Yes, better than
White Castle hamburgers, better than
Cicek kofte in Istanbul, better than any cevapcici in Belgrade or kebache in Skopje. Nobody takes a ground up cow and grills it better than the Bosnians. I challenge even the
hardiest hamburger partisan to eat Bosnian cevapi in the Bascarsija district and walk away thinking that In-and-Out burgers or Shake Shack can hold a candle to the simple perfection of a $3 Sarajevo cevap plate. The first thing we did when we set down our bags after arriving at 9pm was to make a beeline to Zeljo's.
Zeljo's is, perhaps, the most famous of the Bascarsija's cevap houses -
cevabdzinicas - and there are now at least two on the same street. Like most
cevapdzinicas, the menu is spare and no beer is served, but you can order fresh sour buttermilk by the glass to wash down the meat, which is served in a spongey flat pocketed bread known as
somun. Traditional sides are chopped fresh onion and
kaymak, a thick and slightly cheesy cream ball that melts over the cevap. This is the classic Sarajevo cevap: a small cylinder of meat, a mere morsel of amino acids and proteins that was once a happy little animal and is now a masterpiece, a high point of world cuisine, the excelsior of the grilled arts. And also, it is my lunch.
Mine!
This is the
Cheeseburger of the Gods, the ultimate in ground beef goodness on this little blue orb we call Earth. They are even easier to eat than a burger, and served inside a warmed somun bread they stay warm throughout the meal. You can eat the cevapi like a sandwich but most people tear up the
somun and grab the cevap with the bread. This cevap was astoundingly good, and a bite of this flooded my brain with all kinds of dopamine "happy brain" chemicals - true meat crack. I would drag myself through the sewers of hell for another plate of these cevapi. For Sarajevo style cevap, Zeljo's definately took the "I Can Eat This Twice a Day Award", but we had to try a few other places as well... people who have tried cevap in this nabe can be sharply loyal to one cevap house or another, and while I definately stand in Zeljo's camp, Cevapdzinica Hodžić was also highly recommended.
Hodžić is definately going for the upscale market: they were the most expensive cevapi in the quarter, and they seem to have opened a new franchise on about every block in the Old City... there is Hodžić One, Hodžić Two, and so on. Still, it is hard to be
too upscale with grilled meat... nothing on the menuis over 5 EU (the Bosnian mark is 2 BM to 1 EU) and you can get grilled veal kidneys and liver... I was tempted to try the
pleskavica, but heck... stick to the classic shapes.
The verdict? Good. Very good. Better than 99% of all the world's cevapcici, but not as good as Zeljo's. Slightly saltier. Slightly more charcoal flavor in the bread. And a truly excellent Coca Cola. I know... I know... globalization goes better with coke... but I only drink about five cokes a year. I really love Coke and I know they would kill me if I drank more, so whenever I actually drink one it is a memorable event, and it paired so well with the saltier Hodžić cevapi. Truly an
idealna kombinacija! 
Later we ate at the Cevapdzinica #Nine, right next door to our accomodations (the clean, friendly and shockingly cheap Kod Kome Guest House.) For some reason, Sarajevans seem to name their meatwad bistros after cardinal numbers, usually involving a soccer ball in the logo, which gives me the impression that opening a cevapdzinica is something you do when you retire from football. If you are Irish or Hungarian, you open a pub, but Bosnian ex-strikers go for grilled meat.
This is your usual no-big-deal Sarajevo cevap house, meaning it is only better than 98% of the cevap houses in the entire world. And they served salad! What a treat. For several days we had not seen anybody eating anything that resembled a vegetable (and face it, onions don't really resemble a vegetable.) Noting the interesting long term effects of an entirely fiber-free diet on our digestive systems, we went for the salad. Glad we did.
So what did we do when we weren't eating cevap? We ate
burek (another post) or Banja Luka style cevap (yet another future post: the serious issue of a competing cevap style is too complex to include in a single post.) We also walked around not buying any souvenirs. I have managed to live from day to day for decades without really
needing a copper Turkish coffee pot or a small flintlock musket to defend myself from miniature Albanian sheep raiders. I could, however, hear the sad, beseeching voices of the rugs, pleading
"Buy me! Buy me! Pleasse! Take me home with you!" With a stone heart, I ignored them and walked on.
Yes, I like rugs, but for the price of one rug I can eat about 125 plates of cevapi, so there really wasn't any contest there. Fumie, however, fell in love with a pyjama set in a shop window, and passed on it when it turned out to be the same price as 13 servings of cevap.
Disturbo? Disturbo!
