Sarajevo had been dreaming of it for 15 years: a moist, dense cube of thin pastry and hazelnut cream, skilfully layered, then drizzled with chocolate glaze by the master patissiers of the Jadranka bakery.
The pastry shop was a Sarajevo landmark, and so was its signature ”Bohem” cake.
Boarded up when war erupted in 1992 and the Bosnian capital came under siege, Jadranka was lamented but never forgotten.
When it reopened last week, it was instantly mobbed by nostalgic customers lining up for the taste of their childhood, a time before the three-year war divided Bosnians into Muslims, Serbs and Croats, leaving no room for simple pleasures.
”It’s unbelievable. Every day people come to congratulate me, to thank me. Some of them are crying,” said Aleksandar Bukvic (58), who returned from Canada to his old place at the same corner where his parents welcomed customers every day since 1956.
The shop, in the Grbavica part of the city, has been renovated, but the staff are the same. They are working round the clock to meet the demand, constantly serving up cakes to the smiling customers, who chat cheerfully in patient queues.
”I craved Bohems from Jadranka when I was pregnant in New Zealand,” said Biljana Meduric, visiting relatives in her native Sarajevo for the summer. ”I tried others but they just did not have the same taste.”
Other big hits are Jadranka’s own-recipe walnut cake, a staple of Sarajevo children’s birthday parties for decades, and the Shamponez, a round, flaky pastry filled with chocolate and hazelnut, with an inviting dot of pink fondant at the top.
”I cannot believe my eyes,” cried Branka Kovacevic, shocked that her schoolmate Bukvic came back. ”We were always buying cakes in Jadranka as children, then sent our own children.”
The recipes have been in the family for years. Bukvic’s father was an apprentice to German pastry masters in the Serbian province of Vojvodina before World War II. The secrets of the sweet treats of the Austro-Hungarian empire moved with him to Sarajevo where he opened his own shop, then passed on to his children.
Jadranka shut down in April 1992, when Bosnian Serb forces occupied Grbavica and the shooting started. During the grim, 43-month siege of the city, the area became a byword for the killing, rape and torture of Sarajevo’s non-Serb population.
But the memory of Jadranka remained, and for years people explained where they live in Grbavica with the shop as reference point, even though it was by then just an empty shell.
The city is now Muslim-dominated as many local Serbs and Croats left for areas where they are the majority. But Bukvic, an ethnic Serb, said it was natural for him to return to Sarajevo, a multi-ethnic city for centuries.
”I think that people here also appreciate that a Serb from Sarajevo returned here, where he belongs, and not to Banja Luka or some other Serb-dominated town,” he said.
His customers agree. ”Now there is hope for Sarajevo,” one delighted woman said at the opening. — Reuters