Auditing in Banja Luka & Sarajevo, Bosnia

Tuesday morning bright and early we started from Varazdin to Bosnia Hersgovina to fulfill some of our auditing responsibilities.  Our first stop was the border crossing at Jasenovac, Bosnia, where we crossed in 5 minutes. After a hint from President Bradford of the Banja Luka Branch, we found this small not often used border crossing station. What a relief after the crossing last time into Serbia, which was a 2.5 hours wait.

Banja Luka, Bosnia LDS Branch is also small in membership but housed in a 4 story building. The Church takes up the first two floors.

I was jealous of their five family history computers....I'm on a mission now to get at least one for our members in Varazdin.




We had lunch with the Senior Bradfords along the Vrbus River, walked through the fortress and took off for another 5 hours drive through the countryside of Bosnia, heading to Sarajevo, our planned stop for the night.

What beautiful countryside.  We took the mountain road, which at times was a little harrowing, but worth the amazing vistas and deep gorges.

We arrived in Sarajevo at about 7 pm and were able to find our hotel after only one drive by and u-turn!  Thankfully we had selected a hotel which offered free parking since parking on the street is almost impossible to find.

We found the Sarajevo LDS Branch just as they were finishing a music program put on by their 2 sets of missionaries...Sisters & Elders. They had a large crowd of people there to enjoy, young and old, members and investigators and friends.  It certainly looked like a thriving branch.  We were happy to visit with Elder Smith, who was our first Elder-son in the mission.  He transferred to Bosnia a couple of transfers ago and is loving Sarajevo.

The Newton's (Senior couple) gave us a very warm welcome. The audit went great and we thankfully checked into our hotel. The Rainbow Hotel.
We were excited to find we were on the top floor and had a 180 degree roof top view of the city.  It was beautiful and even more spectacular the next night when it started to lightening, thunder and rain over the whole city.


Next morning we met up with Pres. & Sister Newton and went for a short tour of the downtown area, the open international market, and had lunch with local fare. They treated us to a film festival movie, and then we hopped in the car for a longer tour of the area.  We were able to see where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, which started WWI took place and other historic sites. We traveled out of the city, up into the mountains surrounding the town and it became obvious that Sarajevo is in the bottom of a bowl with mountains on all four sides. It was on top of these mountains that the Serbs set up their rocket launchers and fired down upon Sarajevo.

From wiki:  The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. After being initially besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People's Army, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 (1,425 days) during the Bosnian War. Nearly 13,000 of it's people were killed.  

We walked through an old hotel that had been used as a bunker site on top of the hill and now totally in ruins. 

















On a happier note, we walked along the bobsled cement run that was used in the Winter Olympics in 1984. The city is now modern and people of all kinds and nationality, religion and color flock there.  Our missionaries all say the best party about serving there is not knowing which religion a person believes in, if any, when they first start to talk to them.




                     Beautiful countryside around Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzgovina