Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

November 2021.

After four solid days in the Bosnian capital, Sladja and I wanted a change of pace. An afternoon out in nature, and for fresh air, tranquillity and a piece of history we could find nowhere else, we settled on 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 walked up from our apartment near Kovači Cemetery to the Trebevićka žičara, The Sarajevo cable car, 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 wreck for twenty-six years, it finally reopened in 2018.

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 gunners on these slopes, hard to believe the shells had come from this quiet ridge. Yet for four long years Trebević was a mountain Sarajevans could only look at.

The upper station (Vidikovac) is named after Ramo Biber, the cable car’s forty-two-year-old guardian, killed at his post on 2 March 1992. According to some historians, he was the first person killed in the Siege of Sarajevo. His body

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.

We set off down a 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 1978, its planners immediately hit an awkward problem. Bobsleigh and luge are different sports with different needs. A bob is heavy and wants wide, sweeping curves, while a luge is light and requires something tighter and trickier. Host cities had often built a run for each.

Trebević Mountain.

Sarajevo’s engineers did something cleverer. They built one track that both sports could share, with separate start houses set at different heights up the mountain. 1,300 metres for the bobs, 1,210 for the luges, thirteen curves for both. By the close of the Olympics it was rated among the best in the world.

The complex sprawls across fifty-one hectares of Trebević’s northern hillside. A scatter of buildings stands in ruins along the route: start houses, a finish house, viewing points and a press centre.

Wild grass, creeping vines and saplings have taken the lot, pushing up through the concrete and over the banked walls.

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. A year on, at the Games themselves, over 30,000 people packed the slopes for the bobsleigh; around twenty thousand for the luge.

Trebević: Hiking the Sarajevo Olympic Bobsled Track.

None of that was easy to summon as we strolled down the track. With nobody else in sight, it was just us and the birds and what came after 1984.

What happened next is why a lot of 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 knocked holes through the concrete, and for four years men fired down on the streets from the run that had carried Olympic crews.

With that in our heads 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 see anyone that day, locals use the track for hiking, dog-walking, skating and cycling.

The track has also become a pilgrimage site for graffiti artists. Not all of it is pretty. Plenty of charmless tagging, the odd swear word and the occasional mindless slur. But for anyone who keeps a curious eye open, there’s also work 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 is by a Portuguese artist, Nuno Costah. Born in Porto in 1983, he splits his time between street art, illustration, tattooing and music, and is well enough established that cities commission him.

We paused at a large split-face portrait signed Endo and Jang. On the left, a gaunt face with bared teeth and one hollow eye, caught mid-snarl. On the right, a cartoonish green figure with a lolling pink tongue and a yellow quiff, grinning: cheerful, though 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, the sliding golds went overwhelmingly to East Germany. The GDR arrived at Trebević at the peak of their powers and took three of the five titles on offer, including a clean sweep of all three medals in the women’s luge.

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 in the coming weeks. Look out for my review of Sarajevo’s Olympic Museum in next week’s post. 

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