How I Got Mugged In Sarajevo or A $2,000 Soccer Trip

Why I went to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I can’t say that I was an avid soccer fan…. But I tried not to miss the matches of my Ukrainian national soccer team. I was even happy to go to their matches in Ukraine and abroad.

Unfortunately, it has not been possible lately: a coronavirus and then the war. But it so happened that I was in Montenegro, and the national team had to play in neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I wanted to support my favorite team. So, as soon as the dates and venue were announced, I booked a hotel and bought game tickets.

I put all my affairs aside, packed my things into my car, and drove to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. Thus began the misadventures that would long define my attitude toward Bosnia, its people, and security in the Balkans in general.

It is worth mentioning that I have been to Bosnia before. In 2013, I went to Mostar as part of the Erasmus+ program. I worked on environmental issues in this godforsaken region. At the time, I liked this country. I realize now that we were relatively safe because of our status. But there is terrible poverty here, which leads to crime and inaction on the part of the local authorities.

But I didn’t know any of this at the time. The result was my reports on the city of Mostar itself, the capital Sarajevo, and a photo report Bosnia in Faces.

Road

The Beginning of the Journey

And so, 11 years later, in March of 2024, my girlfriend and I piled into a car and drove to the Bosnian border. Although “drove” is a strong word, of course. The roads in Montenegro are quite good, but they are narrow, and the terrain makes you drive very carefully and slowly.

Another surprise was the closure of the highway through which our Google Navigator had led us. The traffic on one of the key sections, which could not be bypassed in less than 3 hours, was staggered for several hours a day due to major road repairs.

The map showed an alternate route from Google. It would make us go back for an hour and a half, then spend the same time in Sarajevo via Mostar. I didn’t see much sense in it because, after an hour and a half, the traffic on this section was open. Why waste extra fuel?

By the way, there was an attempt to drive on a secondary road. OpenStreetMap showed it. But Google refused to plot a route to a neighboring country along it. Once again, I trusted the American creation. After a few weeks at home, I checked the border database. The checkpoint was there and working. Using Google Maps for navigation in Montenegro is unreliable. It updates slowly and not very often. The crowdsourced platform OpenStreetMap and services based on it are much better. I usually use it for hiking and biking, but it can often be useful for driving here as well.

First obstacles

8 km from the Bosnia border, I heard an unpleasant noise. It was like the sound of a flat tire, thanks to the “wonderful” roads in Ukraine, a few dozen kilometers from the border with Hungary.

I stopped and checked; everything seemed to be fine. I concluded that a stone got between the wheel and the undercarriage; it happens. Especially here, there are a lot of rocks rolling down from the mountains onto the roads.

We waited about 15 minutes to make sure the tire was okay… And somewhere inside of me, something said, “This is a sign. You shouldn’t go there.” But no, stubborn me. I got out my camera, took some pictures of the surrounding mountains, and drove to the checkpoint.

The border guards displayed unexpected politeness, including the Montenegrin one. My mood was slightly lifted. At dusk, we entered Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the dark, we took the mountain passes and serpentines to Sarajevo.

On one of these passes, fate again began to hinder my progress. A huge lumber truck, overloaded with greed, couldn’t climb a steep, winding road. It caused a massive traffic jam on a rarely used road.

After about 30 minutes, the logging truck dumped part of the forest on the side of the road and crawled forward to make room for us to pass. Despite fate, we drove on and reached Sarajevo around 20:00.

Finally in Sarajevo!

Here we booked an apartment right in the center. The horrible Booking service, which I’m trying to avoid, showed a parking lot. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have booked this hole. But the lot was a kilometer and a half away. It was a paid lot for 30 euros.

A small Bosnian man was walking near the apartment. It was as if he were waiting for us on purpose. He was not afraid to walk under the CCTV cameras. He was sure the hotel staff would not show him the footage later. (The hotel helped the criminal escape.)

You may believe I am extremely naive and stupid if you continue reading my story. But so relaxed after the same neighboring Croatia, where we left windows open and cars at night, so that the air was not so stuffy….. Or Montenegro, where after decades there are relay cabinets on abandoned objects… And tired… That we fell for it like idiots.

A meeting with a thief…

So this guy runs up to the car and asks what we’re looking for. I said Hotel So-and-So. He informs us with a bright smile that the hotel is right here and leads us to the door. But there’s nowhere to park the car. But we can always do it in the courtyard of his apartment building. He says, “Here are a few free spaces; you can park there.”

I guess I should have sensed something was wrong. The bastard repeated three times that it was safe to park here. The phrase “dangerous parking” has been out of my mind for a long time. In Ukraine, this kind of theft has seen a significant decline due to martial law and curfews.

