A Note from the Founder

In 2019, I went to see Bobovac, the medieval fortress where Bosnian kings once ruled. I spent hours walking through the ruins. Then I got hungry. A sign pointed to a farmhouse in the nearby village, and I followed it. On the way, I passed another sign: Zvjezdane staze, a trail leading up towards Perun. I had never been to this place before, but standing there, looking at the mountains, I had the strange feeling that I belonged.

I bought a house that day.

I am from Bosnia, from Tuzla. When the war began, I was a teenager. What followed were years of shelling, displacement, the slow collapse of everything I thought immovable. The country I was born in no longer exists.

I have lived in Vienna for over twenty years now. But something remained open. A question I could not answer from a distance. Perhaps this house, this village, this mountain, is my way of asking it differently.

A village where people know each other's names, the ruins of a kingdom a short walk away. A few residents at a time, enough to share a table, a walk, an idea. I am here often, available for conversation, for collaboration.

What interests me is connection. Between artists, between disciplines, between ways of seeing. Something that grows slowly, like spores through soil.

I cannot tell you what Zvjezdane Staze will become. I can only tell you what it is trying to be: a place in connection with the land and the people here. A small world, open to those who recognise it.

Ovo je to što jeste. Mi smo to što jesmo.