Koševo Hospital

Koševo Hospital is the overcrowded hospital in besieged Sarajevo that Lorenzo Quart remembers during a later intimate encounter. Its corridors, crowded with the injured and lacking both electricity and medicine, make the surrounding war’s daily toll tangible; the hospital belongs to a city where burial grounds had run out of space and the dead were laid in football fields.

Setting and Wartime Conditions

In August 1992, Quart traveled to Sarajevo to mediate the evacuation of Archbishop Franjo Pavelic, a Croatian prelate valued by Pope Wojtyla and threatened by both Bosnian Muslims and Serbs. The city was experiencing twenty or thirty deaths a day and hundreds of injuries. At Koševo Hospital, those casualties were piled in the corridors without light or medication, while bombs fell on queues for water and bread.

The hospital’s overcrowding was part of a wider collapse of ordinary provision and burial. Cemeteries had no ground left, and victims were buried in football fields. The brief reference to Koševo thus links medical scarcity to the city’s larger condition: injury and death had become routine, while even the institutions meant to receive the wounded were strained beyond capacity.

Quart’s Mission and the Hospital’s Context

Quart’s mission was to secure the archbishop’s passage to Zagreb without his being shot at a street checkpoint, as Pavelic’s vicar, Archbishop Jesic, had already been killed by a sniper. Quart carried 100,000 German marks aboard a United Nations helicopter, the case chained to his wrist, under the escort of French peacekeepers. The money persuaded the opposing sides to allow the evacuation. Koševo Hospital is not the destination of that mission, but the account places the negotiation within the same lethal landscape that filled its corridors.

The memory returns through Quart’s recollection of Jasmina, a woman he met in Sarajevo. She survived by offering interpretation to journalists and diplomats at the Holiday Inn and sometimes exchanging more than words; in that city, her price could be a tin of food or a packet of cigarettes. She approached Quart because of his clerical dress, describing a disabled father without tobacco amid war and hunger. Quart promised provisions, and she returned that night dressed in black to avoid snipers.

The Memory’s Human Scale

Quart obtained half a carton of Marlboro cigarettes and a packet of military rations for Jasmina. When running water became available in the hotel rooms, she asked permission to take the first shower she had had in a month. Quart watched but did not accept her invitation; the narration makes clear that his refusal was not a matter of clerical rules but of not wanting intimacy to be payment for food and cigarettes. They went downstairs, drank half a bottle of cognac by candlelight as Serbian bombs continued outside, and Jasmina left with the supplies after giving him a quick kiss.

Koševo Hospital anchors this remembered encounter in the material conditions that shaped it: scarce food and tobacco, unreliable water, sniper fire, bombardment, and mass injury. The hospital is named only briefly, but its corridors condense the scale of civilian suffering against which Quart’s small, personal decisions take place. Its presence makes the scene more than a recollection of attraction or restraint: it is a glimpse of human need in a city where survival itself had become precarious.