Bosnia and Herzegovina

It’s a small country that fits a lot in. Ottoman bazaars sit next to Austro-Hungarian streets, Bosnian coffee comes in a copper džezva with a sugar cube on the side, and you hear the call to prayer echoing through a European city (which, as someone raised Muslim, felt strange and oddly comforting). Then you leave town and it’s waterfalls, river canyons and a Sufi monastery built into the base of a cliff.

It’s also a country still living with the 1990s. You see it in bullet-scarred buildings and memorials on ordinary street corners, and it stays with you. Give it more time than you think you need. It gives a lot back.