, Serbia.