Kakanj // Friday Night in Kakanj
© John Bills
Industry and beer go hand in hand. At least, I always assumed as much, although that could be informed almost entirely by Wrexham’s claim that it is the town of steel, coal and beer, and the first two brought the third. Kakanj is a city defined by its history of industry, but where did it stand on the beer front? As the headline suggests, I did some wandering.
It was cold outside, being December and all that, so I didn’t waste a whole lot of time wandering around in search of a place. A short stroll in a straight line led me to a quiet bar, unassuming, as if that might have been its calling card. Two men played chess on one table while another cleaned glasses and cups behind the bar. There was a metronomic static between the three that suggested they were friends. I ordered a Sarajevsko, and one of the chess-playing men interrupted his game to open the fridge adorned with Pan marketing material to bring it to my table. The old days at Pavarotti, revisited.
He returned to his chess game. His hair was dark, and his fringe hung lazily towards his eyes, not unlike the style seen in most modern photos of Rambo Amadeus. Guessing ages in this part of the world is a fool’s game, but I’ve never claimed to be anything more than a fool, so let’s go with 52. His opponent initially looked younger, although he looked more comfortable in his hamster cheeks and thinning hair. They took 10 or 15 seconds between moves, occasionally studying the board longer but never giving the impression that moves were anything less than pre-ordained. The third man moved to a separate chair with a beer and lit a Lucky Strike. Red.
The bar was all high stools and tables, the former covered in a crimson and purple flower pattern on beige material, the latter all chipped wood and simplicity. The stools could have been purchased at any point in the last decade, the tables almost certainly at the beginning of the century. The walls followed the red-colour scheme, albeit with a random square of gold that seemed to seep into the block of red around it. Three photographs of Kakanj hung from the walls, beneath lampshades that served no purpose. The circular Oriental style lamps above the bar were doing all the work.
This clearly wasn’t a night out sort of bar. Sure, the trays carried a Pan logo, the glasses the same, the fridges adorned with the logos of the same Croatian brand and the world-famous Staropramen, but the chess-playing and apparent staff to customer ratio hinted at a place that sold more coffee than beer. I could be wrong, I usually am. The speakers were hooked up to a laptop that cycled through YouTube videos of Yugoslav love songs, where desperate-sounding women lamented for their dead lovers while warning of storms to come. A photograph of a buxom woman in a Dirndl adorned the back wall, with more photos of the city on a joining wall and a clock singing the praises of FK Rudar, the local football team.
A fifth individual stumbled into the bar, not drunk but not entirely sober. He was younger than the two chess players and the glass cleaner, likely more my age, although his baseball cap and energy hinted at youth that the rest of us had lost. He spoke from the moment he entered until the moment he left, checking his phone before informing the two chess players and the glass cleaner that someone’s father had died. He wasn’t sure who, so he asked the three if they were familiar with the family name, a name that may have been Azdić, may have been Avdić. All four cycled questions between each other in the hope of creating clarity around the obituary, but this was as ‘beating around the bush’ as it got. They couldn’t work it out, so the younger man in the cap left. I decided to do the same. I had a brief conversation with the glass cleaner before I left, although the back and forth didn’t go beyond ‘Wales’ and ‘Gareth Bale’. I left.
It didn’t take long for Gareth Bale to come up in the second bar. Tell someone in the Balkans that you are from Wales, and you’ll receive one of four names in response; Gareth Bale, Ryan Giggs, Ian Rush or Tom Jones. We beam with pride back home when considering the depth and breadth of Welsh culture, but internationally speaking, it doesn’t go beyond attacking football players and a crooner.
© John Bills
Again, there were three people in the bar, but it was clear who was working and who was socialising. I ordered a Sarajevsko as I walked past the bar, surprised to hear the barman ask if I wanted a big or a small. I said big, a fact I reiterated when he brought the beer across with the rather feeble comment that I’m from Britain and the only answer is big. He chuckled, and we settled into an easygoing conversation. I asked him what the best beer in Bosnia and Herzegovina was, and he said that Sarajevsko. I asked why, he said that they had the best water. Tellingly, he always described the beers as ‘nije loš’, not bad. Peter Andre’s ‘Mysterious Girl’ started playing through the speakers.
The conversation continued, moving to Kakanj itself. Everyone I had encountered in the town had been super friendly up to that point, and I made a point of saying as much. The barman, who reminded me of Mariusz in Welshpool but more age than powerlifting, commented that it was because Kakanj was small, not much happened, so being friendly was the only option. I had never considered such an approach, and felt a little bad that I hadn’t.
He returned to the locals at the bar, and I settled back in a chair. Ukrainian football was playing on the TV, Shakhtar vs. FC Lviv. Shakhtar was 2-1 up, although the scoreline only stayed as such thanks to a remarkable save by the Lviv goalkeeper. The fridge was sponsored by Sarajevkso, the same brand that had provided a sign for the wall of the bar. The mirrors were dirty, but it didn’t matter. The colour scheme was all red and black, not unlike dingy rock bars around the UK. Shakhtar was dominating, but the TV kept freezing.
I went to the toilet, greeted by an old-fashioned hole in the floor and a reminder that the scope of my travels will always be hindered by a lack of desire for such things. It became all too clear that I would never see parts of Asia, because my refusal to take a shit while squatting trumped my interest in the millennia of culture that waited out east. I returned to the bar, read for a while, only moving my eyes to sip at another Sarajevsko. In the time that had passed, Shakhtar had gone 6-1 up. The ‘90s pop had been replaced by Yugo love songs. I paid for my beer and headed back out into the cold Kakanj evening.
I rarely took photos when out, so here’s the church instead // © John Bills
And then, a third place. Far larger than the previous two, the interior of bar three didn’t really require a description. It certainly didn’t demand it. Calling it faceless would be disrespectful, but it wasn’t as if the walls and the floor and the seats and the ceiling had anything to do with the place whatsoever. The first two places hadn’t been unique, but they had been of Kakanj. There was nothing about them outside of decorative flourishes that suggested where they may have been found, but there was something about both of them that defied uniformity.
Bar three was almost defined by its uniformity. It could be anywhere else in the world, if you’ll allow the Alexisonfire reference. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. I couldn’t tell you how many people were here, because 80% of the tables were occupied, and there was a steady stream of people coming in and going out, two by two, giving me the all-too-easy link to Noah and his desperate ark. Occasionally, a group of three guys in identikit black jackets might saunter in, a look of uncertainty about them as they surveyed the best place to sit and make judgments about everyone inside (as if I wasn’t doing exactly the same thing), before settling on what was clearly the only table available. The staff swarmed around the place with conviviality and efficiency, two attributes that simply weren’t required in the first two bars. The music pulsed above the hum of conversation. It didn’t matter.
The conveyer belt of beautiful young people walking in and out of the third bar suggests that news of Kakanj’s population decline is premature, but it isn’t right to judge a city by its most stylish bar on a Friday night. It isn’t right to judge a city, full stop, whether you’re in a none-more-local-spot or a glitzy box-ticker that attracts every confident person between the ages of 20 and 30, although you’ll have to stretch that a little for me, both the age and the confidence. I ordered another Sarajevsko.
