Last night I watched a brilliant documentary, For the Love of Books: A Sarajevo Story, about a group of men and women who risked their lives to rescue and preserve a large and extremely valuable library collection - largely Islamic manuscripts – in an effort to protect the nation's history that lay between the pages of each book.
I was, quite frankly, embarrassed at my ignorance of what exactly happened during the Seige of Sarajevo in the early 1990s. The Seige was the longest seige of a capital city in modern history and saw 18000 Serbian troops fill the hills and rain bullets and bombs down on Sarajevo. Every time someone left their house they risked being shot dead by the snipers hiding in the burnt out buildings and overshadowing hills. In the midst of all this, thousands and thousands of books dating back over 900 years sat sheltered in Sarajevo's Gazi Husrav Beg Library that was founded back in 1537.
But like every other building in the city, the library was not safe and it took a handful of extremely brave and admirable men and women to protect the most important books and see them to safety. This involved putting their own lives in danger on a regular basis and the reconstruction film together with the real wartime footage shown in the documentary made my heart race. Truly terrifying, yet inspiring, this documentary follows the people who moved 10,000 irreplacable texts to safety while their city was under seige for nearly 4 brutal years.
Heart-pumping stuff. Definitely worth watching on BBC iplayer this week! Go go go!
No comments:
Post a Comment