So picture this: you’re counting down the days to a Christmas trip. The packing list is ready, the gifts are wrapped, but there’s one thing you can’t stop doing: refreshing the weather forecast. Each time you check, the picture gets grimmer. Snowstorms curling across Mount Vlašić, the kind of storms where the sky and ground blur into one blinding swirl. You start to wonder if the rental car you booked is really up to the task, or if you should call the agency and plead for four-wheel drive.
Somewhere in the middle of these frantic Google searches, the algorithm gets clever. It decides you must want everything in your media feed to be Bosnia-themed. Suddenly, your news suggestions looked like a Balkan buffet: politics, culture, and, unexpectedly, a Sarajevo Times headline about a new smoking ban in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
A Pause for History
Why would a smoking ban spark so much chatter? To answer that, you have to understand how Bosnia’s politics function (or, perhaps more accurately, how they stumble along).
Back in Ottoman times, society was divided into “millets”, or communities defined by religion. Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics were each governed within their own group.
Fast-forward to today, and you see an echo of that system. Bosnia’s constitution, written after the war in the 1990s, created a three-member presidency split among Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs. In theory, it was a way to guarantee representation for everyone. In practice, it’s a system that prioritizes group identity over individual citizenship. You are first a Bosniak, Croat, or Serb only after that are you a citizen of the state.
Hovering above all this is Christian Schmidt, the international overseer. His job is to step in when the three leaders lock horns. He is both referee and reminder: Bosnia is still under international supervision nearly three decades after the war ended. And so, when a public health reform like a smoking ban makes headlines, it isn’t just about clean air. It becomes a symbol of Bosnia’s uneasy balancing act, caught between its historical legacies of division and the European Union’s expectations of modern governance.
Back to the Trip
With all that in mind, walking into a restaurant in Travnik became a strangely political moment. I was bracing myself for the familiar scene: a waiter taking my order between puffs of smoke. And sure enough, that part hadn’t changed. The waiter smoked, the customers smoked, everyone smoked. What had changed were the walls: they were plastered with “No Smoking” signs, as liberally as they would be in Canada. It might sound like a small change, but it really isn’t, because Travnik is not a place that leans on signage to begin with.
Normally, there are no glossy health posters, no aggressive ads about what’s on sale, and no parking meters. Instead, there’s still a man with a coin pouch who wanders the lots, collecting change! Signage exists mostly in the form of shop names and the occasional quirky ad taped to a wall. It’s not chaotic; it’s relaxed, almost charming in its simplicity. You don’t need a sign to tell you grapes are on sale (if you want grapes, you just buy grapes). That kind of common-sense humour makes daily life feel refreshingly un-choreographed, which is why the sudden flood of “No Smoking” posters felt so absurd.
And the reality only got funnier the longer I looked around. People still smoked in cafés, on sidewalks, and even in uniform. At one point, I saw police officers and an actual member of the army smoking indoors, framed perfectly in a café window. I couldn’t stop laughing. The law was present in print, but absent in reality.
A Museum and an Elephant
My curiosity about this new ‘law’ hung in the air, but so did the season. The town in winter is breathtaking. Snow gathers on the tiled roofs, narrow streets curve between houses painted in fading pastels, and the sound of the nearby river carries through the cold air. Wandering through Travnik, you will stumble across its quieter landmarks, and one of the most striking is the home of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivo Andrić, now a museum.
Inside, I picked up a copy of The Vizier and the Elephant. At first glance, it seems like a quaint local tale, but Andrić never writes anything without layers. His story places an elephant in Travnik, a town that had never seen such a creature. The sudden arrival of this enormous animal throws the townspeople into confusion. They argue over what it means, fear it, romanticize it, and project onto it. The elephant becomes less an animal and more a metaphor that has stayed relevant across the centuries.
And this is where my earlier detour into laws that exist only on paper folds back in. The elephant works the same way: something large, official, and impossible to ignore, yet oddly disconnected from lived reality. Just as “No Smoking” signs wallpapered every café without changing the fact that waiters, police, and even soldiers still smoked indoors, the elephant is a presence that reshapes how people talk and think (but not necessarily how they live lol).
It’s hard not to see the metaphor. Bosnia’s three ethnic groups, bound together in a rigid system, are like that elephant. It’s heavy, misunderstood, and always at the center of dispute. The elephant’s fate mirrors the frustration of a political order that still struggles to move beyond old divisions.
And then, circling back again, there is Christian Schmidt. He plays the modern keeper of this metaphorical elephant, mediating disputes that go nowhere, tending to a system more invested in balancing identities than empowering individuals. In that light, even the smoking ban feels like part of the same performance: at once progressive, yet oddly hollow.
So why did I mention the waiter’s cigarette, the police puffing away in uniform, Christian Schmidt, and (of course) the grapes that never go on sale 🙄 ? Because they are the texture of everyday life in Travnik. Andrić shows how the grand structures of history and politics slip into the corners of daily experience. By noticing these details, you start to see how Bosnia’s struggles are written into its ordinary rhythms.
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And if you do pick up The Vizier and the Elephant, let me know. I’d love to hear your the ways you perceived the metaphorical elephant!
Some things don’t vanish easily. Not smoke, not history, and certainly not the elephant in the room.
