Sarajevo: history and heritage

About Sarajevo: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Sarajevo Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Walk east to west along Ferhadija and the street changes beneath your feet. At one end is Baščaršija, the Ottoman market of copper workshops, coffee and ćevapi; at the other are the ochre façades of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo. A brass line in the pavement marks where the two meet. Within a few hundred metres stand a sixteenth-century mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral and a synagogue, which is why Sarajevo is often called the Jerusalem of Europe.

At a glance

Names through history: Vrhbosna (medieval), Saraybosna (Ottoman Turkish), Sarajevo.

Peoples: Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, with Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, Roma and others.

A brass line in the pavement marks where the Ottoman city ends and the Austro-Hungarian city begins.

Shaped by: the Ottoman Empire (from the fifteenth century to 1878), Austria-Hungary (1878–1918), Yugoslavia and, since 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Geography: the narrow valley of the Miljacka, ringed by the mountains of the 1984 Olympics.

Sarajevo today

The 2013 census, published by the Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, counted 413,593 people in Sarajevo Canton and 275,524 in the City of Sarajevo. The city’s peoples are Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, with smaller Jewish, Roma and other communities, and its religious life takes in Islam, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity and Judaism.

An Ottoman foundation

People lived in the valley long before the Ottomans: there was a Roman settlement at Ilidža, where the Roman Bridge still crosses the Bosna, and a medieval Bosnian district called Vrhbosna. But the city itself was founded by the Ottoman governor Isa-beg Isaković, whose charter of endowment dates from 1462. He built a mosque, a hammam, a caravanserai and a bridge, and the name Sarajevo comes from the Turkish saray ovası, the field around the governor’s palace.

Gazi Husrev-beg’s city

In the sixteenth century the governor Gazi Husrev-beg gave Sarajevo its great buildings: the mosque that bears his name (1530–1531), the covered Bezistan market, a hammam, a clock tower and the Kuršumli Madrasa (1537), where students still study. Baščaršija grew into a market of guilds, each with its own street: coppersmiths, goldsmiths, saddlers. The Sebilj fountain at its heart is a later wooden copy of an older one, and drinking from it is said to bring you back.

The Sephardic community

Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 reached Sarajevo in the sixteenth century, and spoke Ladino here for four hundred years. The Old Synagogue of 1581 now houses the Jewish Museum, and the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina keeps the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript made in fourteenth-century Spain that survived its owners’ long journey and the wars that followed.

Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo

In 1878 Austria-Hungary took over the administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Sarajevo gained a new city of boulevards, banks and apartment blocks west of the old market. Electric trams ran from 1895. The architects favoured a pseudo-Moorish style, seen at its most splendid in the Vijećnica, the city hall completed in 1896 and later the National Library; it reopened in 2014 after restoration. The Sacred Heart Cathedral (1889) and the Ashkenazi Synagogue (1902) belong to the same years.

1914, 1984 and after

On 28 June 1914 the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were shot near the Latin Bridge, the event that set off the First World War. In February 1984 Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics, and the bobsleigh track on Mount Trebević is now one of the city’s most visited sights. The siege of 1992–1996 cost thousands of lives, and the city honours them; today the Tunnel of Hope and the Sarajevo roses, shell scars filled with red resin, are places of quiet remembrance.

A city of film and music

The Sarajevo Film Festival, founded in 1995, has grown into the leading film festival of South-East Europe, each August. The National Theatre, the Academy of Fine Arts in its former Evangelical church across the Festina Lente bridge, and the sevdalinka, Bosnia’s melancholy love songs, carry on the city’s blend of East and West.

Our advice: start with a Bosnian coffee in Baščaršija, walk west along Ferhadija past the brass line into Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo, and visit the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the cathedrals and the Old Synagogue on the same morning. Then take the cable car up Trebević for the view.

Sources

Population: Agency for Statistics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2013 Census of Population, Households and Dwellings (final results, 2016). History: National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina; Jewish Museum Sarajevo; Gazi Husrev-beg Endowment; Sarajevo Film Festival; Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Sarajevo”.

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