At the Source

The name comes first, before any house or route: vrelo, the source. Everything downstream begins here, at the foot of Mount Igman, where the Bosna river does not so much start as arrive — cold, already whole, pushing up through the ground in a hundred quiet places.

The water is the first thing, and then the colour of it. Green over pale stone, clear enough to read the riverbed, the current moving without hurry beneath a wall of old chestnut and maple. You walk in on gravel paths and wooden footbridges, and the temperature drops a few degrees under the canopy. It is the kind of cold that feels clean rather than sharp.

Children lean over the rails to look for fish. The forest holds the light in layers — bright at the edges, deep and still at its centre. There is little to do here but notice: the reflections, the moss on the banks, the way the trees stand in the water as if they had grown from it.

We keep coming back to this place because it explains the rest. A collection named for a spring should know where its spring is. This is the current the whole crossing follows — from here, through the valleys and bridges and cities, down to the sea.