Welcome back to Sarajevo

In the English-language bookshop I find a guidebook to Sarajevo. It is a slim volume, rectangular, about 15 inches by five; it has tips on what to eat, where to stay, transportation and sightseeing. The Fama Guide was first published in 1993, during the darkest days of the siege. It is like no other guidebook I have ever seen. The back cover explains: "This is the first guide book of death in recent history."

It describes a three-year state of hell engineered by shrapnel and sniper fire in which "Everything became a target – civilian housing, museums, churches, mosques, hospitals, cemeteries, people on the street. All exits from the city, all points of entry, were blocked".

Turn the page and you find a chapter titled Climate. Flanked by photos of a dead body in the street and burning tower blocks, the text trills: "Sarajevo's climate is very continental, with a short hot summer." The humour is Stygian. By April 1993 the artists and intellectuals who wrote the book had worked out that no international rescue was forthcoming. Sarajevo was alone – and at the mercy of the Serb artillery positions in the mountains that ring the city.

When I first visited the city 10 years ago the damage was total. No building it seemed had escaped laceration by shrapnel or bullet; many were still standing only out of sheer force of habit. Sarajevo's own twin towers in the Marin Dvor business district, the Unis buildings (pictured burning in the Fama book), took such a pounding that they were reduced to skeletons of ruptured steel.

The towers served as icons of the destruction of Sarajevo in much of the news coverage of the time. They have been restored and stand once again, incredibly, brighter and shinier than ever. The mirrored planes of the buildings merge with the sky and clouds, playing tricks on the eye.

On the boulevard, once known as "Sniper Alley", a glass-clad business centre stands on the site of the old office of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjenje. The Serb gunners were determined to silence the voice of the city and shelled the building until most of it collapsed. For many years visitors driving in from the airport were confronted by the resulting tangle of rubble; it was a dramatic symbol of the city's trauma.

Incidentally, the Serbs didn't succeed – Oslobodjenje proudly boasts that it came out every day throughout the worst of the bombardment. There was talk of leaving the site untouched as a memorial but commercial pressures, and possibly a desire to move on, have led to a more pragmatic approach.

Shops, bars and restaurants seem to be opening on a daily basis despite the long shadow of the credit crunch. New high-end hotels such as the Europe and the Central (both opened just months ago) are a far cry from the bunker-like old Holiday Inn that many war correspondents remember with nostalgia. The Irish-owned Central has just 15 very spacious rooms; the rest of the building houses the smartest spa and gym in town and a glorious pool in the basement. Despite the West-facing ambience the management is held to a quirky no-alcohol covenant in the lease – so the mini-bar is unusually wholesome.

The Muslim heritage is most overt in Ottoman parts of the old town known as Bascarsija. There is no mistaking the Oriental influence here: narrow slab-paved alleyways wind through low-rise wooden buildings; domes and minarets spike the skyline and blue-white clouds heavy with the aroma of grilled beef drift in the cold air. On the surface little appears to have changed in the past 400 years, but much of it is new or heavily restored, the area having been targeted ruthlessly by the Serbs during the siege.

There are few obvious reminders of the recent past. But the mask of normality in this part of the world slips occasionally in an almost casual manner. In the yard of the Gazi Huzrev Beg's mosque, a notice asks visitors to observe a few rules, which include the usual injunctions not to wear skimpy clothes, smoke or be noisy, but also to refrain from carrying automatic weapons into the place of worship.

Sooner or later the ubiquitous savoury invitation wafting from the kebab houses becomes irresistible and doors seem to open magically. Inside Zeljo 1 (one of the most highly regarded cevabdzinica) a warm fug of steam and meaty smoke envelopes you. The cook, in chef's whites and matching white baseball cap, is a blur of motion in front of the charcoal grill. Orders are being shouted and delivered in what seems like barely managed anarchy. But there is order: customers are arranged in neat rows at communal tables, the atmosphere friendly but purposeful. People are here to eat, refuel and move on.

