Survival Map

One red line around the city once and for all explained what 'a town under siege' meant.

Some events in our lives elicit our hidden talents, which, under different circumstances, would be quite unnecessary. It so happened that we, as observers and participants of the phenomenon of the besieged city, realized that we could identify the specific needs of the time. That is how the map of the besieged city was created by carefully observing events.

The uniqueness of this map, among attempts to visualize history, is also due to the uniqueness of the Sarajevo experience. At the end of the twentieth century, a European city came under the longest siege in the history of warfare. The „Survival Map“, which was published in 1996, was created based on documents and photographs taken during the siege in order to produce an image of the altered geography of a city that had been isolated from the rest of the world for four years under the constant eye of the world media. As a unique historical document, the map found its way into map collections worldwide.

The map contains all the details of survival, describing also how facilities essential for every city managed to function. The map shows secret passages, tunnels, and special corridors invented to enable personal movement around the town, given its exposure to sniper fire all day long. The map shows the city which replaced its parks with vegetable gardens, its rose gardens with corn fields, electricity with medieval lamps and central heating with hand-made stoves, and tap water with water from canisters filled only at a few places in town, personal recreation was replaced with running under sniper fire, caloric food with plants from window gardens, television with the art of conversation, and art was turned into resistance to terrorism.

When future generations start to research this phenomenon and the period of disintegration of Yugoslavia, this map will make it easy to understand the city's geography and its limitations during the siege. Later on, all these projects demonstrated our chosen method as the key for documenting events, if they are to serve as a valuable contribution to the interpretation of and learning about the 1991-1999 period in the former Yugoslavia.