The smell of coffee brewing in copper džezvas, the sound of turquoise rivers running beneath Ottoman bridges and the endless consumption of fresh ćevapi was what stayed with me after my visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2024. 

When travelling across Europe, Bosnia often skips bucket lists and is overlooked in favour of the more familiar destinations. Yet the country has much to offer beyond its history – things that aren’t confined to museums but embedded in cobbled streets and daily life.

31 years after the Srebrenica genocide, survivors and their children are still carrying memories they cannot forget. But they also want people to know the country that existed before the war, and the one that continues despite it. 

The largest genocide on European soil since the Second World War took place in Srebrenica in July 1995, when Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys. International courts have recognised the massacre as genocide. Across the Bosnian War between 1992 and 1995, nearly 100,000 people were killed, more than two million displaced and between 20,000 and 50,000 women subjected to systematic sexual violence. More than 40,000 people were reported missing and over 3,000 mass graves have been uncovered since 1995. 

“At five years old I understood that there were people who wanted to kill me and my family,” recalls Melisa Mujkanović, a child survivor of the genocide.

“My mother protected me and my sister under the weight of her own body from continuous shelling above us,” she tells me. “She cut our hair so that we looked like boys to protect us from the Serbian soldiers who were raping women and young girls.”

Mujkanović remembers running to her grandmother’s house with her sister and mum as bullets fell from the sky, bouncing off the pavement. “I was really tired and as we were running up the hill, I stopped and said ‘I can’t run anymore, they can kill me, just let them kill me.’ My mum turned around, grabbed me and said I had to keep going.”

Along with her mum and sister, Mujkanović was separated from her father and detained in the Trnopolje concentration camp. Her father survived the Omarska, Keraterm and Trnopolje concentration camps and was later reunited with him a year later in England, upon discovering that he was alive when he appeared on the news. 

“For child survivors like myself, the genocide stole our childhoods. Even when we came to England as asylum seekers we had to assimilate very quickly to a different society, language and life. That is also on top of not discussing what we just experienced.” 

Mujkanović did not ever sit down with her family and talk about the genocide. There was an expectation that the trauma would be suppressed and life would carry on. It was only when Mujkanović was 16 she decided she wanted to deliver a talk for GCSE about her experience during the genocide. 

That was the start of her speaking about her testimonies.

“Genocides begin long before killing when discrimination and intolerance becomes acceptable in society and when misinformation replaces the truth.”

For many Bosnian families, survival didn’t end when the war ended. Trauma settled into homes and parenting, becoming something inherited as much as remembered. 

“Growing up as a child who’s separated from the experiences that my parents and sisters went through, I feel like I have a sort of responsibility towards them, kind of like an imposter syndrome, but not.” 

Amina Mekić explains the generational trauma that has been passed on from her parents and how it has shaped her own life.

Mekić’s father was shot but survived whilst fighting on the frontline, organising troops in Sarajevo during the war. Her sister, Amra, was separated from her parents at the start of the war but was later led through the mountains to be reunited with her family a year later. 

In 1994, her parents and siblings were evacuated to Germany as medical evacuees and then later to England so that her father could undergo surgery for the shrapnel wounds.

“The metal in his chest moves around and you have to be ready to just drop everything and go to the hospital. The first time I had to deal with an episode, I was 17 and it was really scary.” 

As a second-generation living with family members who survived the war, the 25-year-old talks about the emotional process of understanding her parents’ experiences. She shares that there is a feeling of disconnect from her family’s history and the impact of the war on her upbringing.

“There’s a lot of guilt I feel. For example, when there’s food left over, my parents would say ‘well we went through a war and there was no food so eat the food on your plate’. So there’s some things that they do and there’s no other explanation other than they’re traumatised and that’s their way of coping with it.”

Mekić was very aware as a child. She remembers her mother getting a phone call from the concentration camp in Foča and her screaming. Two tiny bones of her maternal grandad were found. It was that moment when she realised that this isn’t a normal experience for children but somehow it was normal for them. 

Three decades on, genocide denial and historical revisionism continue to threaten to minimise or rewrite the atrocities in Srebrenica. Remembering and speaking truthfully about what happened remains vital to honouring those who can no longer speak for themselves.

“Bosnia is very much going through genocide denial, revisionism and taunting but I don’t want us to be framed as victims because we have risen out of something horrible,” she says. 

Rising above tragedy, however, does not mean leaving Bosnia behind. 

“Bosnia is more like a feeling than ‘go to the city, go do this’,” says Lejla Kevrić. “It’s a breath of fresh air with clear spring water.”

The 44-year-old moved to the UK from Brčko in 1992 at the beginning of the Bosnian war with her mother, father and brother. She remembers her parents bringing the culture and cuisine to the UK and implementing it in the household, emphasising the importance of preserving traditions.

For Kevrić, she wants people to understand Bosnia beyond its war. Including the crafts, textiles and the “understated” cuisine.

“The textiles, the woven carpets and the bronze crafts, these are the traditions which are integral,” she says. “But Bosnian is one of the most understated cuisines. We don’t do pretty food, but the level of skill involved in it is crazy.

“Especially the ćevapi. Everything else from Bosnia you can replicate, but that dish I’ve never had outside Bosnia that tastes good,” she adds. 

At a moment when questions of identity and historical memory are increasingly shaping travel experiences, Bosnia offers a particularly compelling case study. It is home to one of the continent’s oldest indigenous Muslim communities where Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav histories intertwined. Yet for many visitors, these stories remain overshadowed by narratives of war.  

“Despite all the horrors, Bosnian people are not bitter, they are seekers of justice,” says Kevrić. This was a common theme in what both Mujkanović and Mekić shared with me. 

Bosnian genocide survivors and their families continue to remind us why remembrance matters. Through their extraordinary courage in sharing their lived experiences, they have transformed personal loss into a powerful force for education. Like Mujkanović who shares her journey through teaching to now a lecturer at De Montfort University. Her motivation is to be a voice that inspires people in society as a whole. 

For Mekić, remembrance is working with Remembering Srebrenica, documenting her parents’ testimonies and her activism against injustices. And for Kevrić, it’s preserving the culture 

Bosnia is still mourning a genocide. That grief is woven into its landscape and into the lives of those who survived. Yet alongside that history is a country of remarkable beauty, resilience and generosity. One that deserves to be remembered not only for what was done to it, but for the life, culture and people that continues to flourish despite it.