My friend Garret (who lives in the city) orders pola pola (meaning half and half) – a mixed platter of cevapi (minced-beef kebab) and spicy sausages known as sudzukice. They are served with cream cheese and chopped onions tucked into a portion of unleavened bread known as somuni.

It's best to blot out any thoughts of the cholesterol count or indeed the raw onion fallout. But as fast food it is pretty unbeatable, and anyway, there is no McDonald's in Sarajevo. Indeed, the whole of Bosnia is still a Big Mac-free zone – a reason in itself to put the country on your travel map.

The Museum of Sarajevo is also in Bascarsija, housed in Brusa Bezistan, a silk market built in 1551. Needless to say, the six-domed building was wrecked during the siege but has been restored beautifully. Unfortunately, the exhibition it holds, covering the development of the city from neolithic times to the outbreak of the First World War, is very old-school and plodding.

The items that interest me most are listed as a couple of coffee cups used by the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife just before their assassination in 1914 – a reminder that Sarajevo has a place in world history that predates the 1990s. But even in this I am disappointed: the artefacts are absent, having been removed for cleaning or exhibition elsewhere.

The must-do museum in Sarajevo is out in the wastes on the far side of the airport. The Tunnel Museum is not easy to find and we follow numerous red-herring directions from locals that lead into fields before we pull up in front of what is, essentially, an unexceptional suburban home. During the siege Sarajevo was surrounded on all sides by hostile forces; the only corridor into friendly territory lay across the UN-controlled airport. In March 1993, with the city in imminent danger of annihilation, the Bosnian government ordered the building of a secret tunnel under the airport so that essential supplies could be smuggled in. It was a heroic, desperate effort and one which was absolutely vital to the survival of Sarajevo.

The tunnel surfaced on the south side of the airport in the garden of the Kolar family, which has now converted its erstwhile family home into an improvised museum. In the courtyard under camouflage netting we find the remains of a mortar crater in the concrete floor. "Look at that," whistles Garret. A deep voice from within rings out, he seems to be laughing, "Yes, mortar. Killed nine. Fourteen injured."

Bajro Kolar, the owner of the house and now the museum, appears and ushers us inside. There are photos of visiting celebs such as Kevin Spacey, Daniel Craig, Orlando Bloom, Juliette Binoche and Michael Moore posing with Mr Kolar.

All that's left of the tunnel is the final 25m section. It is claustrophobic and a short film shown inside the house reveals that it was waterlogged and freezing much of the time. Under constant fire – the Serbs knew the tunnel existed, but not its precise location – it's a miracle so much of the Kolar homestead has survived. We line up for pictures with Mr Kolar and buy merchandise, which includes a wonderfully tacky plaster relief of the house and tunnel entrance. The reverse is stamped Made in the People's Republic of China – proving that everything can be commodified eventually.

Later, I look down on Sarajevo from immediately above a Muslim cemetery where many war dead are buried. Eleven thousand people were killed here during the siege. But even during Sarajevo's darkest days the Fama authors couldn't resist ending their sarcastic "guide book" by quoting a love poem to the city. "It is impossible, no doubt, to name all the beauties of this place," wrote Muhamed Nerkesi in the 17th century.

From the vantage point of the Kovaci cemetery I see the city under snow, cradled by the once deadly mountains, straggling along the thin line of the Miljacka River. In the winter sunshine it is sparkling.

Compact facts

How to get there

Sankha Guha was a guest of Regent Holidays (0845 277 3317; regent-holidays.co.uk), which offers a five-night break to Bosnia from £520 per person, based on two sharing, including return flights with Austrian Airlines via Vienna, B&B in a three-star hotel for three nights in Sarajevo and two nights in Mostar, and bus fares between Sarajevo and Mostar. He stayed at the Hotel Central (00 387 33 561 800; hotelcentral.ba/hotelcentral/eng/index.html), which offers rooms from €100 per night.

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