Few European cities pack so much history into so little space as Sarajevo. Within just a few hundred metres of the old town you'll find a 16th-century Ottoman mosque, a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral, an old Orthodox church and one of the oldest synagogues in the Balkans: that's why Sarajevo has been called the 'Jerusalem of Europe', a crossroads where East and West literally touch. A line marked on the pavement of Ferhadija street — the 'Sarajevo Meeting of Cultures' — separates the Ottoman city of narrow lanes and bazaars from the Austro-Hungarian city of grand façades; crossing it means changing worlds in a single step.
But Sarajevo is also the city of two wounds that marked the 20th century. Here, at the Latin Bridge, on 28 June 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lit the fuse of the First World War. And here, between 1992 and 1996, the city endured the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare: almost four years surrounded, shelled from the mountains and cut off from the world, with the Tunnel of Hope under the airport runway as its only lifeline. The 'Sarajevo roses' — mortar scars filled with red resin in the asphalt — remember the victims with a restraint that is deeply moving.
This guide explores Sarajevo with a practical and respectful eye: how to plan your days between the Baščaršija bazaar, the mosques and the churches; how to understand the memory of the war without voyeurism, at the Tunnel, the History Museum and the roses; how to take the cable car up Trebević and take a look at the Olympic bobsleigh track; where to eat ćevapi and drink Bosnian coffee; and how to escape to the mountains of the 1984 Games. Sarajevo is welcoming, resilient and surprisingly cheerful, and it usually leaves travellers moved and wanting to come back.
Sarajevo's history begins with the Ottoman conquest: the city was founded in the 1460s by governor Isa-beg Ishaković, who built the mosque, market, baths and bridge that formed the original urban core. The name comes from the Turkish 'saray' (palace) and 'saray ovası', the palace field. Under the Ottomans, and above all thanks to the legacy of the great patron Gazi Husrev-beg in the 16th century, Sarajevo became a prosperous trading city of mosques, bazaars, hans and a remarkable coexistence of Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Sephardic Jews who arrived after the expulsion from Spain. In 1878 it came under Austro-Hungarian administration, which modernised it and gave it its Central European face. On 28 June 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand next to the Latin Bridge triggered the First World War. After 1945 it was a prosperous city of socialist Yugoslavia and host of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Between 1992 and 1996 it suffered the longest siege of a capital in modern warfare during the break-up of Yugoslavia. Today it is a rebuilt, lively, peaceful capital that keeps the memory of all this in its stones. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of the country: Sarajevo, the capital where East meets West, and the Olympic mountains and towns of the centre and north-east around it.
Read the history of Sarajevo and the centre →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.
If you book from here we earn a commission and you pay no more. Prices and availability come from Civitatis.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Sarajevo is, at heart, an Ottoman creation. The Miljacka valley had Illyrian, Roman (nearby Aquae Sulphurae, in today's Ilidža) and medieval Slavic settlements, but the city as we know it was born in the 1460s, shortly after the Ottoman Empire absorbed the medieval kingdom of Bosnia. The governor Isa-beg Ishaković then put up the founding buildings of a Muslim city: a mosque, a covered market, a hammam (public bath), a bridge over the Miljacka, a caravan inn and his own residence, the 'saray'. The city's name came from that palace and the field around it, the 'saray ovası': Sarajevo.
The big leap came in the 16th century with Gazi Husrev-beg, governor (sanjakbey) of Bosnia and one of the Empire's great patrons. Between 1521 and 1541 he gave Sarajevo an extraordinary set of monuments: the great mosque that bears his name (1531), a madrasa, a library, a bezistan (cloth market), baths, fountains and a public kitchen for the poor, all funded through pious endowments (vakuf). With his backing, Sarajevo became the most important city in Bosnia and one of the great Ottoman urban centres in the Balkans. It had dozens of mosques, neighbourhoods (mahala) built around them and a lively bazaar, the Baščaršija, divided by craft guilds.
Ottoman Sarajevo was already a cosmopolitan city. Bosnian Muslims lived alongside Orthodox and Catholic merchants and craftsmen. Above all, there were the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, who settled in the city, built their synagogue and brought their language (Ladino) and their culture. That coexistence of faiths, which would last for centuries, is the root of the multicultural character that still defines Sarajevo.
Sarajevo enjoyed its Ottoman golden age in the 16th and 17th centuries. It was a rich, populous city whose busy trade linked it with Istanbul, Dubrovnik and Venice. Urban life was refined, with mosques, tekkes (dervish lodges), fountains and coffee houses (in fact, coffee reached Europe largely through cities like this one). Most of the population was Muslim, but Orthodox, Catholic and Sephardic communities were well established, each with its own neighbourhoods and places of worship.
That boom ended in 1697. During the Great Turkish War, a Habsburg army led by Prince Eugene of Savoy made a lightning raid on Sarajevo, sacked the city and burned almost all of it. The disaster was brutal: most of wooden Sarajevo went up in flames, and many residents fled or died. The city was rebuilt but never fully regained its former importance. Through the 18th and early 19th centuries it went into a slow decline, made worse by epidemics and by tensions between the central Ottoman government and local Bosnian notables.
