THE WORD Konjic, pronounced “Konyitz,” means “the little horse” in Bosnian, and the Bosnian town of Konjic, set among green mountains and virgin forests in the valley of the river Neretva, was one of the loveliest I had ever seen, when I first visited it in 1991. I was riding a bus from Dubrovnik on the Dalmatian coast to Sarajevo, when three teenaged girls came aboard, heading a little way up the road. They were beautiful, wearing headscarves, and one of them sat next to me. I asked her, in my halting Slavic (more Russian than anything else, then), the name of the place, and her voice was divine as she said, “Konjic.” I spoke no more, and, of course, never saw her again. Later I supposed they must have been Muslim girls, and I mourned when I heard that terrible massacres had taken place in the town at the onset of the Bosnian war, the following year.

After the war, I began traveling regularly through Konjic, by car and bus as well as by train; the Bosnian rail system switches coaches there, and as an old railroader myself I was impressed, if negatively, to see the macho way the Bosnians worked coupling cars together, standing between the tracks in total disregard of their personal safety. Communism–protector of the workers, I thought bitterly. But there were other sources of sadness as well. Passing through so many times, I couldn’t miss the broken minaret on one of the mosques, ruined by shell-fire. It’s been a long time rebuilding, but that is another story.