Sarajevo

Sarajevo is a young city by European standards. The Ottomans took control of Bosnia in the 1460s, and around 1461 the governor Isa-beg Ishaković set up a new town at a crossing of the Miljacka river, where a trade road met the valley. The name comes from saray, a Turkish word for a palace or a governor’s house. Merchants and craftsmen settled around a market that became Baščaršija, and the city grew quickly as a trading stop between Istanbul, Dubrovnik and the Adriatic.

The great builder of the early period was Gazi Husrev-beg, the governor who completed his mosque in 1531 and paid for a madrasa, a covered market called the Bezistan, a caravanserai and a clock tower. Sarajevo was by then a city of guilds: coppersmiths on Kazandžiluk, saddlers, tanners and goldsmiths each had their own lane, and many of those trade names are still on the street signs. The city was also a refuge. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain after 1492 settled here in numbers, and the Orthodox and Catholic communities built churches under Ottoman rule.

Ottoman Sarajevo suffered in 1697, when Prince Eugene of Savoy raided the city and burned much of it. Little wood-built housing from before that date survived, which is why the oldest stone buildings, the mosques and bridges, matter so much to the skyline. Through the 18th and 19th centuries the empire weakened, and Bosnia became a place of unrest and reform.

In 1878, after the Congress of Berlin, Austria-Hungary took over the administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Sarajevo changed fast. Engineers laid out straight streets west of the old town, built a tram, put up the neo-Gothic cathedral and the pseudo-Moorish city hall, and set up a national museum. The formal annexation came in 1908. On 28 June 1914 a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife near the Latin Bridge, and within weeks Europe was at war.

After the war Sarajevo became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then a city occupied and damaged in the Second World War, when most of its Jewish community was deported and killed. In socialist Yugoslavia the city was rebuilt with wide avenues, tower blocks and factories, and in 1984 it hosted the Winter Olympics, the high point of its modern self-image. The story after 1992 is told in the next chapter. What the old town gives you is the earlier record: streets that have kept their trades and their shape for five centuries.

In the spring of 1992, as Yugoslavia broke apart, Bosnia and Herzegovina voted for independence in a referendum and was recognised as a state. Fighting began across the country, and from early April Bosnian Serb forces, positioned on the hills around the valley, began to shell and besiege Sarajevo. The siege lasted until February 1996, about 1,425 days, the longest of a capital city in modern warfare. Around 11,000 people in the city died, many of them civilians, though figures differ by source.

Daily life meant water and heat shortages, shelling and sniper fire on open streets. The wide avenue west of the old town was nicknamed Sniper Alley because gunmen on the hills could shoot at it, and people learned to cross corners at speed. Trams and buses ran only in short stretches. Residents collected water in plastic bottles, burned furniture and books for heat, and ran theatre, art and even a film festival by candlelight. Some of the most repeated attacks happened at the Markale market, where shells killed dozens of people on 5 February 1994 and again on 28 August 1995.

On the night of 25 August 1992 the city hall, which held the national library, was hit by incendiary shells and burned. A large part of the collection was lost, in one of the worst destructions of books in modern Europe. The National Museum and the Oriental Institute were also damaged. In 1993 the defenders dug a tunnel of about 800 m under the airport runway, linking the besieged city with government-held land at Butmir. It carried food, weapons, supplies and people, and a short section is preserved as the Tunnel of Hope museum.

International mediation, the July 1995 killings at Srebrenica, and a NATO air campaign in August and September 1995 helped bring the war toward an end. The Dayton Agreement, signed in December 1995, set up the current structure: two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, and a joint state. The siege was declared over in February 1996.

The traces are easy to find if you look. The Sarajevo Roses are red resin patches in the pavement where a mortar shell left a mark. Cemeteries of white markers climb the hillsides. Some buildings still have bullet scars, while others have been rebuilt, like the city hall reopened in 2014. Many local people have strong personal stories, so visitors should listen more than they comment, and avoid taking sides in political debates. The museums below give the facts; a good local guide gives the context.

