Jajce is one of those towns that seem made for a postcard: a waterfall over 20 metres high plunging right where the old town ends, with the stone medieval town climbing the hillside and a fortress crowning the rock. It is probably the only town in Europe where a major waterfall drops inside the urban fabric itself, audible from the little streets above and visible from the walls.
But Jajce is much more than its waterfall. It was the last capital of the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia, the place where the last Bosnian king was executed in 1463, and also the setting where Tito's federal Yugoslavia was decided in 1943. Its old town packs in medieval catacombs carved out for a duke, the bell tower of St Mary's, a Roman temple of Mithras and Ottoman mosques: layer upon layer of history in just a few blocks.
And just 2 kilometres away are the Pliva lakes, with their row of tiny wooden watermills over the water, a scene straight out of a fairy tale. This guide tells you how to see it all today: how much admission costs (very cheap), how to get there from Sarajevo or Banja Luka, and why Jajce deserves more than a quick stop along the way.
Jajce was founded in the 14th century as a stronghold of the nobleman Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić and became the last capital of the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia. It was here that the last Bosnian king, Stjepan Tomašević, was crowned and, in 1463, executed, when Sultan Mehmed II conquered the kingdom. Hungarians and Ottomans fought over the fortress for decades until it passed definitively into Turkish hands in 1527. After the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian eras, Jajce entered world history on 29 November 1943, when the anti-fascist council AVNOJ decided here on the future federal Yugoslavia. The full story — the medieval kingdom, the last king, the Ottomans, AVNOJ and the war of the 90s — is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Cities of kings, viziers and partisans: Jajce and its royal castle, Travnik, birthplace of a Nobel laureate, and Banja Luka, capital of Republika Srpska.
Read the history of The west and north (Jajce, Travnik, Banja Luka) →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 6 activities in Sarajevo. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
They depart from Sarajevo, 92 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few places pack so much history into so little space as this rocky outcrop where the Pliva River throws itself into the Vrbas. According to the most widespread interpretation, the town's very name, Jajce, comes from 'jaje' ('egg' in the South Slavic languages), after the oval shape of the hill crowned by the citadel; others link it to the Neapolitan influence of the 'Castel dell'Ovo'. Either way, historic Jajce was born at the end of the 14th century as the fortress of one of the great nobles of medieval Bosnia: Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić, Duke of Split and a powerful feudal lord.
Hrvoje built a spectacular stronghold here, making the most of an almost impregnable site: a rock surrounded by the water of two rivers and protected by tiered walls. In the early 15th century he had catacombs carved into the rock beneath the town — an underground crypt-church with a Gothic vault and carved symbols — meant to be his family's mausoleum. Those catacombs, which can still be visited, are one of the few surviving examples of Bosnian Christian architecture from before the Ottomans, and a sign of the power and ambitions of the kingdom's aristocracy.
Long before that, there was already life beneath this hill: a Roman temple to the god Mithras (a mithraeum) from the 3rd-4th centuries AD, preserved in the town centre, shows that the valley was settled and Romanised centuries before any Bosnian kingdom existed. Jajce was born, then, on top of ancient layers, and it would soon become the stage for the final act of independent Bosnia.
Over the course of the 15th century, Jajce became the effective capital of the Kingdom of Bosnia, at a time when the shadow of the Ottoman Empire was spreading across the Balkans. This was the residence of the last Bosnian king, Stjepan Tomašević, who took the throne in 1461 after his father's death. Trying to secure allies against the Turkish threat, Stjepan sought the backing of the papacy: he was the first king of Bosnia to receive a crown sent by the Holy See, from Pope Pius II.
It was no use. In the spring of 1463, Sultan Mehmed II 'the Conqueror' — the same man who had taken Constantinople ten years earlier — gathered a huge army and marched on Bosnia. The king fled from the old capital of Bobovac to Jajce and then further west, but he was pursued and besieged. Lured into surrendering with a promise of safe conduct, Stjepan Tomašević was eventually captured and beheaded on the sultan's orders near Jajce, at the spot known ever since as Carevo polje ('the emperor's field'). With his execution, the medieval Kingdom of Bosnia ceased to exist in 1463 and became the westernmost province of the Ottoman Empire.
