On Thursday, April 16th at 8:30 PM, there will be a presentation of the book “LEAVING SANSKI MOST. The war in Bosnia, the escape on foot, Everest by bicycle“ curated by the authors Sanel Kaltak and Ilario Tancon.

The book is the biography of Sanel Kaltak, who was born and raised in Sanski Most, Bosnia, like all the boys in the world between school, friends, games, and nature. But unlike the others, he is on the brink of the last gasps of the former Yugoslavia. 

In 1992, he sees his adolescence swept away by the outbreak of war. Sanel and his family experience all the drama: tension and fear, death and destruction, days spent buried at home and nights spent in shelters dug in the woods, until the escape on rickety buses and on foot from Sanski Most to Travnik and to Pula. After months spent in Istria as refugees, here comes Italy, in the Belluno Dolomites: first Colle Santa Lucia, then Gosaldo, then La Valle and Agordo. There is a new home, a new school, a new language, new friends. Everything is a challenge for Sanel that he faces with enthusiasm and determination in every moment of his existence among different work experiences, eventually becoming an entrepreneur and starting a business (timber trade) that leads him to work intensively with his homeland. 

Sanel tells his story through small scenes, photographs that rediscover the essential moments of his life, and he does so on a summer day in 2020, while cycling during his Everesting, the endurance challenge in which cyclists repeatedly ascend and descend the same hill, until they reach a cumulative height of 8,848 meters, the height of Mount Everest.

“Leaving Sanski Most. The war in Bosnia, the escape on foot and Everest by bicycle” is the summary of many long conversations between the protagonist and Ilario Tancon, who set Sanel’s words to paper, giving shape to a text that offers a dual narrative thread (the challenge of Everesting and the biography) and that addresses those who love contemporary history and those who love bicycles but see this marvel of mechanics not so much as a means to achieve athletic performance but as a way to discover small and large stories and get to know the human soul a little more closely.

Free admission.

Book presentation