The European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF) is scheduled to kick off in Sarajevo on Sunday, exactly 35 years after the 1984 Winter Olympic Games were held in Bosnia's capital. Billed as the largest sports event since the 1984 Olympics to be held in the region, EYOF will bring together more than 1,500 European athletes from 14 to 18 years of age.

The organisers hope that the event would restore some of the Olympic spirit of togetherness to the city which had once employed thousand of young volunteers from across the now divided city to help organise the only Olympics Yugoslavia ever hosted.

EYOF will open at the city’s Kosevo stadium, officially named after the famous Bosnian footballer Asim Ferhatovic, and which is the same place where Croatian figure skater Sanda Dubravcic had lit the Olympic flame in February 1984.

The festival will last until February 16 with winter sports athletes competing in Alpine and Nordic skiing events, snowboarding, figure and speed skating, and ice hockey.

This will also be the first time since the end of the 1992-95 Bosnian War that the country’s two autonomous entities would organise a large event together.

The hosts of the event are today’s Sarajevo and East Sarajevo, two successors to what was once a single city, which has been divided into two separate administration areas by the 1995 Dayton agreement which ended the war.

Located in a valley surrounded by mountains, the sports facilities on the nearby Bjelasnica and Igman mountains are run by Sarajevo, whereas mount Jahorina is controlled by East Sarajevo.

Sarajevo deputy mayor, Ivica Saric, told Croatian state agency Hina that the event will be a unique experience.

“The beauty and importance of EYOF is also a test for the Olympic city of Sarajevo and the still living memory of the 1984 Olympics, which at the time, were the best organised Winter Olympics until then, as the then International Olympic Committee head, Juan Antonio Samaranch, said,” said Saric.

“The main message to young people is to remember the Winter Olympics of 1984, understand those messages of peace, and that we should never let the evil that happened happen again,” Saric told Hina.

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