Explore Sarajevo / Destinations / Zetra Olympic Hall
Destination · Koševo · 4 min read
Zetra Olympic Hall
The 1984 Olympic ice arena where Torvill and Dean won gold for Bolero, shelled and burned in the 1992–95 siege, rebuilt and now the working ice hall and arena of Sarajevo.
- Established
- 1983; rebuilt 1999
- By
- Lidumil Alikalfić and Dušan Đapa (1983); rebuild by ARH Group (1996–1999)
Address
Alipašina bb, Koševo (next to the Asim Ferhatović Hase stadium)
Hours
Open to the public during scheduled events. The Olympic Museum (when reopened on site) is typically Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00. Verify on arrival.
Price
Event tickets vary. The Olympic Museum (when open) is ~5 BAM.
Getting there
Tram 4 to Koševo, then 5 minutes' walk. Or any tram on the centre line to Skenderija, then 15-minute walk north.
Time needed
30 minutes to look at the building from outside; 1.5 hours for the Olympic Museum (when its current relocation here is completed) plus the surrounding park.
Best time
Daytime for the architecture; evenings for events. The surrounding park is pleasant year-round.
Coordinates
43.8721° N 18.4019° E
Navigate
The Juan Antonio Samaranch Olympic Hall — known locally and everywhere else simply as Zetra — is the ice arena built for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics. It is the venue where the figure-skating, short-track speed-skating, and ice-hockey events of the 1984 Games were held, and the arena where, on the evening of 14 February 1984, the British figure-skating pair Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean performed their Boléro free dance and were awarded the highest scores in ice-dance history — twelve perfect 6.0s out of the nine judges. It remains, for many sports historians, the most-watched figure-skating performance of all time.
Eight years after the Games, in February 1994, the wooden roof of the arena was burned by incendiary shelling during the 1992–95 siege of Sarajevo. The arena’s main hall, which had been used during the early months of the siege as a temporary morgue when the city’s mortuary was overwhelmed, was destroyed. The seats were used as firewood for survivors. The Olympic legacy was, for several years, in ruins.
In 1996, with funding from the International Olympic Committee and from the United States, the rebuild began. The structural frame of the building was preserved; the roof was reconstructed in steel rather than wood; the interior was rebuilt to a near-original specification. The arena reopened on 2 April 1999 under its current name — the Juan Antonio Samaranch Olympic Hall, honouring the long-serving IOC president who had championed the 1984 Games and personally supported the rebuild. Locally, nobody calls it that. It is Zetra.
Why visit
The arena is a working sports venue and is open primarily during scheduled events — ice hockey games, figure-skating practice, and occasional concerts. Visitors who come during the day for the building itself can look at it from the surrounding park and from the slopes of Berg Hum to the north. The architecture is Yugoslav-modernist of the early 1980s — a low oval volume with a curved roof, set in a small park, surrounded by the larger sports campus of Koševo. The original architects were Lidumil Alikalfić and Dušan Đapa.
The reasons to stop:
- The Olympic memorial plaque at the entrance, listing the 14 Bosnia-Herzegovina athletes who competed at the 1984 Games on the Yugoslav team.
- The Vučko mascot — the wolf mascot of the Sarajevo Games, designed by the Slovenian illustrator Jože Trobec. A small bronze statue of Vučko sits near the entrance.
- The surrounding ensemble — Zetra is part of a larger Olympic campus that also includes the Asim Ferhatović Hase football stadium next door (35,000 capacity, the venue for the opening ceremony of the 1984 Games), the smaller training rinks, and the access path up to the Trebević cable car about 20 minutes’ walk south. Read as a single piece of urban planning, it is the most ambitious Yugoslav civic project of its decade.
- The Olympic Museum, when its long-awaited relocation here is complete. The original Olympic Museum sat in a Habsburg-era villa in Marijin Dvor that was destroyed in the 1995 siege. The museum’s archive survived (it had been moved to storage before the siege) and a new permanent display is being assembled on the Zetra campus. Check the current status — the museum has been in transition for several years.
How it fits in the Sarajevo Olympic story
The 1984 Games were spread across multiple Sarajevo venues:
- Zetra — figure skating, short track, ice hockey.
- The Skenderija sports centre — ice hockey (preliminary rounds).
- The Koševo stadium — opening ceremony.
- The bobsled and luge track on Trebević — bobsled and luge.
- The ski slopes on Bjelašnica and Igman — alpine and Nordic skiing.
- The Olympic Museum in Marijin Dvor — exhibition centre.
Of those, Zetra is the most-restored. The bobsled track is the most-abandoned. The ski venues on Bjelašnica are working again as ski resorts. The Olympic Museum is in relocation. Koševo stadium is still in continuous use as a football ground (FK Sarajevo plays here).
The full ensemble can be walked or driven in a long day. Zetra is the most accessible from central Sarajevo — twenty minutes north from the centre, in the Koševo neighbourhood.
Further reading
- The Olympic Bobsled and Luge Track — the sister venue, on Trebević, never restored.
- Sunset on Trebević: the nine-minute commute to a different world — the cable car, also a 1984 Olympic infrastructure project.
Sources & further reading
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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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Ph: Julian Nyča · CC BY-SA 3.0
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