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 hillbillies.

The film director Ademir Kenović, whose work includes the first postwar Bosnian feature, Perfect Circle(1997), grimaces when he hears such comments. He considers the urban dislike for the rural immigrants a form of racism. But Kenović (himself a native of the city) is a man of great generosity who cannot speak ill of anybody, while other Sarajlije sneer at many. Their sensibility, which seems borrowed in some part from the Vienna of a century past, when the Habsburgs ruled here as well, is generally cynical, impossible to please. This