Sarajevo is not one of the great European capitals. Its population stood at no more than 600,000 before the 1992–95 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, and the effects of the long siege left it with half that. Peace has restored its population by a third, to 400,000, but it is a provincial center where the streets seem empty half the time—a De Chirico painting with mosques, perhaps —and where everybody seems to know one another.

But old Sarajevans, or Sarajlije, as they are known (the term is of Turkish origin), complain that today they do not recognize their neighbors. Too many real Sarajevo folk, they insist, fled to Germany, the U.S., and other places of refuge, leaving the city to a different set of refugees: Muslim peasants expelled from the towns of eastern Bosnia that remain within the so-called “Serb Republic” (Republika Srpska or R.S.) The Sarajlije sneer at these unfortunates, calling them papci or hil ...

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