Bosnia Thunderstorm Soundscape | 17 Minutes of Rain After the Heatwave

An Englishman in the Balkans is a personal podcast about life, travel, culture, and storytelling in Bosnia and Herzegovina, told from the perspective of a British-born creator who has made this country home.Expect gentle reflections, real places, local voices, field recordings, and stories that go beyond the usual headlines.01 July 2026.Last night across northern Bosnia, the weather finally broke.After days of heavy heat, the kind that seems to sit on the house, the garden, the dogs and your own shoulders, the thunderstorms arrived. I had hoped to capture them as a timelapse, but like so many creative plans, it didn’t quite come out as expected.What I did manage to record, though, was something much more intimate: This 17-minute soundscape of rain, thunder, and the atmosphere changing over our little corner of rural Bosnia and Herzegovina.Across the country, the heat had been building.Weather reports had warned of high temperatures, unstable air, sudden storms, heavy showers, strong gusts of wind and even hail in some places. It was that familiar summer pattern here: days of fierce heat, then the sky begins to shift, the pressure changes, the air turns restless, and suddenly the storm arrives.At home, our three dogs reacted in their own ways. Two of them were completely unbothered, as if thunder was just another background noise of village life. But the tiniest one, Fibi, does get worried when the storms come.So while the rain fell and the thunder rolled, I cuddled up with her and kept her close.And she was good as gold.This soundscape is not dramatic in the polished sense. It is simply a real moment from a real night in Bosnia: the rain on and around the house, the rumble of thunder, the feeling of the heat finally lifting, and a small frightened dog finding comfort beside me.To be honest, we enjoyed both the rain and the rapid drop in temperature.Sometimes a recording does not capture what you planned.Sometimes it captures something better.If you enjoy these stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina, you can find more at:Website:Substack:YouTube:Support the Podcast:Interested in starting your own podcast later in life?My self-paced course, Start With Your Voice, is designed for late creators who want a calm and simple way to begin:FIND OUT MORE: