About the book

In the 1990s, during the war in Bosnia, our father was stuck in Sarajevo while my mother, my brother Kosta and I managed to flee to Serbia. Despite the difficult situation, our father sent us letters that were funny, positive and filled with drawings.

The book consisting of a number of selected authentic letters written by my father and the replies Kosta wrote down in his notebook was published some ten years later by the Institute for textbook publishing.

Combined, these letters tell a slightly different and more buoyant tale of the war.

About the website

The website came about because we wanted to share this story with the world.

Adequately conveying this type of book on a website is no easy task. I did my best but I still recommend that you read the Letters on a bigger screen, not on a mobile phone.

Special thanks to my colleagues Felipe and Ana who translated this website into Brazilian Portuguese.

The entire website content and code are available on GitHub, under CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.

The drawings

Unfortunately, the original letters got lost and all we are left with are the digital versions of them, and poorly scanned ones too. That’s why we are very grateful to my friend Ivan Nedeljković who, based on the originals, made new copies of the drawings and digitalized them.

The end result is fantastic. Below you can see one of the original drawings compared to Ivan’s version.

For the time being, if you want to help translate the book into another language or make a suggestion, please do so on GitHub by creating a new Issue.

Thank you for your interest!