The apocalyptic sight of smog-clad Sarajevo is a complex aesthetic phenomenon. The noxious atmospheres of pollution and urban decay cannot be dismissed as just ugly or horrible. They beg new questions about the notion of plein air. Unlike the London fog that enchanted Turner and Monet, the suffocating smog in Sarajevo leaves no room for any “innocent,” fascinated impressions. The sensual information is coupled with a keen awareness of impending human and ecological catastrophe. How might an artist capture such a scene, when the “plenitude” is only perceptible in the noxious quality of air? Distress and anxiety supplant the composure of a keen, sensitive observer. The promise of progress is replaced by a menace of decay. The falsity of progress is laid bare.

Sarajevan landscapes call for a plein air aesthetics present in the underbelly of Impressionism, in the less “pretty” variety of it. In his discussion of Manet and his followers, T. J. Clark asserts that in order to reach the original sense of wonder and puzzlement with the Impressionist art we must “unlearn our present ease with Impressionism.”¹ In other words, no directness or immediacy is readily available in the dark strand of the Impressionist aesthetics. Paintings such as Manet's The Railway (1873) or Monet's The Gare Saint-Lazare (1877) come to mind.

Anxiety and quiet, quivering doubt mark such paintings. As Anthea Callen points out, the long nineteenth century's shift toward “close empirical study of nature outdoors” entailed not only the French sensibilité but also a “fascination with things mechanical.”² Urban modernity and its artifacts assail and deregulate the artistic temperament.

Similarly, John House identifies Manet as both the originator and the tail end of the Impressionist disquiet with modernity. According to House, for Degas modernity embodied a set of spaces and signs that the skilled observer could still decode. For Renoir, urban life could still sustain “a mythic image of wholeness and harmony.” Manet, however, proposed “no coherent reading of the modern world.” Instead, he celebrated a “vision of the modern that could not be classified and controlled,” and of a “modern urban life that was ultimately illegible.” The ambiguous, fuming locomotives of Monet and Manet evoke precisely this uneasy modernity. House contrasts the rural genre of the Salon to the urban scenes of the Impressionists that plunge spectators “back into the world that they had left behind them as they entered the gallery from the street outside: fine art offered no sanctuary here.”³

The confrontational and disturbing urban aesthetics of such paintings amplifies into outright terror in wintry Sarajevo. The viewer has nowhere to hide. There is no sanctuary indeed, and the opaque reality renders a message of shocking transparency. Modernity becomes legible. It is apocalyptic. The cars, the power plants, the shopping malls, and heaps of coal elicit a new, eschatological aesthetics in Sarajevo. The beauty remains, however dark or gray, but it brings about decadent melancholy. It concerns a new notion of plein air. “Close empirical study” portends evil and perverse fascination with disaster. It deprives us of the grace and delight of natural painting and puts our awareness of the sights we see and the air we breathe under duress.

This is the city of the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo — en plein air. This photograph shows one of the many hills that surround the Sarajevan valley in which the city is located. The hills and mountains are the source of the city's many resources, and one of its main tourist attractions. They are surprisingly diverse. A part of the long chain of the Dinaric Alps stretching from Slovenia in the west to Monte Negro in the east, the mountains host different ecosystems rich in fresh water, clean air, dense forests (both evergreen and deciduous), wildlife and vegetation. The 1984 winter Olympics took place here. The prolonged siege of Sarajevo that began only eight years after the Olympics, in 1992, and lasted almost four years was also possible because the occupying forces were entrenched in the mountains. Mountains are essential to Sarajevo, and they endow it with mystery, even certain ominousness.

Two major empires shaped the history and development of the city. It was founded by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century as a stronghold and caravanserai — hence the name. Sarajevo was an important mercantile center that reached the peak of its power in the sixteenth century, when it even rivaled Dubrovnik. After a prolonged stagnation under the declining Ottoman Empire, Sarajevo eventually became part of Austria-Hungary, from 1878 to 1914, when it underwent significant urban development, resulting in a unique East-meets-West architecture and ambiance. Following Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I, Sarajevo was eventually integrated into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and — after World War II — the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, before becoming a capital of the renewed Bosnian state in 1992. The city has a population of about half a million residents.

This is Sarajevo in the winter, also en plein air. It is a regular view of the city from one of the surrounding mountains. The fog itself is a natural, beautiful phenomenon. The fog itself is a natural, beautiful phenomenon. When laced with the smoke from the city below, however, it contains high levels of toxic substances Bosnians use the English portmanteau smog to describe the phenomenon. Smoke and fog blend into a toxic mix and pollute the air throughout the winter. The pollution levels reach those of the major industrialized megalopolises such as Mumbai, New Delhi, Shanghai and Moscow — cities whose populations far surpass Bosnia and Herzegovina's population of about 3 million.

In photos of the fog like these, the Sarajevan valley cannot be seen from above. Visibility is severely compromised, and driving, as well as walking can be dangerous. As the contents of toxic particles are on average two to five times higher than the EU limit of fifty micrograms per cubic meter, it is easy to imagine how polluted the air is. It has a peculiar odor, ranging from the pleasant smell of burning wood to the nauseating sense of heated rubber. This comes as no surprise, as about 100,000 homes in Sarajevo are heated with coal, wood, and car tires.

