About

A city where you could hear the muezzin call to prayer, the church bells, and the synagogue’s chant — all from one café table. A pluralistic city, founded on respect for difference. — Dževad Karahasan, paraphrased from Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (1993)

Explore Sarajevo exists because most English-language travel writing about the city falls into one of two camps.

The first is the war story. Heavy, well-meaning, often beautifully written, mostly stuck in the 1990s. The siege happened. It still shapes the city in ways visitors should understand. But Sarajevo did not stop existing in February 1996, and a travel journal in 2026 owes the city the rest of the story too.

The second is the listicle. Ten things to do in Sarajevo! You will be told to feed the pigeons at the Sebilj, to walk across the Latin Bridge, and to eat ćevapi at Željo. All three are correct. None of them is half of what you came for.

This is an attempt at the journal in between.

What is here

• Destinations. Long-form guides to neighbourhoods, landmarks, and natural escapes around the valley.
• Hidden gems. Smaller-scale places — bars, bridges, memorials, markets, cemeteries.
• Stories. Field notes on coffee, music, mountains, language.
• Pocket guides. Practical, short, ranked. Where to eat ćevapi. How to spend a perfect day. The tram lines that matter.
• Postcards and a map. Every location plotted, every location collected.
• PDF editions. Everything on the site is also available as a downloadable booklet — see Downloads.

Who writes here

The site is written and edited by Nedim Hadzimahmutovic. One person, one byline. The editorial we you’ll find on the site is a voice convention, not a roster.

I lived in Sarajevo for about twenty years and, as a local and a Bosnian, never really bothered to explore the city. In 2019 I moved to Bali, Indonesia, as a digital nomad and stayed about five years. That is where I met my wife. We married, had a kid, and settled in Jakarta. In late 2025 we moved to Sarajevo, and my wife’s constant curiosity and her questions about the city made me realise I wanted to explore Sarajevo with her, as a joint adventure. That is how exploresarajevo.com began.

If you have a correction, a tip, or a place worth adding, the email is h.nedim@gmail.com. Replies arrive slowly, but they arrive.

Sourcing

• Facts come from publicly verifiable sources — Wikipedia, the Sarajevo Tourism Bureau, museum and institutional pages, the surviving press archives. Pages that lean materially on outside reporting carry a Sources & further reading block at the bottom.
• Photographs are CC-licensed (Wikimedia Commons, Flickr CC) with full attribution to the photographer, source, and licence in every caption.
• Quotations from other writers are short, attributed, and linked.

A note on language

Bosnian words appear across these pages — čaršija, ćejf, sevdah, merak, inat, džezva, fildžan, somun, kajmak, salep, šljivovica. Some of them don’t translate, and forcing them into English flattens what they mean. Context usually carries the meaning. When it doesn’t, the gloss is in parentheses the first time the word appears.

The bookshelf

Half of this site is built on the shoulders of writers who got there before. If you want to read your way into Bosnia before you come, start here:

• Ivo Andrić, The Bridge on the Drina (1945). Nobel Prize 1961. The novel on bridges, time, and empires.
• Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish (1966). 18th-century Sarajevo as a setting for a meditation on cowardice and conscience.
• Mak Dizdar, Stone Sleeper (1966). Poems on the stećci, the medieval Bosnian tombstones.
• Semezdin Mehmedinović, Sarajevo Blues (1992). Prose and verse from inside the siege.
• Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro (1994). Short stories from the same period, told slant.
• Dževad Karahasan, Sarajevo, Exodus of a City (1993). A philosophical memoir, written under shellfire.
• Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (2008) and the essays. Sarajevo from the diaspora, in English.
• Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). The English writer’s 1,100-page Balkan travelogue. Sometimes wrong. Always alive.

Dobrodošli.