Touch wood, Sarajevo is a safe and secure city, a million miles away from its wartime past. Bosnian people are welcoming, friendly to and tolerant of foreigners – they’ve had thousands of them in their country for fifteen years – and it’s an engagingly safe place. Taxis are cheap, women walk home, the city-centre and environs are friendly and largely secure. Outside of some of its more deprived and isolated suburbs and quarters, Sarajevo is one of the safest cities in Europe. Obviously, normal, basic safety precautions should be observed, but, for instance, any fights in or outside pubs, bars and clubs are extremely rare.
 

The occasional presence on the streets of Roma exploiting their children as begging accoutrements is an unavoidable let-down common everywhere in the region – except in Kosovo where they are still largely too afraid of violence to leave their settlements. Best not to give them money – it goes not to their well-being but their parents’ grubby pockets.  And on the other end of the spectrum, the vibrant organized crime scene in Bosnia means that some real organized gang violence is mostly confined to the occasional shooting and car-bombing in the cities’ suburbs.