Monsieur Chat

For the five months we've been here, I've been borderline obsessed with taking photos of this cat.

He appears on walls all over the city in various poses. Sometimes he seems to be normal (though artful!) graffiti.

Note the shorts--this is back from the first week we were here.

Sometimes he shows up advertising the establishment whose wall he shares.

Huh? Is this advertising? Is this graffiti? I've wanted to write posts about him but couldn't figure out what to say: there are lots of cats painted on walls in Sarajevo?

Then Ruth came to visit. She enterprisingly got her previous employer, the Let's Go travel guides, to employ her to blog about Sarajevo over Christmas break. She told me she wanted to do a post about graffiti so I dragged her to one of my cats. She took a picture and then came home and researched on the internet for half an hour.

Turns out the cats are all by Thoma Vuille, a French artist who started painting the cats, uninvited, on walls and chimneys in Orleans, France. His identity remained secret until 2007. He has now painted them all over the world. His cat has been exhibited at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and you can buy fine art prints of them. He painted in Sarajevo, as far as we can tell, in both 2005 and 2009.

How did she even know which search terms to use? Cats and Sarajevo? This is why we hire professionals.

Here is her post about Sarajevo grafitti , and here are her other posts about Sarajevo.