After the Games

The mountain above Sarajevo had its moment, once. For a few weeks the whole world looked at Igman — the jumps, the pistes, the flags, the brand-new hotel built to put the visitors somewhere with a view. Then the world moved on, and a decade later the same slopes were a front line, and the hotel that had been built for glory caught the other thing mountains above cities catch.

Now it’s the forest’s. You come up through the pines and it resolves out of the green slowly — a long, low, stepped thing in raw concrete, terracing along the contour the way good mountain architecture does, except the windows are dark and the balconies hold saplings instead of skiers.

Inside, the floor plates are intact enough to walk and open enough to be careful on. The partitions are mostly gone, so each level is one long room with the forest pressing in at every opening. Where there were once corridors of doors there’s now a colonnade of light and pine. Graffiti brightens the stairwells. Everywhere the same view repeats — spruce, valley, the pale wall of the far range — the exact panorama the place was built to frame, now free of charge and short of guests.

It was made to host the best week of the mountain’s life. It has spent every year since hosting the weather. The view never changed; only the number of people allowed to enjoy it.

Up the meadow there’s an A-frame standing on its own, a sharp concrete triangle in the grass, stubborn and strange, the kind of small bold structure that decade loved. I sat on a broken ramp for a while with my legs over the edge and the valley doing nothing in particular, and the quiet up there is the clean alpine kind — wind in needles, a bird, the tick of hot concrete cooling.

What the mountain keeps

I think that’s why I keep coming back to places like this. A ruin in a city is an argument — somebody wants it gone, somebody wants it saved. A ruin on a mountain is just weather and patience. Nobody’s fighting over it. The pines are simply taking it back at the speed pines take things, a season at a time, and the building is letting them, holding its terraces open to the view until it can’t anymore.

I went down before the light did. Behind me the hotel slid back into the trees, step by concrete step, keeping its one perfect view for an audience of two: the forest, and whoever climbs up next.