Sarajevo History: Empires, Civic Life and the City Where East Meets West

Sarajevo fills a narrow valley along the Miljacka river, and almost every period of its past can be read in a short walk along the water. Ottoman mosques and a timber bazaar stand a few streets from Austro-Hungarian civic buildings, an Orthodox church, a synagogue and a Catholic cathedral, and a stone bridge marks the corner where a shooting in 1914 changed the course of European history. Sarajevo history is the story of how all of this came to share one valley, and of how the city kept its civic life through the twentieth century’s hardest years. On our small group tour through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Albania, Day 3 is given to an extensive tour of the city.

Why Sarajevo history matters on a Balkans route

The tour page describes the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a city that is sometimes called the place where east meets west, ringed by mountains and once known as a religious melting pot. The phrase is a cliché, but it points to something real. Sarajevo was founded by the Ottomans, governed for forty years by the Habsburgs, drawn into Yugoslavia in the twentieth century, and besieged in the 1990s, and each of those periods left buildings and institutions that are still in use.

That layering is why the city sits at the heart of the route. Our overview of the Balkans history tour from Dubrovnik to Kotor follows Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans, Venice and the Habsburgs across six countries; in Sarajevo most of those threads meet in one valley. The religious map matters too. Our article on how the land shaped the peoples of the Balkans describes Bosnia as a historic border zone between Croatia and Serbia, set apart by the large part of its population that adopted Islam under Ottoman rule. Sarajevo is where that mix became a city.

An Ottoman foundation: Isa-beg Isaković and the waqf city

Historians generally treat Sarajevo as a planned Ottoman foundation rather than the slow growth of a medieval town. The founding date usually given is 1462, the year recorded in the vakufnama, or endowment deed, of Isa-beg Isaković, the Ottoman governor of the region. Writing for the Waqf Directorate of the Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Professor Haris Dervišević lists what that deed set up in a single year: a mosque, a tekke (a dervish lodge), a bridge, a caravanserai with shops, a hammam, a water supply and mills. The Encyclopedia of Modern Europe gives the same date and describes Isa-beg beginning work on his residence and a mosque on the site.

The waqf, a charitable endowment whose income paid for public buildings and services, was the engine of Ottoman town-making, and Sarajevo is a clear example of it. The city’s official tourist board, Visit Sarajevo, records that the founder named the new settlement Saraj and built the Emperor’s Mosque (Careva džamija) first (it gives 1461 as the founding year), followed by a lodge for travellers, an administrative centre and housing. Dervišević argues that before 1462 there was no city on the site with the institutions and infrastructure needed for urban life; within a few decades an Ottoman provincial town, with its own markets, baths and water supply, had grown up on the river.

Baščaršija and the mahalas: how the Ottoman city worked

The Ottoman city had two halves. At its centre was the čaršija, the commercial quarter, and Baščaršija, the main market, is still its core. Visit Sarajevo puts the number of shops at more than a thousand, and that its lanes are still named after the trades practised in them: Kazazi for the button makers, Kovači for the blacksmiths. Around the market, on the slopes above the river, lay the mahalas, the residential neighbourhoods. Business happened in the čaršija and family life in the mahalas, a division that still shapes the way the old town is laid out.

The city grew quickly. According to Visit Sarajevo, more than a hundred mosques were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the river was spanned by stone bridges, among them the Goat’s Bridge (Kozja ćuprija), which it dates to the sixteenth century. The Encyclopedia of Modern Europe estimates that Sarajevo had between 80,000 and 100,000 inhabitants by 1660 and quotes a seventeenth-century Turkish traveller’s count of 17,000 houses, 170 mosques and 1,050 shops. Those figures are estimates, but they give a sense of the scale the city reached at its height.

Gazi Husrev-beg and the sixteenth-century city

A figure closely associated with Ottoman Sarajevo is Gazi Husrev-beg, whom the architectural archive Archnet describes as an Ottoman governor in Bosnia who funded much of the city’s architectural development. His mosque, a few steps from Baščaršija, carries an inscription above the entrance that Archnet says dates its construction to 1531 (937 in the Islamic calendar); Visit Sarajevo gives 1530 for the start of the work. Archnet attributes the design to Ajem Esir Ali, an architect from Tabriz who later became a chief architect in Istanbul, and describes a central dome about 26 metres high and a minaret almost 36 metres tall.