The fall was so swift and so symbolic that the last Bosnian king lived on in collective memory as an almost legendary figure. Above the gate of Jajce's fortress you can still see the coat of arms of the vanished kingdom, and the town proudly holds on to its status as the last capital of the medieval Bosnian state.
Jajce's story did not end with the Turkish conquest of 1463: quite the opposite, the town became a pawn fought over by two empires. That same year, King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary struck back and took Jajce from the Ottomans, setting up the so-called 'Banate of Jajce' here, a forward Christian bastion meant to halt Turkish expansion towards Croatia and Hungary.
For more than sixty years, Jajce was a Hungarian island in Ottoman-held territory, under repeated siege. Its fortress, strengthened and well garrisoned, held out time and again against Turkish attempts to retake it, becoming a symbol of Christian resistance in the Balkans. It was a hot frontier, with raids, truces and almost constant war.
The balance broke in 1527 when — after the Hungarian catastrophe at Mohács (1526) and the collapse of the Kingdom of Hungary — the Ottomans finally took Jajce, which was absorbed into the Empire for good. So began the long Ottoman period: the town filled with mosques (the Church of St Mary was turned into a mosque), hammams, fountains and stone houses, and some of its medieval churches took on new roles. Jajce became an Ottoman town of inland Bosnia, losing its old political centrality but keeping its medieval urban fabric beneath the new Islamic layer.
After the Ottoman era, Austro-Hungarian rule from 1878 and incorporation into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia after 1918, Jajce seemed destined to be a small, pretty provincial town. But the 20th century had a second moment in the spotlight in store for it, this time of global reach.
In the middle of the Second World War, with much of the country under Axis occupation and a fierce guerrilla war under way, Josip Broz Tito's Partisan movement chose Jajce for a decisive act. On 29 November 1943, the Second Session of AVNOJ (the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) was held here, an assembly of delegates from all over the country gathered in liberated territory. That session laid the foundations of the future Yugoslavia: a federal, republican state with equality among its peoples and nations, in which Bosnia and Herzegovina would be one of the six constituent republics. The return of the king in exile was rejected and Tito was recognised as leader.
That meeting in a modest hall in Jajce was, in practice, the birth certificate of the socialist Yugoslavia that would last until the 1990s. That is why 29 November became the Yugoslav national holiday (Republic Day), and why Jajce holds a place of honour in the history of the 20th-century Balkans. The AVNOJ hall is preserved today as a museum, a striking counterpoint to the medieval catacombs just a few steps away: within a few blocks of this town, the end of a kingdom was decided in 1463 and the birth of a modern state in 1943.
Jajce's last great test came with the break-up of Yugoslavia and the Bosnian War (1992-1995). Because of its strategic position in the centre of the country, the town was bitterly fought over. In 1992 it fell to Bosnian Serb forces after heavy fighting and was left damaged, with much of its population displaced. In 1995, during the final offensives of the war, it was retaken by Croat-Bosniak forces. Like so many Bosnian towns, Jajce came out of the conflict with material and human wounds and with a population partly reshaped by displacement.
The post-war years brought reconstruction and, with it, recognition of an exceptional heritage. Jajce restored its monuments — the fortress, the catacombs, the medieval churches, the Ottoman mosques — and its waterfall in the middle of town, which had changed after a major flood in 2014 reshaped part of the falls. The town has pushed its candidacy and its profile as one of the country's great historical and natural destinations.
Today Jajce lives mainly from tourism and from its status as the jewel of central Bosnia: the only town in Europe with a large waterfall right in its centre, the last capital of a medieval kingdom, the cradle of federal Yugoslavia and home to the charming little watermills of the Pliva Lakes. Walking its steep streets is like reading, layer by layer, the whole history of this land: Roman, medieval, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav and contemporary, all gathered around an egg-shaped rock between two rivers.
