Republika Srpska

Republika Srpska enters the narrative chiefly through Pale, presented as its capital during the Bosnian War. Rather than provide an institutional history, the book places the entity within a vivid wartime landscape: a former Olympic resort, political leaders bent over maps, and a society in which inherited songs and contemporary armed conflict meet.

Capital and Setting

Pale is described as a ski resort built in 1980 for the Sarajevo Olympics that served as the capital of the Bosnian Serb Republic, identified here with Republika Srpska. Its chalets and bobsled tracks give the seat of wartime authority an incongruous resort setting. The narrator’s comparison to a Balkan Vichy, with ski facilities in place of spas, makes the landscape feel at once specific and unsettling: a place designed for sport repurposed as a political center during war.

Leadership and Wartime Politics

Filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski’s footage follows the conflict beyond the siege of Sarajevo and into the world of the Bosnian Serb leadership. In a council of war, Radovan Karadžić and the Serbian military leader Ratko Mladić bend over maps, mark borders, and weigh what can be conceded against what must not be surrendered. The scene makes territorial decisions visible as decisions about populations too: the maps are being altered, and people are moved with the lines. The book sets this small gathering beside the diplomatic negotiations taking place in Lisbon, Geneva, and Dayton, contrasting the labor of international diplomacy with a direct exchange between two leaders.

Cultural and Narrative Context

Pawlikowski’s film also records older Serbian songs about defeat on earth, victory in heaven, and burning Turkish houses, heard around soldiers’ tents and traced into weddings and children’s ditties. In those songs, the names of valiant forefathers give way to contemporary figures, including Karadžić and Mladić; even children sing while carrying Kalashnikovs. The narrative does not present this material as a complete account of Republika Srpska’s society or institutions. Instead, it shows how historical memory and heroic language are recast amid the war, placing the republic within a conflict where national stories, political leadership, and armed force continually overlap.

Pale also provides the setting for Pawlikowski’s encounter with Eduard Limonov at an officers’ mess. Limonov, wearing a People’s Army overcoat over a leather jacket and carrying a pistol, is on friendly terms with a group of Chetniks, though Pawlikowski recognizes that he is not one of them. This episode connects the political geography around Republika Srpska to the book’s portrait of Limonov’s wartime self-presentation, without equating him with the republic or its forces.