Vehid Gunić's New Book: Journeys for Return

Published by the Sarajevo Association "Promokulture", Vehid Gunić's long-announced travelogues "Journeys for Return" have just been released. It is about 42 travelogues, in which Vehid Gunić, as usual, travels the entire planet and meets his Bosnians everywhere, writes the Patria news agency.

On the cover of this extremely interesting book is a railway lantern, which Vehid received as a gift from Murat Grabić, a train switchman from Kozarac, as a boy. With that lamp, as a boy, he read books that would later determine his destiny. His small room, with that lamp, was transformed into a dark tunnel.

Good people are the history of Bosnia. Vehid Gunić has saved many from oblivion. Wherever he travels, he meets someone who carries Bosnian roots with them. Vehid traveled from the Norwegian Nordkapp, called the northernmost point of Europe, with cliffs 307 meters high, to the far south in Tasmania, where he again meets Bosnians, such as the highly successful electrical engineer Sead Pašalić, the owner of one of the oldest castles in Tasmania, built in 1803.

Several reports are about the beauties and history of beautiful Norway. There are the noblest stories there. After Vehid's wife was killed by a grenade in a school in besieged Sarajevo, several Norwegian journalists visited their minor sons and helped them.

There are stories that take your breath away, stories that lift you up and carry you powerfully over the images of Vehid's travels. Such is the unusually valuable story about the Turkish Sultan Bayezid II and the famous artist Leonardo da Vinci and their correspondence and plans for building a bridge. All these plans were completed by the famous Norwegian artist Vebjørn Sand, so the dream of Leonardo and Bayezid II was realized in Oslo.

There is also a top report about Japan, about Sydney, about Žepa and Prusac. Vehid made a large number of American reports from the Golden Gate, then from the famous Alcatraz prison. Then there is a wonderful story about visiting the museum of the film and book "Gone with the Wind". All this intertwines with the memory of his mother who brought him a pie in the Kozarac cinema in the middle of the famous film, because the film lasts four hours, so one gets hungry.

Reports from Hollywood, Las Vegas follow, all seasoned with Bosnians from the American neighborhood. His greatest travel companion and friend Izet Dizdarević is also there, with whose truck he traveled across the United States. There is also a story about St. Louis, one of the largest Bosnian cities in the USA with 40,000 of our emigrants.

One of the most beautiful stories about failed expectations of love is the story of Hamdija Jakupović Đaja, who was the first to drive a "Ferguson" tractor through Kozarac, "and many a maiden's sigh was torn after him, so handsome and good-looking". Vehid found Hamdija in Brisbane, Australia, and visited him twice.

Vehid Gunić is the only Balkan journalist who interviewed Muhammad Ali. They informed him from the famous Ali's staff that the price of one minute of his interview was 2500 dollars. You should then see in this book how the great journalist Vehid spent almost eight hours in conversation with the famous Ali, and from that made a brilliant book about this global sports legend.

There are details of his friendship with Abdulah Sidran. The book is another great gift from Gunić to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the fight against oblivion. It is as if, through beautiful journeys, we return in memory to where we belong and from where our scattering around the world began long ago.