Balkan

“I love my children! Do you know how glad I am when I can pamper them with a chocolate!” – The father says warmly and his eyes shine with joy. I’ve met this family two years ago during one of my field researches. I was told about some refugee houses close to the Vraca memorial park. The Mucista family moved to Sarajevo leaving their hometown Dakovica in Kosovo and suffering from everyday hardships of war. For sometimes Hajrula, his wife and children were traveling around Italy in search of happiness, but couldn’t find it there. Sarajevo pur up the family in one of the destroyed buildings in Kanara settlement, where in the only extant room without water and electricity are huddling now together old and young alike. The father works in the market, a place of permanent hope and disappointment. “Sometimes kids are begging. What can we do? When children as for food and some stuff, you know..”. One of the boys cuddles with his grandpa looking on me intently. He became an orphan, when his young father died and his mother finally left him. They won’t have another family or another life. Even in the Orphanage. “My father was a well-known person in the town. He was educated and religiously inspired.” Would his son manage to transmit the family tradition without regulating the daily life of his children and losing them one by one? “I pray to God and he is merciful to us. Look, someone else would die  in such conditions and my children are healthy”. 

Photography as a social landscape