Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

November, 2021.

After four solid days exploring the Bosnian capital, Sladja and I decided it was high time for a change of pace. An afternoon out in nature would be just the ticket, and for fresh air, tranquility and some fabulously unique history besides, we looked no further than Trebević Mountain.

Sarajevo is a city that lives in a bowl. Wherever you stand in the old Ottoman quarter, with its coppersmiths and coffee steam, you feel the mountains leaning in over the rooftops. Trebević is the closest of them, rising to 1,629 metres just south of the centre. One clear afternoon we set off on a walk from our apartment near Kovači Cemetery all the way up to Trebevićka žičara, The Sarajevo Cable Car. It took a brisk twenty minutes.

The Trebevićka žičara has been carrying Sarajevans up this mountain, on and off, since 1959. Destroyed in the 1990s siege and left as a rusting scar for twenty-six years, it finally reopened in 2018.

That day we climbed aboard one of its thirty-three gondolas and up we went, the city rooftops soon giving way to pines. It was an idyllic autumnal afternoon, the sky a pale, placid blue.

Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

The ride lasted about eight minutes, everything below us perfectly still. It was hard to picture Bosnian Serb gunners on these slopes, this quiet ridge the place the shells once came from. Yet for four long years Trebević was a mountain Sarajevans could only look at, never climb.

One touching detail that is easy to miss: the upper station (Vidikovac) is named after Ramo Biber, the cable car’s 42 year old guardian, killed on 2 March 1992. According to some historians, he was the first victim of the aggression on Sarajevo.

Setting foot on the mountain, we were full of anticipation. Few walks anywhere take you down the inside of an abandoned Olympic bobsled track. This one, built for the Winter Games of 1984, has been left to the forest.

The autumnal glory of the mountain was an immediate delight as we set off down the leaf-strewn trail.

Within ten minutes we were onto it, quite suddenly: a great grey channel curving away, its walls banked high on either side. When Sarajevo won the Games in 1977, its planners immediately hit an awkward problem. Bobsleigh and luge are different sports with different needs. A bobsleigh is heavy and wants wide, sweeping curves, while a luge is light and requires something tighter and trickier. Traditionally, cities would build a separate track for each discipline.

Trebević Mountain.

In contrast, Sarajevo’s engineers did something cleverer. They built one track that both sports could share, steepening the gradient to keep it challenging enough for the fast bobs. It ran to around 1,300 metres with thirteen curves, and by the close of the Olympics was rated one of the best in the world.

The track covers fifty-one hectares of Trebević’s northern hillside. There are a scatter of buildings, now all in ruins, including start houses, a finish house, viewing points and a press centre.

Everything has been claimed by nature, the buildings and the sides of the track consumed by wild grass, creeping vines and saplings that have pushed up through the concrete.

In January 1983, prior to the Games, the track hosted its first real competition, the European Bobsleigh Championships. The sport’s international federations judged Sarajevo’s pioneering course fast, safe and technically demanding, a track that punished any lapse in concentration. Later, when the Olympics themselves came around, over thirty thousand people packed the slopes for the bobsleigh; around twenty thousand for the luge.

Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

It was hard to imagine those scenes that afternoon as we strolled down the track. With no other people in sight, it was just us and the sound of the birds as we considered the weight of history. Especially the history that followed the 1984 games.

What happened next is the main reason people climb up here. In 1992, Bosnian Serb forces took the mountain and its famous track. Those banked bobsleigh curves served as ready-made bunkers: sunken, reinforced and angled at the city. Gunmen then knocked holes through the concrete walls to shoot from, and for four years the run that had once hosted celebratory sledding events instead poured fire onto the streets below.

With flashes of that horror flickering in our minds, we pushed on with the hike, taking comfort from the leaf litter, pine needles and light coming through the trees in warm bars. Although we didn’t witness it that day, locals use the track not only for hiking and dog-walking, but for skating and cycling.

Moreover, the track has become a pilgrimage site for graffiti artists. Not all of it is pretty; there is plenty of charmless tagging, the odd swear word and the occasional mindless slur. But for anyone who keeps a curious eye open, there is also work here from some of the most respected muralists in the Balkans.

An Open-air Canvas.

What makes the track such a draw for painters is simple: up here, you can work freely. There are no fences, no guards, no surveillance cameras. Artists return again and again to touch up old work and add new pieces, so no two visits are ever quite the same.

This anti-war mural, for example, is by a Portuguese artist, Nuno Costah. Born in Porto in 1982, he splits his time between street art, illustration, tattooing and music, and is well enough established that cities invite him to paint commissioned murals.

We also paused to take in a large split-face portrait, signed Endo and Jang. On the left, a gaunt, grimacing face with bared teeth and hollow eye is caught mid-snarl. On the right, a cartoonish green figure with a lolling pink tongue and a yellow quiff grins; cheerful, albeit unhinged. Endo is a street artist active across Serbia and Bosnia, known for expressive, emotionally charged faces. His collaborator, who may be Macedonian according to several online sources, signs simply as Jang.

As for the events themselves back in 1984, the haul of gold medals belonged almost entirely to East Germany. The GDR’s sledders arrived at Trebević at the peak of their powers and left with nearly every title the mountain had to offer.

Trebević: Hiking Sarajevo’s 1984 Olympic Bobsled Track.

The bobsleigh belonged to one crew. Wolfgang Hoppe and Dietmar Schauerhammer won the two-man event, then took the four-man title as well alongside two teammates. So the pair walked away with two golds each from a single Games.

Photo courtesy of Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0322-006 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

In the women’s luge, Steffi Martin took gold, the first of what would be two consecutive Olympic titles. The men’s doubles luge went to the West Germans Hans Stangassinger and Franz Wembacher.

Photo courtesy of gala.de.

By the time we made our way back up to the station the sun was already low, sliding gold through the pines and catching the last yellow leaves along the track.

Sarajevo lay spread out far below as we climbed into a gondola and swung out over the treetops. Within a minute the city had risen to meet us, closer and louder with every metre of descent. 

It had perhaps been our favourite day in Sarajevo so far, and yet there was still so much to explore. Rest assured, those adventures will find their way onto these pages. Look out for my review of Sarajevo’s Olympic Museum in next week’s post. 

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