Explore Sarajevo / Destinations / The Sarajevo Roses
Destination · Across the city centre · 4 min read
The Sarajevo Roses
Mortar craters from the siege, filled with red resin and left in the pavement. Memorials the city walks past every day.
Address
Most visible near Markale market, Ferhadija street, Vijećnica steps
Hours
Always accessible
Price
Free
Getting there
Walking the central pedestrian street is the easiest way to find several
Time needed
Built into a wider walk; no time of its own
Best time
Any time. Particularly affecting in morning light.
Coordinates
43.8585° N 18.4313° E
Navigate
You will probably notice the first one without knowing what it is. A scar in the pavement, perhaps a metre across, with the broken concrete filled in with what looks like dark red wax or rubber. The shape is irregular, like a splash. It seems decorative until you understand it isn’t.
This is a Sarajevo Rose (Sarajevska ruža), one of the most haunting forms of memorial in any European city.
What they are
Between 5 April 1992 and 29 February 1996, Sarajevo was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces who held the hills around the city. They shelled the city with mortars, artillery, and rockets continuously for 1,425 days. By some counts, an average of 329 shell impacts per day, with the worst days exceeding 3,000. Civilians were not collateral. They were targets. Markets, bread queues, water lines, schools, hospitals, funerals.
Mortar shells leave a distinctive impact pattern in concrete. A roughly circular pit at the centre, with a star-burst of fractures radiating outward — the trace of the shrapnel scattering across the pavement. This characteristic shape is sometimes called the mortar’s rose. After the war, in places where the impact had killed civilians, Sarajevans filled the craters with red resin, leaving the fracture pattern legible. The result is a permanent, immovable mark on the street. The shape of the shell, in the colour of blood.
The first roses began to appear in 1996, shortly after the siege ended. The project was grassroots. No central authority oversaw the work. Survivors, neighbourhood groups, and family members filled the craters with whatever materials they could find. Most of the surviving roses are concentrated in the central pedestrian streets, where civilians had been targeted on the way to markets, bakeries, and water pumps.
Where to find them
The Sarajevo Roses are not monuments. They have no plaques, no fences, no information panels. They are at street level, embedded in the pavement, often in places where people are walking or queuing for trams. You will see them if you look down. You will miss them if you don’t.
The most visible cluster, and the one with the gravest history, is at the entrance to Markale market, on Ferhadija street in the central pedestrian zone. On 5 February 1994 a single mortar shell fell into the market here, killing 68 civilians and wounding 144 more. It was, at the time, the single deadliest attack of the siege. A second mortar attack on the same market on 28 August 1995 killed another 43 people. That attack was the one that finally prompted NATO airstrikes against Serb positions and, three months later, the Dayton Agreement that ended the war. The roses outside the market mark the impact points of both attacks. A small bronze plaque on the wall lists the names of the dead.
Other roses are scattered through the central streets. Look for them:
- Near the Eternal Flame on Ferhadija
- Outside the Sarajevo Cathedral
- On the steps and pavement around Vijećnica (the City Hall)
- Along Maršala Tita street
- Near several of the central tram stops, where queues were targeted
- Outside schools and hospitals across the central neighbourhoods
There is no good catalogue. The map of the roses is, in a sense, the map of where the siege concentrated.
How to see them
Walking the central pedestrian street Ferhadija from Baščaršija toward the Cathedral and Eternal Flame brings you past four or five roses without trying. Markale is unmistakable. From there, watching the pavement as you walk along the south side of the river toward Skenderija yields several more.
There is no proper tour of the Roses, and we would gently suggest there should not be. They are not visiting hours. They are evidence, sitting in the street, asking only that the people walking past not forget what they are. Most visitors find that the first rose they notice changes how they see every street in the city afterwards.
A note on what’s left
The number of Sarajevo Roses has shrunk over the years as streets have been repaved, buildings rebuilt, and weathered resin worn down by foot traffic. Some have been deliberately preserved. Others have been quietly lost. The municipal government has occasionally proposed formalising a register, and occasionally not. Whatever the number — probably around 200 survive in identifiable condition — they remain one of the most quietly powerful pieces of post-war public art in Europe. The work of an entire civilian population that, asked how it wanted to remember what it had lived through, filled the holes in the pavement with red and walked on.
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Ph: Desemeus · CC BY-SA 4.0
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