Sarajevo is sometimes called the Jerusalem of Europe because a mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox church and a synagogue stand within a few hundred metres of each other, and all four have a long record in the city. That is not a slogan but a piece of urban geometry you can walk in ten minutes. The Ottomans left the mosques of the bazaar, the Austrians built the cathedral on the modern avenue, and the Orthodox and Jewish communities kept their old temples in the streets between.

The Muslim community is the largest in the city, and the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque is its main historic place of worship. Five times a day the call to prayer (ezan) rings out from the minarets; in the evening you also hear church bells. The Sacred Heart Cathedral, completed in the 1880s, serves the Catholic community, and the Old Orthodox Church near the bazaar is one of the oldest Serbian Orthodox churches in the city, with a small museum of icons. The Sephardic Jewish community, which arrived after 1492, left a synagogue and the story of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The Sarajevo Haggadah is an illuminated Jewish manuscript made in Spain around 1350, brought here by refugees, and now kept in the National Museum. It survived the Second World War when a museum curator smuggled it out of the city, and again in the 1990s, when it was protected during the siege. It is not always on public display, so ask at the museum. The story of the book has become a symbol of the city’s habit of protecting what belongs to all its communities.

Today the population is mostly Bosniak, with Serb, Croat and other communities, and the relationship between them is complicated by the war and by the political structure of the country. Visitors will meet warm hosts and easy conversation, and they will also hear strong opinions. The best approach is to ask questions and listen, avoid political arguments about the 1990s, and not assume who belongs to which group.

The practical etiquette is simple. Dress modestly in religious buildings: cover shoulders and knees, take off your shoes in a mosque, and cover your hair if you are a woman where signs ask. Do not enter during prayers, do not photograph worshippers, and keep your voice down. In the bazaar, the calls to prayer are part of the soundtrack and shops may pause for a few minutes. You can plan a single walk that passes all four traditions: mosque, church, cathedral and synagogue, with coffee between.

Food in Sarajevo is short and simple, and most of it can be eaten standing or sitting on a plastic stool for less than the cost of a coffee at home. The three foods you will meet on the first day are burek, ćevapi and Bosnian coffee, and each has its own rules that locals take seriously.

Burek is the flaky pie sold in a buregdžinica. In Bosnia the word burek means the meat pie only. Cheese pie is sirnica, spinach is zeljanica and potato is krompiruša, and calling a cheese pie a burek can get a polite correction. You buy a portion by the weight or the size, eat it with a glass of plain yoghurt, and pay in cash. Pies are baked in the morning and often sell out by mid-afternoon, so breakfast is the time to go.

Ćevapi are small grilled sausages of minced beef, served five or ten at a time inside a soft flatbread called somun with raw onion and often a spoon of kajmak, the salty clotted cream. The two most talked-about grills in the bazaar are Željo and Hodžić, and locals argue about which is better. The order is quick: say the number, say sa lukom for onions, and eat. It is a meat dish and there is nothing for vegetarians except side salads, so people who do not eat meat use the bakeries and the market.

Sit-down restaurants like Dveri and Inat Kuća serve the older dishes: bosanski lonac, a slow-cooked stew of meat and vegetables; begova čorba, a creamy chicken and okra soup; sogan-dolma, stuffed onions; and japrak, stuffed vine leaves. Trout from the mountain rivers is common. For dessert, look for baklava, hurmašice (small syrup cakes) and tufahija, a poached apple stuffed with walnut cream.

Coffee is a ritual. Bosnian coffee is boiled in a small copper pot (džezva) and served with a small cup (fildžan), a sugar cube and a glass of water. You pour a little into your cup, let the grounds settle, and sip slowly. It is close to Turkish coffee but locals call it Bosnian coffee, and a coffee here is not a break but a conversation. A good coffee house will let you sit for an hour without pressure. Plan one stop in the morning and one in the afternoon, and make one of them in a busy house on the bazaar.

The market at Markale is the best place to see what people buy: cheese, honey, dried meat, fruit and bread. Go before noon, taste before you buy, and remember that the plaques near the entrance mark the victims of the 1994 and 1995 attacks. Budget about KM 40 to 70 a day for food and coffee, and carry small notes: most counters do not take cards.