Around the mosque Gazi Husrev-beg endowed a madrasa, or religious school, with a library, and Visit Sarajevo notes the clock tower, the Sahat kula, about 30 metres high, that stands beside it. The date places the complex early in the reign of Sultan Suleiman, the period that our guide to the art, architecture and golden age of the Ottoman Empire treats as the empire’s high point. Sarajevo was a provincial city, not an imperial capital, but its mosques, schools and bridges were built in the same architectural language as those of Istanbul and Edirne.

Ottoman Sarajevo also suffered setbacks. The Encyclopedia of Modern Europe records that Prince Eugene of Savoy, campaigning for the Habsburgs, sacked and burned the city in 1697, and that after about 1690 the Ottoman governors moved their residence to Travnik. Visit Sarajevo notes that walls were built along the Vratnik quarter after the burning of the city. The city recovered, and it remained under Ottoman rule until 1878.

Four faiths in one valley

Places of worship of four faiths stand within a short walk of one another in Sarajevo’s old centre. The city’s guide, Sarajevo Navigator, says the Old Orthodox Church, dedicated to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and standing in Baščaršija, was first mentioned in 1539, and that it was burned and rebuilt several times, most recently in 1726.

A Jewish community arrived under Ottoman rule. The Museum of Sarajevo records that the old synagogue, which now houses its Jewish Museum, was originally built in 1581 by Sijavuš Pasha, and that the museum opened in 1966 to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Sephardic Jews in Bosnia and Herzegovina. An object closely tied to the city’s Jewish history is the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated Hebrew manuscript that the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina says was made in the kingdom of Aragon, most likely in Barcelona, around 1350, and has been in the museum’s collection since 1894.

The Catholic presence grew most visibly after 1878. The Cathedral of Jesus’ Sacred Heart, seat of the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna, was begun in 1884 and dedicated in 1889, according to the GCatholic church directory, and Sarajevo Navigator records that it was built in the Neo-Gothic style to designs by the architect Josip Vancaš. None of this means the city’s communities lived without tension, and their relative sizes shifted with each change of ruler. What the buildings show is that for centuries Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish Sarajevans shared the same streets and markets.

Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo, 1878 to 1918

In 1878 the Treaty of Berlin passed control of Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ottoman Empire to Austria-Hungary, which administered it while the Ottoman sultan kept nominal sovereignty, and in 1908, the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe records, Austria-Hungary formally annexed the province. Forty years of Habsburg administration changed the city’s face, as the cathedral dedicated in 1889 and the City Hall of 1896 show, and the Museum of Sarajevo devotes a whole branch, the Museum of Sarajevo 1878–1918, to the period. The population changed as well: the same encyclopedia puts the city at about 51,000 people in 1910, with Muslims making up about a third of residents, down from two-thirds in 1879.

A defining building of those years is the City Hall, the Vijećnica. A study published by the Imaneo research project at France’s national institute of art history (INHA) names three architects, Karel Pařik, Alexander Wittek and Ćiril Metod Iveković, and calls the building the archetype of the pseudo-Moorish style in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an Islamic-inspired decorative language chosen by a Central European administration for a city with an Ottoman past. It was opened in April 1896.

The Vijećnica’s later history follows the city’s. The same study records that it housed the national and university library from 1951, that it was burned and partly destroyed in August 1992, during the siege, and that after reconstruction beginning in 1996 it reopened in May 2014.

28 June 1914 at the Latin Bridge

A date known far beyond Bosnia belongs to this period. On 28 June 1914 the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot in the city by Gavrilo Princip. Britannica describes Princip as a Bosnian Serb born in 1894 and associates him with Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), a movement it describes as especially active in Bosnian schools and universities and rooted in resentment of Austrian rule. Britannica also records that Austria-Hungary used the killing as a pretext for mobilising against Serbia, and a month later, the Encyclopedia of Modern Europe notes, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, the opening of the First World War.

