Come see the pyramids ... in Bosnia?

Still recovering from civil war, the European nation lures tourists with skiing, 'siege tours,' and land formations of dubious heritage.

By Colin Woodard | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 29, 2007 edition

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VISOKO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA - Until recently, residents of this central Bosnian town never gave Visocica hill much thought.

Roughly pyramid-shaped and covered in woods, Visocica loomed 720 feet above the town. Occasionally, tourists or picnic parties would drive up the track on the back side to take in the scenery or to poke about the ruins of the medieval castle on its summit. Most of the time it was left to the sheep.

But over the past year and a half, this sleepy town of 12,000 has become one of Bosnia's busiest tourist destinations, with thousands of daily visitors coming in summer to see what is purported to be the world's largest pyramid. Four more purported pyramids are scattered around Visoko, disguised as hills.

Foreign geological experts who have visited the site report that it is a natural hill, and Bosnia's archaeological community has condemned ongoing digs here as a waste of the nation's limited resources and a threat to real sites. But for many Bosnians, it's a tourism dream come true.

"It's a big affirmation for the town, because everyone hears the name Visoko," says Mayor Munib Alibegovic. "Suddenly we have economic movement and lots of tourists coming here."

Twelve years after the end of the 1992-95 war, Bosnia's tourism industry is slowly coming back to life, and not only in Visoko. Sarajevo and Mostar have become popular summer side trips for the throngs of Italian, French, and German tourists who spend their holidays on Croatia's Adriatic coast. Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins crowd the slopes of the country's ski resorts.

In the Croat-Bosniak Federation (one of the country's two states within a state), hotel stays by foreign tourists have increased by 69 percent since 2003. The other half of the country, Republika Srpska, has seen more modest growth, in part because it suffered less physical damage during the war and, thus, began attracting visitors earlier, many of them from neighboring Serbia.

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