Explore Sarajevo / Destinations / The Sebilj
Destination · Stari Grad · 3 min read
The Sebilj
The 1753 Ottoman drinking fountain that became the meeting point of Sarajevo's bazaar — and the pavement everyone in the city has, at some point, fed pigeons on.
- Established
- 1753 (restored 1891)
- By
- Hadži-Mehmed paša Kukavica (founder); restored by Aleksandar Wittek
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Address
Baščaršijski trg (the Sebilj square), Stari Grad
Hours
Open square, accessible at all hours
Price
Free
Getting there
Tram 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to Baščaršija (terminus); two-minute walk
Time needed
Twenty minutes if you stop; sixty if you sit at the café opposite
Best time
Half an hour before sunset, when the bazaar's lamps start to come on
Coordinates
43.8597° N 18.4313° E
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The Sebilj is the small, wooden-roofed, octagonal drinking fountain that stands at the centre of Baščaršija. It is the most photographed object in Sarajevo and, by general agreement, the city’s living room: the place locals send first-time visitors before they send them anywhere else, the corner where the city’s first kiss has happened more times than any other, and the spot the pigeons descend on as if on cue at exactly twenty minutes before sunset.
If Baščaršija is a bazaar, the Sebilj is its punctuation mark.
A short architectural history
The fountain was built in 1753 at the order of the Ottoman vizier Hadži-Mehmed paša Kukavica, then governor of the Bosnia Eyalet. Sebilj (Arabic sabīl) is a category of Ottoman public charity fountain — a kiosk-style structure, often gifted by a wealthy patron, designed to provide free drinking water to passers-by and to travellers. The Sarajevo Sebilj was one of more than three hundred such fountains the city is recorded to have had during Ottoman rule. The vast majority did not survive.
The current building is not the 1753 original. The 18th-century structure stood elsewhere on the same square and fell into ruin in the 19th century. In 1891, under the Austro-Hungarian administration, the architect Aleksandar Wittek built the present Sebilj on a new site about thirty metres east of the original. Wittek’s design is in a deliberate pseudo-Moorish style — an architectural posture the Habsburg authorities used across Bosnia in the late 19th century, intended to legibly mark the territory as historically Ottoman while subtly inscribing it as administered by Vienna. The same style produced the Vijećnica (1896) and the Olomane complex.
What the square does
Although the Sebilj itself is the focal point, the square it stands in is the more useful object. It is bordered by:
- The opening of Sarači street to the west — the spine of the bazaar, leading toward the Gazi Husrev-beg complex.
- Kazandžiluk and Bravadžiluk to the east — the coppersmiths’ and the ćevabdžinicas, respectively.
- Kovači to the north — the steep climb toward the Vratnik cemetery.
- A loose ring of café terraces along its west and south edges, with low tables and good views of the fountain.
Sit at any of those café tables for an hour with a Bosnian coffee and you will see the city pass through. Schoolchildren on excursions. Couples on first dates. Tour groups feeding pigeons. The muezzin’s call coming up out of three nearby mosques at once.
The legend and the tap
The Sebilj has a working brass tap on its east face. The water is drinkable, fed from the city supply, and locals do drink from it. Tradition holds that a sip from the Sebilj will bring you back to Sarajevo — a city superstition, kindly meant, the kind of small civic story that has survived all the larger ones the city has endured.
It is exactly the sort of thing it would be churlish not to do once.
When to come
Any time. The fountain is open square; there are no hours and no entrance. That said:
- Half an hour before sunset is when the bazaar’s lamps come on and the pigeons gather for the day’s last grain. This is the photograph most people are looking for.
- Friday afternoon around prayer is when the surrounding mosques empty into the square. The atmosphere shifts noticeably, and is worth experiencing once.
- Winter mornings are the quietest. The square has nobody on it but the pigeons, the snow, and you.
The Sebilj will not impress you with its scale; it is a small building. It is meant to. Its work is being the place — small, wooden, weathered, generous — that a large city has chosen to stand around for nearly three hundred years.
Order the coffee. Stay the hour.
Sources & further reading
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Ph: Julian Nyča · CC BY-SA 3.0
Stari Grad
Baščaršija
The 1462 Ottoman bazaar of Sarajevo, still a working bazaar. Copper workshops on Kazandžiluk, Bosnian coffee at Morića Han, and a marker in the pavement where the Ottoman city meets the Habsburg one.
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Ph: 11sasapus11 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Stari Grad
Kazandžiluk
Kazandžiluk is the row of coppersmiths' shops that runs east from the Sebilj into Baščaršija. The patterns being hammered here today are the same patterns the smiths' grandfathers hammered. The street is a working workshop, a museum, and a souvenir row in one.
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Ph: Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0
Stari Grad
Kovači Street
A short uphill walk from the Sebilj into the old residential mahala. Coppersmiths and blacksmiths once worked here; today it's Sarajevo's small but serious café row, ending at the Kovači šehidi cemetery where the first president of Bosnia and Herzegovina is buried.
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