The place is small and easy to miss. The Museum of Sarajevo locates the shooting in front of the former Schiller’s shop, at the corner of Obala Kulina bana and Zelenih beretki Street, a building that now houses its Museum of Sarajevo 1878–1918. A few steps away is the Latin Bridge, which Archnet describes as an Ottoman-era stone bridge across the Miljacka: a ledger of 1541 records a crossing on the site, and the present stone bridge replaced one washed away by a flood in 1791, rebuilt in 1798 with funds from a merchant, Abdulah Briga. Princip was tried in Sarajevo and, Britannica records, sentenced to 20 years in prison, the maximum for someone under 20 at the time of the crime; he died at Theresienstadt in April 1918. On Day 3 the tour visits the spot where the Archduke was shot.

How much walking does the Sarajevo day involve?

The tour page describes Day 3 as an extensive tour of Sarajevo but gives no walking distance for it; the tour as a whole is rated Level 2, Moderate. Participants must be able to carry their own luggage, climb and descend stairs, and take part in 3 to 5 hours of physical activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground. Sarajevo’s old town sits on a valley floor with residential quarters climbing steep slopes on either side, so expect some gradients. A Tour Specialist can talk through the day’s pace with you.

The siege and the tunnel, 1992 to 1996

The war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia reached Sarajevo in the spring of 1992. The siege is usually dated from early April 1992 (some accounts give 5 April, others 6 April) until 29 February 1996; the Italian research centre OBC Transeuropa records that the end of the siege was decreed in February 1996, some months after the Dayton peace agreement of late 1995. The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s permanent exhibition, Besieged Sarajevo, concentrates on how residents lived without electricity, water and heating, and on the improvised stoves, lamps and water carts they made. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) later convicted a commander for a campaign of sniping and shelling against civilians in Sarajevo between September 1992 and August 1994; the tribunal’s case summary records that hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands wounded in that period.

The tunnel is the part of this history the tour visits; the tour page describes it as the tunnel used under the city during the war of 1992 to 1995. Visit Sarajevo records that it was dug beneath the airport runway, then under the control of United Nations (UNPROFOR) troops, between 27 March and 30 July 1993, and that it was about 800 metres long, one metre wide and 1.6 metres high. Digging began in the yard and ground floor of the Kolar family house; it became the city’s main link with the outside world, used, Visit Sarajevo records, to move people, food and other necessities, along with cables for electricity and telephones and lines for fuel and water. The damaged house now serves as the Tunnel of Hope museum, where visitors can see artefacts, a documentary and a preserved section of the tunnel.

What else does Day 3 include beyond the city?

After the city tour the group heads north to Stone Ball park, an area of large stone spheres, and then to what the tour page calls the “valley of the pyramids”: hills near Visoko that some claim hide man-made pyramids. That is a modern claim, and archaeologists reject it. In April 2006 Curtis Runnels, a Boston University specialist in the prehistory of Greece and the Balkans, told Archaeology magazine that the claims were “completely unsupported with any kind of factual evidence”. The visit is a look at a modern controversy rather than an ancient monument.

How does Sarajevo fit between Mostar and Belgrade on the route?

Sarajevo is the middle of three linked stops. On Day 2 the group stops in Mostar to view what the tour page calls “the famous bridge” and to walk the Ottoman and medieval quarters, which our article on Mostar’s Old Bridge over the Neretva covers, before continuing to Sarajevo. On Day 4 the route stops at the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad before crossing into Serbia, and on Day 5 a morning city tour of Belgrade takes in the Belgrade Fortress above the Sava and the Danube, where Roman, Ottoman and Habsburg layers meet again. The group spends two nights in Sarajevo, arriving on Day 2 and staying on Day 3, before leaving Bosnia and Herzegovina on Day 4.

Reading Sarajevo in layers

Walk from the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque to the Latin Bridge and on to the Vijećnica and the route crosses five centuries: the waqf city of the Ottoman governors, the Habsburg administrative capital, the corner where the shooting of 1914 took place, and a library rebuilt after the siege. None of these layers erased the one before. Austro-Hungarian facades face Ottoman shops across the same streets.

That is why Sarajevo history repays an unhurried day with a guide. Travelling in a small group of up to 16 travellers with an Odyssey Program Leader, mature travellers reach the city from Mostar, spend Day 3 exploring it, and carry its layered story on to Višegrad, Belgrade and the rest of the Balkans.