Welcome

I have been in Sarajevo for three weeks at this point, so I’m still less than half-way through my stay (but already sad that I’ll have to leave).

I am visiting Pontanima Choir, an interreligious choir that has been singing music of faith since 1996, when the war here ended. The choir includes people of all of the Bosnian ethno-religious backgrounds,* as well as Jews,* people of other religions, and atheists. They sing music from each of these religious traditions, and have held concerts all over Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) as well as in other parts of the former Yugoslavia, other nations in Europe, and in the U.S. They represent a powerful example of a community in which religious difference can exist peacefully and be celebrated.

*These are Bosniak/Muslim, Croat/Catholic, and Serb/Christian Orthodox, some people practice the religions associated with their ethnic background, and some do not ... BiH is - and was also before the war - a fairly secular country.

* There is a long Jewish tradition in Sarajevo, as many Sephardic Jews came here when they were expelled from Spain. Many were killed or left during World War II, and many left during the war here in the 1990s. What was once a large population has now shrunk to about 1000 in the city of Sarajevo. The University here once had the second largest Ladino (the Sephardic language) department in the world, but it has not existed since the war. Jews greatly influenced life in Bosnia; the root of much of the traditional music is actually in Jewish music, some of the traditional sevdalinkas, in fact, are Jewish songs with different words.