Don’t balk at the Balkans
London, March 8, 2010
The former Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina doesn’t feature on the list of favourite destinations for British overseas property buyers. Mentions of the capital, Sarajevo, and Mostar, the second city, instead trigger memories of the devastating civil war in the 1990s, which killed 100,000 people and displaced 2m.
Fifteen years on, however, a small and intrepid band of pioneering Britons is moving in, attracted by improving transport links, government attempts to boost tourism and property prices half those in neighbouring Croatia.
Among them is Philip Lilleyman, 61, a former colonel from Rotherham, who in 2004 bought a ruined 18th-century Ottoman customs officer’s house in Trebinje, a handsome Venetian-style town straddling the glassy Trebisnjica River, 15 miles inland from the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. Lilleyman was stationed in Bosnia with the British army in the 1990s, and decided to build his dream property there when he retired.
He and his wife, Lynda, 54, paid £20,000 for the ruin, set on a hillside and fringed by a terraced garden where the couple now grow vines and apricot trees. Little was left of the original house, bar the 2ft-thick stone walls and a weather-beaten roof. During the course of the restoration, in 2005 and 2006, they raised the roof by 20in and rebuilt the property in local stone, around a concrete shell, as a six-bedroom house, with a granny flat attached. It cost £130,000 and has since been valued at £540,000.
“Since retiring in 2006, my wife and I spend six months of the year here,” Lilleyman says. “We love it — it’s like Provence before the tourists arrived, with summer-long blue skies, fabulous produce markets and centuries of history. All at half the price of Croatia, where an equivalent home would sell for €1.2m [£1.1m].”
Peter Chappell, 49, originally from Oxfordshire, has also been seduced by the charms of Bosnia. A former consultant to the Bosnian Office of the High Representative charged with rebuilding the country after the war, he settled there when his contract ended in 2002. He and his Bosnian wife, Gorana, who have a six-year-old daughter, Natasha, have built a house and factory for his kitchen business, Olive Design, in Drvar, a mountainous region in the northwest of the country, which he calls the “Bosnian Lake District”.
“The process of building our home was simple,” he says. “The skills are here, although you need four times the patience than in the UK.” Chappell’s four-bedroom, three-storey home, which took two years and cost £54,000 to build, is set back into the mountains, with entrances on two levels, bedrooms on the ground and second floor, and living quarters with “eye-watering” mountain views on the level between.
Life is good. “The UK holds little appeal for me now,” he says. “Bosnia-Herzegovina is the England of 50 years ago — less materialism, great for kids — with good skiing and the Adriatic coast just an hour’s drive away.”
Marina Bowder, 39, also from Oxfordshire, came to Sarajevo in 1994 as an NGO volunteer and fell for a local soldier — and the local way of life. Today, she and the soldier, Armin Alagic, who has since become her husband, run an English-style pub in Vratnik, the old Ottoman quarter of Sarajevo, and own a home nearby. Much of their work when renovating their properties has involved erasing the scars of Bosnia’s recent past.
“Digging my garden, I’ve found a cannonball from the 18th-century siege of Sarajevo, a second world war rifle and a dud grenade from the latest war, which would have been off-putting to fainter souls,” Bowder says. The house, set in a cobbled courtyard behind great wooden doors that give onto the street, was a wreck when she bought it, as it hadn’t been lived in for more than a decade.
“It’s an Ottoman house made of mud bricks, which strengthen with age as long as water is kept out,” she says. “We have the obligatory courtyard plants — rose tree, quince, vines, plum trees for plum brandy — which tells you all you need to know about the Bosnian lifestyle.”
When restoring, Bowder and Alagic were faithful to the old processes: “We travelled into the countryside to find specialists in old wooden ceilings or twisted iron door locks. The system of specialisation is reminiscent of the smiths of medieval England.”
Quite how many people without some link to Bosnia, whether professional or personal, would want to follow these examples remains to be seen. The country remains politically volatile, and since the end of the war has been divided between two entities: the largely Serb Republika Srpska and the mainly Muslim and Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. A further reminder of its troubled past was provided by the arrest last week at Heathrow airport of the former president, Ejup Ganic, accused over ambushing a Yugoslav army column in Sarajevo.
Yet Paul Bradbury, British director of Agent, an estate agency that sells and develops property in Bosnia, insists the country has potential for buyers with mettle. “There are bargains everywhere — city three-beds for £70,000 and rural three-beds at £50,000,” he says.
“The second city, Mostar, in the southwest, is one to watch. The ski resorts of the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, too: Jahorina has good hotels and après-ski, and there’s Bjelasnica, with huge plans for expansion. Both offer opportunity for brave buyers.”
(Times Online)