While modern Bosnian history has pivoted on the divisions between Muslim Bosniak, Catholic Croats, and Orthodox Serbs, Bosnia has also been home to a vibrant Jewish community. The majority of Bosnia's Jews were Sephardim, expelled from Spain in the 15th century and granted refuge in the Ottoman Empire by the Muslim Sultans. Sarajevo's Jewish comunity dates from the early 16th century, and by 1900 Jews comprised about 12 percent of the city's population, and about 100% of its doctors. Other towns had (and some still have) smaller Jewish communities, enlarged by Ashkenazic immigrants after Bosnia was annexed by the Hapsburgs to Austrian rule in 1828. My maternal Grandmother was born in Travnik in 1896, met my Jewish Hungarian Grandfather during WWI - while he was serving in the 19th Jász-Kun Huszár regiment - and moved to Hungary after the war.
Today, the Ashkenazic Synagogue is the center of Sarajevo Jewish life, although the majority of the congragation is of Sephardi origin. The Jews of Sarajevo - as in most of former Yugoslavia - lived in a tolerant cultural atmosphere almost devoid of the antisemitic poison that prevailed in pre-WWII Europe, and it all the more tragic that they were almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust. Local Muslims and Christians were active in saving the lives of many Jews, and Jews were prominent in the Yugoslav Partisan movement, such as Moshe Pijade, Tito's right hand man. There is a photo in the Jewish museum of a Jewish Woman - wearing a Jewish star armband - walking along the main street of Nazi-occupied Sarajevo arm in arm with her Muslim friend, a woman maintaining the tradition of a complete face veil, their daughters holding hands.
The present Synagogue has been rebuilt to accomodate a smaller congregation (about 700 Jews reside in Sarajevo, but unoficially the number is about half that - many are abroad in Israel and return on occaision.) But like a lot of Sarajevo cultural centers, it still attracts a daily crowd of loyal retirees to its kosher kitchen and backgammon boards.
While Sarajevo was one of the centers of culture for the Ladino language, today perhaps only about twenty of the people in the community actively speak it. Sarajevo's Jews once had a a flowering music scene, as evidenced by the existence of the award winning "Lira" Jewish choir during the 1920s, but today the sole representative of that tradition may be Flory Jagoda, an aging Ladino singer who moved to Massachusetts decades ago but is still considered to be the soul and Nonya (Granny) of Sarajevo Jewish music. At the Sarajevo Jewish Museum, located in the Bascarsija of old Sarajevo, there is an exhibit dedicated to the Lira Choir.
A lot of Sarajevo starogradsko pesme "Old City Songs" however, have Ladino folk song origins, such as Kad ja Podjoh na Bembasu, considered to be the unofficial city anthem of Sarajevo.(The Youtube clip below is from the 1968 Yugoslav film Sarajevski Atentat and presents the Bosnian philosopher/actor Predrag Finci as Gavrilo Princip plotting the demise of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand which leads to World War One...There are no Yiddish speakers in Bosnia at all anymore, and most of the Ashkenazic community has Hungarian Jewish origins as can be seen in their names, especially when visiting the cemetery. The Cemetery in Grbavica was one of the prime sniper posts during the siege - it poked down the hill straight into a clear rifle shot at the main downtown square. Serb paramilitary poured gunfire and shells into the modern center - named "Sniper Alley - and, on retreating, heavily mined the cemetery, which was only declared safe again in 2006.
Personally, I don't consider mine fields to be fun, so I asked at the Synagogue and I took it on trust that the cemetery was safe and caught a cheap cab ride up the hill. Personally speaking, blowing one's self up can be a bummer. A lot of the hills surrounding Sarejevo are still dangerous for hiking, due to the thousands of antipersonnel and land mines laid during the 1990s. A majority of the stones in the Grbavica cemetery were damaged or destroyed during the siege, but restoration efforts are being made - the priority, however, is for the living.
After a long walk downhill it was time for lunch. We passed a lot of Americans in suits in the downtown area and I wondered if Obama was in town for some kind of meeting - I would have loved to take him to Zeljo's for some meat. But it was only Joe Biden, and I didn't see him at any of our Bascarsija hangouts so the Vice Dude just missed out on the good stuff. No, I did not eat the cevapi for every single meal in Sarajevo... although that would be easy for me to do. For the sake of variety, we chose a famous stew and soup house, an Ascinica in the old town.
I ordered the bamija, an okra and veal stew, while Fumie went for a plate of meat-stuffed everything: stuffed peppers, stuffed grape leaves, stuffed zucchini, all served with soft and puffy somun bread. As much care and heritage was evident in this meal as in any of the famous cevapdzinicas we tried.
Finished it off with a Bosnian coffee and a kadaif. Bosnia is proud baklava country, but the kadaif - a noodle version of baklava - was almost like a pudding of nuts and noods swimming in syrup.