In the 19th century, the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of nationalism in the Balkans reached Bosnia too. Bosnian lords revolted against reforms imposed from Istanbul, and peasant uprisings followed. The great uprising of 1875-1878 in Bosnia and Herzegovina, against taxes and Ottoman rule, drew international attention and brought an era to a close: at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the great powers decided the province's fate.
In 1878 the Congress of Berlin handed the administration of Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria-Hungary. The empire occupied the province despite local resistance and formally annexed it in 1908. For Sarajevo, four decades of rule from Vienna brought radical change. The city modernised at full speed: the railway arrived, along with the tram (Sarajevo was one of the first cities in Europe with a permanent tram service), street lighting, banks and new Central European architecture that sat side by side with the Ottoman bazaar. Grand buildings went up, as did the Catholic Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, the striking pseudo-Moorish Vijećnica and broad avenues. The result was the double city, Eastern and Western, that still defines its centre today.
But discontent was simmering beneath the modernisation. Many Bosnian Serbs wanted union with Serbia, and underground nationalist groups such as Young Bosnia emerged. That unrest exploded on the morning of 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was visiting Sarajevo with his wife Sophie. Next to the Latin Bridge over the Miljacka, Gavrilo Princip, a young member of Young Bosnia, shot and killed the couple.
The assassination was the spark that set off the First World War. In the weeks that followed, Europe's system of alliances dragged the great powers into a war that would leave millions dead and redraw the map of the world. Sarajevo was thus written into world history for good as the place where the 20th century of catastrophes began. The building on the corner where the assassination happened now houses a museum about that period.
After 1918, Sarajevo became part of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929. The Second World War hit the city hard. In 1941 it came under the control of the Independent State of Croatia, an Axis ally, and Sarajevo's Sephardic Jewish community, one of the oldest and most deeply rooted in the Balkans, was almost entirely wiped out in the Holocaust, along with Serbs and Roma. In just a few years that tragedy erased an essential part of the city's multicultural soul. Yugoslav Partisans liberated Sarajevo in 1945.
In Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, Sarajevo became the capital of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and enjoyed decades of growth and modernisation. New neighbourhoods of apartment blocks went up (such as Novo Sarajevo and Dobrinja), industry arrived, and the city became firmly established as a place where Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and others lived together, with high rates of mixed marriage and a strong sense of shared identity.
Its proudest moment came in February 1984, when Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics, the first held in a socialist country. The mountains around the city (Jahorina, Bjelašnica, Igman, Trebević) filled with ski runs, and the city showed the world a modern, open and confident face. That bright image of Olympic Sarajevo would make the contrast with what came barely eight years later all the more painful.
When Yugoslavia broke up and Bosnia and Herzegovina became independent in 1992, a war broke out that split the country along ethnic and national lines. Sarajevo, capital of the new republic and a symbol of coexistence, was encircled. From April 1992 to February 1996, Bosnian Serb forces positioned in the mountains around the city kept it surrounded and under fire for nearly four years. It was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. This text treats the subject soberly and points readers to the extensive historical and legal literature on it.
Throughout those years, civilians lived without a regular supply of electricity, water or gas, short of food and under constant artillery and sniper fire. The main avenue became known as 'Sniper Alley'. Thousands of people died, many of them civilians, including many children. Events such as the Markale market massacres (1994 and 1995), caused by mortar shells, had a huge international impact. Even so, the city kept up an extraordinary spirit of resistance: schools, theatre, newspapers and concerts carried on, and there was even a beauty contest under the shelling.
The only link to the outside world was the Tunnel of Hope, dug by hand in 1993 beneath the runway of the UN-controlled airport. Food, aid and weapons came in through it, and the wounded went out. The war across Bosnia left close to a hundred thousand dead and millions displaced, and it included atrocities such as the 1995 Srebrenica genocide, later tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The Siege of Sarajevo ended after the Dayton Agreement, signed at the end of 1995, which brought the war to a close. Today the 'Sarajevo Roses', mortar craters filled with red resin, quietly remember the victims in the pavement.
The 1995 Dayton Agreement ended the war and organised Bosnia and Herzegovina into two entities within a single state: the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska. Sarajevo stayed the capital, although part of its eastern outskirts went to Republika Srpska (today's Istočno Sarajevo). Rebuilding the city, and above all rebuilding coexistence, took a long time. For years, bullet-riddled buildings and empty lots stood alongside restoration work, and many residents never came back.
Over time, Sarajevo came back to life. Landmark monuments were restored, such as the Vijećnica, which reopened in 2014 after burning in 1992. The Trebević cable car was rebuilt in 2018. The city's cultural life returned too, with major festivals such as the Sarajevo Film Festival, which was born during the siege and is now one of the most important in South-East Europe. Tourism grew, drawn by the unique mix of histories and cultures, the warmth of the people and affordable prices.
Today's Sarajevo still carries the weight of its history and the problems of a complex country that is sometimes politically deadlocked. But it is also a lively, young and welcoming capital, proud of its place at the crossroads of cultures. Strolling through Baščaršija with the smell of Bosnian coffee in the air, crossing the line between East and West, stopping at a Sarajevo Rose or watching the sunset from Žuta Tabija lets you understand, in just a few hours, how one city could be both the stage where a tragic century began and a symbol of resistance and reconciliation.
