A local's guide to Sarajevo. Long-form guides to destinations, neighbourhoods, and hidden corners, written by someone who lives in the valley and pays for his own coffee.
The Ivan Štraus building opened in 1983 as the flagship of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Ten years later some of the first shots of the siege were fired from its upper floors,...
The catalogue
Sarajevo’s working synagogue, built in 1902 in pseudo-Moorish style by the Austro-Hungarian administration for the Jewish community that had grown...
The Avaz Twist Tower is Sarajevo’s tallest building (142 metres, completed 2008). A small public observation deck on the 35th...
Built for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games and last raced for the 1991 World Cup, the bobsled and luge track...
Ferhadija is the broad pedestrian street that begins at the Sarači–Sarači transition (marked by the Meeting of Cultures line in...
A small, deliberately unflashy memorial museum to the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995. Founded by photographer Tarik Samarah in 2012,...
Founded in 1882 to a design by Karel Pařík, Hotel Europe (Hotel Evropa) was the first purpose-built hotel of the...
A locals' atlas
Zlatna Ribica is a tiny bar near Sarajevo Cathedral with a museum-like interior, good coffee and drinks, friendly service, and...
A long-running family-run restaurant on Iza Hrida above the south bank of the Miljacka, looking straight across at Vijećnica and...
Sarajevo’s oldest still-active ćevapi restaurant, opened in 1957 by the Ferhatović family. Three generations in, slightly quieter than Željo, equally...
The Viennese Café at Hotel Europe is the city’s oldest continuously-running coffeehouse, wood-panelled walls, mirrored bar, marble-topped tables, and a...
The Historijski muzej Bosne i Hercegovine sits in a Boris Magaš-designed concrete and glass pavilion from 1963, originally built as...
The smaller of Sarajevo’s two natural springs, on the city’s northern slopes above Faletići. A short steep walk, an icy...
The journal
The Ivan Štraus building opened in 1983 as the Olympic showcase, launched two opposing political parties in 1990–91, briefly served...
Between 1909 and 1910, two British women published widely-read travel books about Bosnia at exactly the moment the region was...
R.W. Seton-Watson visited Sarajevo in 1912 and 1913 before the assassination, returned in 1920 and 1925 to interview the surviving...
Béni Kállay ran Bosnia-Herzegovina from a desk in Vienna between 1882 and 1903. His twenty-one-year tenure as Common Minister of...
The canton’s development strategy cites three numbers that, taken together, form one of the sharpest paradoxes in the Sarajevan economy:...
In 1878, a Habsburg military officer named Armand Schweiger-Lerchenfeld published in Vienna a 245-page ethnographic study of newly-occupied Bosnia titled...
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