The workers of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo announced the closing of the building and the cessation of work for August 25, the date when the City Hall (which housed the National and University Library before the war) was set on fire in 1992. This symbolism probably means that books are as important to Sarajevo's politicians as they are to Trebevic's, i.e. only when they turn to ashes. People who do not receive a salary for months and do not have health insurance are probably not clear why this policy has money for festivals and New Year's Eve (the City will allocate 795,541.50 KM for the 2025 Eve!), but not for the National Library. Well-intentioned advice to engage a little more in projects they mostly hear as the cynicism of cultural managers.
How could the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina raise the necessary money through projects?
For example, if it published a calendar with twelve naked nubile girls, would that sell well? Between the concept of street culture and street prostitution, the differences are smaller than they seem to small townspeople. Or that, for example, if it rents out a reading room for children's birthdays, and the librarians dress up as Disney characters and throw periodicals at each other instead of cakes? Or to organize races with Red Bull on work chairs with wheels, on the tracks of David Coulthard in Sarajevo? It could conveniently be called Libraries on the Streets!
After last week's adoption of the new law on elementary and secondary education in the Canton of Sarajevo, NUB shares further fell. What good are books to patriots who prefer to hum the national anthem rather than worry about the national library? Elections are won by monumental kitsch shows, and written heritage does not bring the populists the votes of the illiterate. Why did the City Hall and the books in it burn, if not for gala nights, business events, and Austrian balls? Librarians are hungry? So give them baklava.
For more than 30 years, out of the 80 that it has existed, NUB has been a refugee in its city, a user of forced accommodation, neither ashes nor Phoenix, a chronic patient without money for medicine, an intruder on the campus where the modern building of the future library of the University of Sarajevo is sprouting. Perhaps everything is headed for the NUB as a legal entity to simply close down, just as the Institute of Literature closed down when the City Hall was burning, and its staff and funds will be moved under a safer roof.
Thus, the whole matter would be resolved far from the New Year's Eve budget, in the academic silence of the campus.
