Introducing Bosnia to My Granddaughter

Not as a tourist, but as a way of life — and wondering if I can get it right

There’s something quietly unsettling about time when you stop and really look at it.

In a few weeks’ time, my granddaughter Alice is coming to stay with us here in northern Bosnia. She’s 19 now. The last time she was here, she was four.

Thats fifteen years.

That’s not a gap you bridge with a cup of coffee and a quick chat. That’s a lifetime, really, hers just beginning, mine already well into its later chapters.

And I’ve found myself wondering… how do you start again?

I was sitting in my little studio this morning, looking out at grey skies that haven’t quite decided whether they belong to winter or spring. The kind of weather that slows everything down. And it was in that stillness that the thought landed.

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Am I going to be able to pull this off?

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It sounds like a simple visit. Granddaughter comes to see her grandfather. Two weeks together. Some travel, a lot of food, some photos?

But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like something more delicate.

Life here in Bosnia and Herzegovina has its own rhythm. It’s not something you can explain easily to be honest. You have to feel it. The slower pace. The small routines. The way a day unfolds without much urgency.

It’s taken me years to settle into that rhythm. Years to understand it, and more importantly, to stop resisting it.

But how do you show that to someone who’s 19?

Someone whose life has been shaped somewhere else. In a different country, a different culture, a different speed entirely.

What I do know is this:

• I don’t want to overwhelm her.

• I don’t want to underwhelm her either.

• I just want her to leave with a feeling.

That this quiet, often misunderstood corner of the world, has something real about it.

If you were in my position… what would you do?

Would you plan everything?

Or would you let it unfold, slowly, the way life tends to do here?

I’d be genuinely interested in your thoughts on this.