Explore Sarajevo / Destinations / Old Jewish Cemetery
Destination · Kovačići, south slopes · 4 min read
Old Jewish Cemetery
One of the largest Sephardic burial grounds in Europe. Founded 1630, terraced into the south slopes above Grbavica.
Address
Kovačići, on the slopes above Grbavica
Hours
Always accessible
Price
Free
Getting there
25 minutes' walk uphill from the centre. Trolleybus 103 to Grbavica + 15 minutes.
Time needed
45 minutes to 1 hour
Best time
Golden hour, especially in autumn
Coordinates
43.8499° N 18.4079° E
Navigate
On the steep south-facing slopes above Grbavica, in a quiet residential pocket of the Kovačići neighbourhood, the Old Jewish Cemetery of Sarajevo climbs the hillside in long terraces of pale weathered stone. It is one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Europe after the Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague, and one of the most important surviving sites of Sephardic culture in the Balkans.
It is also, on most days, almost empty.
The Sephardim of Sarajevo
The story of Sarajevo’s Jewish community begins in 1492, when Catholic Spain expelled its Jews in the same year Columbus sailed for the Americas. Many of those expelled, the Sephardim, were resettled in cities across the Ottoman Empire by Sultan Bayezid II, who is famously reported to have remarked of his rival the Spanish king: You call him a wise king, who has impoverished his own country and enriched mine.
The first Sephardic families arrived in Sarajevo in the mid-16th century. They settled around what is now the small synagogue still known as El Kal Grandi (the Great Temple). The community grew steadily, integrated deeply into Sarajevo’s commercial life, kept its own language — a Hebrew-Spanish creole called Judeo-Spanish or Ladino — and by the 19th century counted some 20,000 members, perhaps a fifth of the city’s population.
The cemetery was founded in 1630.
The stones
The tombstones at the Old Jewish Cemetery are unlike those of any other burial ground in the city. The Sephardic tradition, particularly in its Ottoman variant, produced a distinctive form: a low, house-shaped sarcophagus, carved in solid limestone, with pitched roof-like tops and inscriptions in Hebrew and Ladino carved across the flanks. The oldest stones, on the upper terraces, are nearly four hundred years old. Many inscriptions are still legible.
The cemetery contains approximately 3,800 tombstones. The oldest dated burial is from 1630. The latest pre-Holocaust burials are from the early 1940s. The cemetery was closed in 1966 and is no longer in active use.
What happened here in the 20th century
Sarajevo’s Jewish community was almost entirely destroyed during the Holocaust. When Nazi Germany and the Independent State of Croatia occupied Bosnia in 1941, about 10,500 of Sarajevo’s 12,000 Jews were deported to extermination camps, most to Jasenovac in Croatia, others to camps further afield. Fewer than 2,000 returned. The community never recovered to its pre-war size. Today perhaps a few hundred Jews live in Sarajevo.
During the 1992 to 1995 siege, the cemetery’s location above Grbavica — territory then held by Bosnian Serb forces — made it strategic. Serb sniper teams used the tombstones as cover, firing down into the city. Bosnian government forces returned fire. The cemetery suffered substantial damage: shrapnel scarring, broken stones, mines laid into the terraces. After the war an extensive demining and restoration project was undertaken. Parts of the cemetery remained closed to visitors until well into the 2000s. The cemetery you walk today is mostly cleared and safe, but visitors should stay on the obvious paths.
What you find now
A vast, quiet, terraced hillside of pale stone. The terraces drop away in long lines toward the city, the city itself unfurling below in red roofs, Ottoman domes, Habsburg blocks, the river thread of the Miljacka. Sarajevo, seen from here, is laid out in its entirety. From the highest points of the cemetery the views are panoramic. On a clear day you see all the way to Bjelašnica on the western horizon.
The stones themselves are the obvious draw, but the memorials added in the 20th and 21st centuries are also worth pausing over. A tall central column commemorating the Holocaust victims. Smaller plaques to Jewish soldiers who fought in both world wars. A memorial to Moshe Mevorach, the rabbi who helped save the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century illuminated manuscript that is now one of the most precious objects in the Bosnian National Museum, and a small piece of how Sarajevo’s faiths have repeatedly protected each other across the centuries.
How to visit
The cemetery is always open, with no entrance fee. From the city centre it is a 25-minute walk uphill — across the river into Grbavica, then up the steep streets of Kovačići — or you can take trolleybus 103 to Grbavica and walk the last 15 minutes uphill. The slope is real. Wear shoes that grip, particularly after rain.
Out of respect, the usual cemetery etiquette applies. Keep voices low. Don’t climb on or sit on stones. Don’t photograph any human remains visible in damaged sections. Most visitors stay between thirty minutes and an hour. Combine, if you have time, with a short further walk along the ridge to Vraca Memorial Park — another quiet site with its own difficult history.
It is a place that asks you to stand still, look down at the city, and think about how many cultures have built it. Most of them are still buried within walking distance of each other. That is the story of Sarajevo.
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Ph: Desemeus · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Ph: Julian Nyča · CC BY-SA 3.0
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