The best way to read Sarajevo’s architecture is to walk west from the Sebilj to the National Museum and watch the styles change under your feet. The walk takes about an hour, and you cross five centuries in a straight line.

The Ottoman quarter starts at the bazaar. Small single-storey shops with wooden shutters line lanes that follow old trades: Kazandžiluk for coppersmiths, Kundurdžiluk for shoemakers, Sarači for saddle makers. The mosque of Gazi Husrev-beg and the covered Bezistan are stone and lead-roofed, with domes and a single slender minaret. The Svrzo House shows the domestic side, with a courtyard, a separate men’s guest room and women’s rooms, and painted ceilings. The stone bridges over the Miljacka, including the Latin Bridge, are part of the same system.

Under Austro-Hungarian rule from 1878 the city grew west along the river. Ferhadija and the streets around it are lined with buildings in the historicist style of Vienna and Budapest: arcades, cornices and balconies. The Sacred Heart Cathedral is neo-Gothic, copying the twin-tower plan of northern European churches. The city hall, the Vijećnica, is a different story: its designers chose a pseudo-Moorish style with horseshoe arches and red-and-cream stripes, an attempt to give the new rulers an Oriental look that fitted Bosnia. The National Museum, built in 1913, is a set of pavilions around a botanical garden, a modern plan for its time.

The socialist period added modernist towers and civic buildings. The twin office towers on the west side of the centre, the sports halls built for the 1984 Winter Olympics and the large post office are examples, and many are still in daily use. Some of the Olympic sites, such as the bobsled track on Trebević, were abandoned after the war and are now covered in graffiti; you can walk them with care, staying on the marked paths.

Then look at the small things that show the city’s recent past: mortar scars filled with red resin, called Sarajevo Roses; bullet marks on façades; and the newest buildings, glass hotels and shopping centres, that came in the 2000s. The mix can feel chaotic, and it is also honest. A good route is to start at the Sebilj, walk to the Vijećnica, cross to Ferhadija, pass the cathedral, ride the tram to Marijin Dvor and end in the museum garden.

Sarajevo sits in a bowl, and the mountains around it shape everything from the weather to the war. Trebević (1,629 m) rises to the south-east, Igman (about 1,500 m) and Bjelašnica (2,067 m) to the south-west, and Jahorina (1,916 m) a little further to the south-east. All four are within an hour of the centre, and in winter they turn the city into a base for skiing.

The 1984 Winter Olympics, held from 8 to 19 February, were the first hosted in a socialist country and a source of great civic pride. Alpine events took place on Jahorina and Bjelašnica, ski jumping on Igman, and bobsled and luge on Trebević. The city built sports halls and hotels for the games, and the mascot, a wolf named Vučko, became a lasting symbol. During the siege of 1992–96 the mountains were used by the besieging forces, and many of the venues were damaged or mined. Some have been rebuilt, but the bobsled track was abandoned.

The Trebević cable car, first opened in 1959, was destroyed in the war and reopened in 2018. It runs from the lower station in Bistrik to the top in about 15 minutes, and a short walk from the upper station leads to the old bobsled track, now a concrete channel with curves covered in graffiti. Stay on the marked paths: outside them, mines were laid and some areas remain uncleared. The view from the top takes in the whole valley, the minarets and the red roofs of the old town.

Winter is the season for skiing on Jahorina and Bjelašnica, from about December to March depending on snow. Lift passes and equipment rental cost less than in the Alps, and the resorts are used by families and beginners. Summer brings hiking and mountain biking; the Bjelašnica area is also the starting point for walks in the Dinaric mountains. The Vrelo Bosne park at the western end of the tram is flat and easy for children, with river springs and horse-drawn carriages.

A good plan is to give the mountains a half day: ride the cable car in the morning when the air is clearest, walk the top for an hour, and be back in the old town for a late lunch. In winter, check the smog; the mountain tops often sit above the layer and give a clean view. Always keep to paths, carry water and a warm layer, and follow local advice on mines and weather. Check the cable car is running: it stops in wind and for maintenance.