This is a photograph of a city center bridge in low fog density conditions. The unhealthful air is visibly thick with smoke. The masks worn by the two women in the picture offer feeble protection against particles that, like the coronavirus, are too fine not to pass through. The very act of wearing a mask is an instance of magical thinking. Even in the pandemic, many citizens do not understand that the mask cannot halt the virus and protect them. Masks and social distancing are not understood as measures of protecting others. They are either taken as a way to protect oneself — as the women in the picture do, trying to shield themselves from the toxic air — or they are perceived as arbitrary bureaucratic decrees that are only observed in half-mockery. As a result, most citizens merely hook masks behind their ears, and then either lower them under the nose or chin, or raise them up on their foreheads, as they would do with their sunglasses. Handshaking, hugging, and kissing are still staples of a culture that thrives on familiarity and bodily proximity. These poisonous sights are all the more demoralizing as the air quality in the surrounding mountains is substantially better, and some areas have the concentration of oxygen comparable to that found in the Swiss Alps.

Why is this happening? How is this possible?

The war-torn economy and Bosnia’s relative poverty only partly explain Sarajevo’s air pollution. The true explanation lies in politics and politicians who allow ecologically harmful policies to continue.

Strictly speaking, there is no conclusive and reliable study about the causes of increased pollution in Sarajevo. Pollution has been present “historically,” but it became life-threatening only in the last decade. Factors affecting it are many. Solutions are all the more difficult to find. Consequences are dire but not yet obviously catastrophic.. One can live in such an environment for years before noticing any personally deleterious effects. In this way, Sarajevo’s smog is similar to global warming: often, the scope of the dangers is not immediately evident. Complacent, reckless behavior remains.

The poor are always the first to be accused. Well-off people in the city center are rarely blamed. Stereotypes affirm that the impoverished in the hills heat their homes with everything and anything — instead of freezing or wearing very warm clothes, they walk around their houses in short sleeves and burn whatever comes their way. They are “avenging their poverty” by polluting the air for the rich below. They are “ignorant” and “uncouth.”

However, and although the indiscriminate use of solid fuels is a significant source of pollution, it does not account for all of it. Sarajevo has plenty of old diesel-fueled cars with high emissions that wouldn't be allowed on the roads in countries with stricter emissions standards, such as Norway. In addition, the use of leaded fuel is neither rare nor discouraged. On the whole, and in the short-term, it’s cheaper to use old cars fueled by environmentally deleterious fuels. Electric cars are an unseen luxury, spitefully associated with progress and effeminate, automatized driving culture.⁴ Real men drive diesel. Poor men have no choice. Women rarely drive in Sarajevo.

Another major source of pollution is once state-of-the-art but now outdated power plants from the socialist or even Austro-Hungarian eras. They run on coal and emit high levels of sulfur. They also sit in the valley, surrounded by mountains. The polluted air is frequently trapped low and rolls around for days on end. Emissions standards are loosely defined and rarely enforced, and there is little public pressure to institute more ecologically-sound policies. Replacing the existing power plants with newer, more efficient models is generally seen as too expensive. In the current political climate, elections cannot be won or lost over such affairs.

Starting with the urban and industrial expansion of the city following World War II, the city was built in such a way that several key outlets and natural openings were envisaged as mechanisms for draining away the pollution. It worked somewhat. However, urban planners of the twenty-first century deemed it wise to clog these outlets with new, tall, ill-placed buildings. Some of them are residential condominiums that yield a lot of short-term profit. Some of them are luxurious malls mimicking the admired and desired consumerist oases like those in Dubai. Critics claim that the new buildings block the airflow and contribute to the entrapment of pollution. The apologists retort that objections are nothing but nostalgic complaints of people who long for the pre-consumerist and communist society of the past, and who are bitter because they cannot afford to enjoy the advantages of the new “Dubai” lifestyle.

Bosnia is a transitional society that never fully transitioned. It is still marked by the worst variety of “wild capitalism” and still cherishes the worst legacies of failed socialism (bureaucracy, feckless administration, sinecure jobs obtained through political nepotism). If some EU or USAID funding can be snatched, the NGOs are happy to raise awareness by talking about the environment now and then. Otherwise, people are bitter and angry when the smog hits. Politicians wait for it to dispel because it is too difficult to do anything about it. When it does dissipate, they have a self-important air, as if they solved the problem themselves. In the spring everybody forgets. In the winter it all comes back again.

Despite the constant barrage of toxic emissions, nature still retains mechanisms to preserve itself. A meteorological phenomenon called temperature inversion frequently causes the cold air to stay low to the ground, trapping pollution and keeping it packed in a dense, lingering fog in the valley. When it is persistent, Sarajevo is the most polluted city in the world. Inversion is a natural and non-negotiable phenomenon. When it occurs, however, the trapped pollution seems almost vicious — as if it were nature's punishment for human irresponsibility.

Decreased visibility, increased disease, and increased healthcare costs are coupled with reduced life expectancy, increased death, and a shrinking economy.⁵

There are many ways out. They all point upwards. Any number of poorly maintained serpentine roads, or a newly restored cable car can take one into some of the cleanest and best-preserved mountainous areas in Europe. By brutally suppressing the pollution down below, nature keeps its treasures intact above. Meanwhile, we remain, pictured smoke-clad Sarajevo — en plein air.