But how tired we were. That we just parked the car under the apartment building, took our suitcases and went to the apartments…

And gifts for him

I left my old Xiaomi Redmi 8T phone, which was my navigation device, in the car. I used to keep it out of sight, but here I left it in the cabin…. Also, under the seat was a backpack. It held my favorite travel camera, a Nikon D5100, and a DJI Osmo Mobile 6 stabilizer. It was at the bottom, under the junk. And the junk was a bunch of winter and semi-seasonal clothes. They were in the back seat due to the unpredictable spring weather here.

Remember! Never leave important, valuable items in the passenger compartment of your car. They can be stolen with little effort, and insurance does not cover such situations!

Theft

Back at the hotel, we passed out and only had time to order Glovo with local shawarma. We ate and went straight to bed. We had a busy day ahead of us. In the morning, I planned to do a series of photo reports on Sarajevo, while the girl would work on her laptop. And then lunch and soccer. That’s how we imagined it. But…

I woke up in the morning, collected some local money (Bosnian convertible marks), and went to pick up the car. As I approached it, I realized that something was wrong. Broken glass covered everything around the car. But I didn’t want to believe until the last minute that it was my Golf’s window.

Thieves smashed the driver’s side window at night and broke into the car. They took everything they could: equipment, clothes, even a 50-cent vest. In other words, they were complete scum, lost to society, with nothing else to do in their lives but take other people’s stuff.

Police

I asked the Bosnian maid to call the police. To be honest, even before the police arrived, I knew how to find the criminals in a short amount of time. It was enough not to miss at least a few lectures on criminalistics in law school. It was clear how they came and went. It was clear that this guy was their accomplice. There was information on the apartment hotel cameras where he’d shown his face. It wasn’t hard to find them. If you’ve worked in police work at this level, you know they always know who’s doing the deeds in the neighborhood and where the stolen goods are being sold.

Again, I did not take into account the local mental. In my country, tourists are rare. There is an unspoken rule to make them comfortable. That is, if a tourist is robbed, it’s a simple matter to drag a local hawker and return the stolen goods to the foreigner.

The police came here, made a fuss, asked what was stolen and left… They told me to pick up the insurance papers at the station. They didn’t even ask me for a contact phone number; they didn’t write down the IMEI of the stolen device. So it is clear that no one is looking for anything, and if they find it, they will sell it themselves.

I wasn’t in the mood to deal with it. I was extremely upset. Someone stole what I had earned for months. Most of all, I was offended by the denim jacket. It was no longer produced because the local Ukrainian brand had ceased to exist.

Fixing the car

I wanted to leave and never return to this cesspool. Throughout the day, I searched for a place to buy car glass on my day off and someone who could install it in half an hour. So I spent the whole day looking for glass for my car. After a few hours, I was able to buy it at a junkyard and then found a service to install it.

At the first address I was given, there was no glass for my car. At the second address, there was no master until the next day.

After driving for a couple of hours in a car with no window and falling shards of glass (as if I had just stolen it), I found a garage where a technician could do the job. After a little more driving, I was offered the part itself for 30 Euros at one of the car junkyards.

By the way, if you need spare parts for your car somewhere in Bosnia, I can tell you that you can easily find them at the car dealership Reljevo at the following address Reljevska 46, Sarajevo 71160 (координаты — 43.88566325008922, 18.316273477128814).

After the quest, I sat in the car. The heater was warm, so I didn’t need a hat on the road. I drove back in search of paid parking.

When we got back to the center, we packed our things and decided to leave a day early. I didn’t want to stay here, especially not to leave my car in the same place where it was stolen yesterday.

I wrote to the hotel, thinking they would help my security find the perpetrators by providing surveillance video. They promised to do so, but even after a few months, they did nothing. So they let the criminals sell the stolen goods and get away with it. Which is ugly, to say the least. I mean, what was easier, to show the security footage of the criminal who robbed your guest?

After half an hour of walking around the center, we ate and took some pictures with the old Soviet “Lubitel 166 Universal,” which the thieves did not steal. Then, we went home, wanting to leave inhospitable Bosnia as soon as possible.

We drove through the night and arrived home in Montenegro at 3 a.m. The only good thing was that the Ukrainian team, whose match we missed, defeated the Bosnian team. This ended the Bosnians’ chance to qualify for the 2024 European Championship.

The takeaway from this story

What conclusions can we draw? First, never leave anything of value in the car. In civilized countries, you can relax. And then you reach a place where someone will steal even a vest worth less than a dollar from AliExpress.

Second, I held the common stereotype that Muslim countries were less prone to theft. Someone robbed my car in the Muslim part of Sarajevo.

Of course, we will still go to Bosnia and Herzegovina. I want to give this country a chance to rehabilitate itself. There are so many wonderful places to see!