Lovers overlooking Sarajevo 20 years after the war: Chris Leslie’s best photograph

The couple were just strangers blocking my view. But as they reached out and embraced each other, it seemed an optimistic image representing the young people of a city that had suffered'

I first visited and photographed Sarajevo in 1996. I had been volunteering in neighbouring Croatia and managed to hitch a ride in to Bosnia in a UN vehicle. The war and siege had ended a few months before and the city was enjoying its long-awaited peace. Sarajevans took to its scarred streets in huge numbers, meeting with friends and drinking coffee safe in the knowledge that they wouldn't be struck down by a sniper or shell.

The destruction of the city at that time was jaw-dropping, surreal and seemingly total: rows upon rows of broken, bombed-out high-rise flats; shell craters and explosion indents everywhere; hospitals, offices and factories all in ruins. This was urbicide, a late-20th-century Dresden or Stalingrad. Everyone who lived through the nearly four-year siege had a nightmare to share.