Rural Life

Please share some photographs and information of what rural life is like in your country. How is it different from urban life? What makes it unique? Do you prefer a rural lifestyle?

Here are a couple of pictures of Dejcici, a small village in the mountains above Sarajevo. Dejcici is a village that exemplifies the rural Bosnian lifestyle, specifically that of Bosniaks though it differs surprisingly little between ethnic groups.

Rural villages in Bosnia and Herzegovina are much more self-sufficient than the large urban centers. This was demonstrated remarkably during the war, during which many died of exposure and starvation in cities like Sarajevo while the death toll in rural Bosnia was almost exclusively limited to dying at the enemy's hands.

Rural villages tend to be more traditional and much more accurately reflect the Ottoman heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina - even among Christians, Jews, and other groups. Women are expected to be much more subservient and modest and a family's reputation, it's honor, is much more a focus of daily life than in larger urban centers.

One thing that makes rural Bosnia unique as compared to what I've witnessed in other countries is that it really is less different from the urban centers than it would be elsewhere. Bosnian cities, almost exclusively, are actually conglomerations of thousands of mahalas. Mahalas are basically villages unto themselves, where everyone knows everyone else and their business. While this unity is not usually expressed in a close-knit urban center as a whole, the mahala system does make Bosnian cities feel much more rural, community-oriented, and close-knit than major cities anywhere else I've visited.

Dejcici, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A female shepherd tends to the sheep on the slopes of Bijelasnica mountain, with the city of Sarajevo just a stone's throw away on the other side.


The village of Dejcici - for the first time in its history connected to the rest of Bosnia with a modern, paved road - is typical of rural Bosnian villages. There is a house of worship, a carsija (market), and one or more mahalas (neighborhoods). The population of Bosnian villages typically consists of less than one dozen different families, all closely connected through centuries of inter-marriage. These families may or may not share a religion in common, many Bosnian villages are as mixed as Bosnian cities.