Sarajevo. Are the two of us in love? Hard to say on such a brief encounter - three nights, four days - but there's definitely chemistry between us. Something to build on.

What I had n't realised, and, really, how can you from the media and photographs, is exactly how much of a cauldron Sarajevo is in; long, narrow, and somewhat spatulate as it fans out towards the airport, and completely overlooked by hills and then a backdrop of snow topped mountains. Nor had I realised how close the frontline actually was, in places it must have been the other side of the street. It  can only have been an unimaginable three year hell encircled, besieged and shelled relentlessly.

Yet, the city has recovered incredibly. New buildings, many, many more restored, with only a handful or so in the city centre still bearing the scars of war, or in case still a hollowed out shell. Again, my hat and my respect goes out to these brave, resilient Sarajevans.

The city is a little gem: studded with minarets, clanging with hardy looking trams, and home to the tallest building in the whole of the Balkans - the Avaz tower. I spent a good part of one morning revelling in the view from the tower's open observation deck, baking in the heat.

Walking longitudinally across Sarajevo is a journey through spiritual as much as secular architecture: from the UN lookalike of the Bosnian parliament building, the quaintly Yugoslav communist functional buildings - all right angles and wide steps - on to imperialist statement buildings thrown up by the Austro-Hungarians - very formal, Viennese fussy - and then the bee hive that is Bascarsija - the old town.

Bascarsija is where generations of people have lived, traded, prayed, wept, bought, fought, laughed, ingested endless thimblefuls of coffee. Designed for meandering, created for chance meetings and conjecture. I felt ghosts every step of the way. Every flagstone throws up a story. The walls breath, the mosques exhale stories. So where are they? Who's the chronicler?