"Sarajevo tourism" used to be an oxymoron. But now, after two decades of ethnic strife—and despite a crisis in nearby Kosovo—the Bosnian capital is being transformed into one of the most dynamic small cities on the Continent. Joshua Hammer savors the new normal

The Sunday brunch is a well-practiced ritual these days in the Old Town of Sarajevo. On a dazzling morning, my friend Senad Slatina is escorting me to his favorite weekend restaurant through a throng of pedestrians on the main promenade. Australian backpackers, Gypsy beggars, Islamic women swathed in head scarves, uniformed European Union troops, and young, well-dressed, secular Bosnian Muslims wander past turreted and domed European edifices from the nineteenth century. Beyond the cluster of ice-cream shops known as Sweet Corner, the street narrows to a cobblestoned passageway barely twelve feet wide. Abruptly we pass from a slice of Hapsburg Vienna into the Ottoman Empire: teetering, red-tile-roofed houses; brassware makers; Turkish coffee stalls; stone minarets and mosques. Slatina leads the way to the Asdz bakery, a hole-in-the-wall. Minutes later, the specialty arrives on our outdoor table: two cottage cheese–stuffed pastries called sirnica, each as wide as a small pizza, baked underneath a charcoal-topped lid and served piping hot.

As Slatina, a forty-year-old political consultant and former journalist, digs into the cheese pie—too heavy a meal for me at this hour—I marvel at the scene. You wouldn't know a war had raged here little more than a decade ago. This old neighborhood alongside the Miljacka River lay in the sights of Serb snipers and mortar teams perched in the green hills above the town, and the dead were buried by the hundreds each week in Kovaci Park, a cemetery that sprawls up the road. Today all that seems like a bad dream. There has been no ethnic violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina for years, and Sarajevo has come back to life. Crowds of bargain hunters browse for rugs and T-shirts, American tourists sip cappuccino and leaf through the Herald Tribune, local children balance triple-scoop gelatos as they run through the streets—it could be the shopping district of almost any vibrant European city. Once again, Sarajevo is a feast for amateur historians, its architecture and atmosphere conjuring up its succession of rulers: Ottomans, Hapsburg princes, the Serb king Alexander after World War I, and the Communists who took over following the Nazi occupation of the Second World War. Perhaps most extraordinary is the sense of being on a historical and geographical fault line: In just a few steps, we've crossed a cultural and religious divide that no other city on earth can replicate, between dynamic Europe and timeless Asia, between the Christian West and the Islamic East.

But delving into Sarajevo's rich religious and cultural heritage doesn't excite Slatina—it reminds him too much of recent wounds. When I ask the name of the imposing stone mosque that looms above the Asdz bakery, he says with a shrug, "I don't remember exactly." (I later learn that it's Havadze Duraka's Mosque, also known as Street's Mosque, built in the mid-sixteenth century.) Slatina enjoys soaking up the Ottoman atmosphere, but he admits, "I've got a distaste for religions, considering the wars that have been inspired in their name."