The Bosnian capital dreams of cultural revival by rejuvenating the hotel that was once the jewel of the Olympic village

When the siege of Sarajevo began in 1992, Ratko Mladić’s Bosnian Serb army took up positions in the mountains surrounding the city.

For his headquarters, Mladić chose Hotel Igman, a breathtaking piece of brutalist architecture that was the jewel of the 1984 Winter Olympics. The hotel was part of the Olympic village, a base for ski jumpers and alpine skiers, but Mladić – now serving a life sentence for genocide and crimes against humanity – used it to oversee the shelling of the city and his enemies used it as a prison and execution site. During the four years of the war, the hotel was blasted and bombed, and since the fighting stopped it has lain derelict, ignored by everyone except graffiti artists and the occasional tourist.

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Source: The Guardian