Explore Sarajevo / Destinations / Kovači Cemetery
Destination · Vratnik · 3 min read
Kovači Cemetery
The shahid memorial above Vratnik. White stones in tight ranks, the city below, and Alija Izetbegović buried among the soldiers he sent to war.
- Established
- 1992
Address
Kovači, Vratnik
Hours
Always accessible
Price
Free
Getting there
12 minutes' walk uphill from Sebilj. Minibus 51, 52, 55 to Vratnik.
Time needed
30–45 minutes
Best time
Late afternoon, in any season
Coordinates
43.8614° N 18.4356° E
Navigate
Above Vratnik, where the cobbled streets of the old residential city begin to ease into the slope of Trebević, a steep field of white stone runs down the hillside in tight ranks. This is Šehidsko mezarje Kovači — the Kovači Martyrs’ Cemetery — the principal burial ground of the Sarajevans killed defending the city during the 1992–1996 siege.
Most of the names on the stones are young. Many are nineteen.
What it commemorates
The siege of Sarajevo lasted 1,425 days. By the end of it, 11,541 of the city’s residents were dead, including roughly 1,500 children, with 56,000 wounded. Some of the dead are buried in family plots across the city, in the older cemeteries that ring the centre. The largest concentration, however, is here at Kovači — soldiers of the Bosnian Army and civilians killed during the defence, interred together in the months and years from 1992 onward.
The cemetery was consecrated as a formal shahid mezarje — martyrs’ cemetery — during the war itself, and continued to be used through the 1990s. It now holds more than 1,000 graves.
The white stones are uniform. Slim, pointed, slightly tapered. Each carries a name and two dates — the second almost always between 1992 and 1996, the first almost always between 1971 and 1975. The arithmetic is unavoidable.
Alija Izetbegović
At the upper edge of the cemetery, in a small landscaped plot, sits a modest stone obelisk shaded by an open-sided dome. This is the grave of Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003), the first president of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the political figure most closely associated with the country’s survival of the 1990s war. He died of natural causes in October 2003 and was buried here, by his own request, alongside the soldiers he had led.
The gravesite was bombed by an unknown attacker on 11 August 2006. The damage was repaired. The political weight of the gesture, on either side, has not entirely faded.
The grave itself is deliberately modest. No statue. No tomb. A small inscribed stone, the dome over it, a few benches nearby. Most visitors stay a minute or two. The view back down across the cemetery, with the city behind it and Trebević on the far ridge, is the part of the visit that takes longer.
The Alija Izetbegović Museum
Just downhill from the cemetery, the Alija Izetbegović Museum occupies the old Ploča and Širokac gate buildings — two of the surviving fortified gates of the 18th-century Vratnik defensive walls. The museum opened in 2007, on the fourth anniversary of Izetbegović’s death.
It is small. Personal documents, family photographs, his presidential robes, a few of the books from his prison years under socialist Yugoslavia (he was jailed twice — in 1946 and again in 1983 — for advocating an Islamic political identity in a country that did not allow it). The captions are sober, in Bosnian and English. An hour is plenty.
It is the right pairing with the cemetery if you want both the person and the consequence.
How to use the visit
The cemetery is always open, with no entrance fee. It is consecrated Muslim ground. Dress respectfully — shoulders and knees covered is the safe default. Keep voices low. Do not photograph individual graves with names visible without thought; many families still visit.
The walk up from Sebilj takes about twelve minutes through the residential streets of Vratnik. The route is signposted in Bosnian; if uncertain, ask for Kovači or šehidsko mezarje and any local will point. Combine with Žuta Tabija, the Yellow Fortress, two minutes further uphill — particularly if you arrive an hour before sunset.
Take the time. The cemetery’s geometry is the answer to the question the rest of the city asks more quietly: what did the siege cost? Walk slowly. Read the dates. Then walk back down through Vratnik in the evening light.
Sources & further reading
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Ph: Damien Smith · CC BY-SA 2.0
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