Bosnia and Herzegovina is a beautiful, welcoming, deeply misunderstood country.

It is a place of villages, rivers, mountains, cafés, festivals, family gatherings, hiking trails, and everyday life. But it is also a country where the recent past still leaves traces — sometimes visible, sometimes hidden, and sometimes buried in the ground.

In this episode of An Englishman in the Balkans, I’m recording from the garden here in the village, with the ordinary sounds of rural Bosnia beneath my voice. Birds, dogs, maybe even the distant sound of a tractor. Peaceful sounds. Normal sounds.

And that is important, because this is not an episode designed to frighten anyone away from visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Quite the opposite.

This is a personal, honest, and practical conversation about landmines in Bosnia ...