That was how Mevludin talked. He could talk like this for hours – about the photographs he took, about members of his clan, about his country, about Tito, about things that never normally got said concerning socialism, for he was too old and too famous to fear reprisals from the authorities. That morning in his studio, he also talked about technology, technique, and the teleology of pictorial representations, in his part of the world. ‘We are musical people. The Ottomans imported their own traditions to Bosnia. But the land is too hard for an art such as painting or sculpture, which requires such outlay from the artist. Only now, with the ease of producing these portraits, thanks to the industry and the economics of the Federation, is it possible for families of even modest means to own a picture of themselves.’

He was referring, of course, to his studio portraits. They were the money-spinners which allowed him to buy his flat on Ferhadija Street and to send his elder son away to be educated in Belgrade and the younger one in Paris. He showed me his backdrops: the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, the Miljacka River running through the centre of the city, the bridge at Mostar, the walled city of Dubrovnik, the islands of the Adriatic rising up through those calm blue waters. In front of these scenes he had positioned and photographed countless families from Sarajevo, Travnik, Mostar.

He jabbed a finger at the photograph of the Sephardic Jewish women.

‘But my art is the pictures I take in the street.’

He pulled out another picture from a box. A young woman: dark hair, dark eyes. ‘My daughter-in-law,’ he said. ‘Spanish blood, like you. Her grandmother still speaks the old language.’

I shook my head; I looked nothing like his daughter-in-law.

JUDGE: How well known a photographer was Mevludin?

LUCIJA: Well known before the war outside our country. Famous, within Bosnia. Then came the war, and it inflated the value. By the time peace was declared, Mevludin’s photographs were being bought for ready money by rich expatriate Yugoslavs and a clique of foreign collectors. His scenes of the countryside around Sarajevo, of the old quarters of the city, of the most beautiful daughters of Sarajevo without their headscarves; you could say it turned from an outdated craft, at the time of Mevludin’s death, a forgotten trade packed away in a cupboard, to a hoard of gold later. But his grandson, Omer, even when he was a schoolboy planned on becoming the chronicler of his grandfather’s career.

Lucija was homesick.