If you want to feel what it’s really like to be European, go to Bosnia

Sarajevo. What does the name conjure up in your mind? Aerial bombardments in the 1990s are one possibility; the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, triggering the First World War, is another.

I have fonder recollections. I remember as a young schoolboy being engrossed by the 1984 Winter Olympics on television and begging my mother to let me go skiing for the first time.

Today, Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, a state with roughly the same size population as the Irish Republic and one of Europe’s unlikelier winter sports destinations.