Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Hidden Gem · Marijin Dvor · 3 min read
History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina
A 1963 socialist-modernist concrete building on Zmaja od Bosne — formerly the Museum of the Revolution, now Bosnia's modern-history museum, with the most rigorous siege exhibition in the city.
- Established
- Founded 1945; current building opened 1963
- By
- Boris Magaš (1963; National Award "Viktor Kovačić" the same year)
Address
Zmaja od Bosne 5, Marijin Dvor
Hours
Typically Mon–Fri 09:00–19:00, Sat–Sun 09:00–14:00. Verify on arrival.
Price
~5 BAM adult; reductions for students
Getting there
Tram 1, 3 or 5 to Marijin Dvor; the building is next door to the National Museum, on the south side of Zmaja od Bosne. Five minutes' walk west from the Holiday Inn.
Time needed
1.5–2 hours for the permanent exhibition; longer if the temporary exhibitions are running.
Best time
A weekday morning, ideally paired with the National Museum next door.
Coordinates
43.8559° N 18.4014° E
Navigate
The History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Historijski muzej Bosne i Hercegovine) sits on Zmaja od Bosne, in the Marijin Dvor museum strip, next door to the National Museum. It was founded in 1945 as the Museum of the People’s Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, renamed the Museum of the Revolution in the Yugoslav-era, and rebranded simply as the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina after 1995. Its remit covers Bosnia’s modern history — broadly from the late 19th century to the present, with the 1992–95 war as the institutional centrepiece.
Architecturally, it is one of the most significant museum buildings in Sarajevo. Completed in 1963 to the design of the Croatian architect Boris Magaš, in the international style: a long horizontal volume on a concrete frame, with large floor-to-ceiling glass walls facing the street. It won the Viktor Kovačić national prize the year it opened, and was designated a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012. Read it as a piece of socialist Yugoslavia’s confident civic modernism; the building’s restrained dignity is part of the visit.
What’s inside: Besieged Sarajevo
The permanent exhibition on the upper floor is Besieged Sarajevo (Opkoljeno Sarajevo), the museum’s documentary record of the 1,425-day siege from 1992 to 1995. It is, in my opinion, the most rigorous treatment of the siege available to the public anywhere in the city.
What it contains:
- A reconstructed room of the Holiday Inn — the hotel where international press were largely based during the siege — restored with siege-era furniture, a typewriter, and a satellite phone. The Holiday Inn itself sits two minutes’ walk away across Marijin Dvor; the reconstruction makes the geography legible.
- Hand-cranked siege radios, kerosene lamps, makeshift heating stoves built from artillery shells. The objects of daily survival.
- A wall of siege-era newspapers — the Oslobođenje paper continued to publish almost without interruption from a basement office, on improvised paper, throughout the war. The wall of front pages is, on its own, a remarkable record.
- Photojournalism from the siege, with credits to Reuters, AP, and the local press; the section is documentary rather than aestheticised.
- A short video room with archive footage and survivor interviews.
Captions are in Bosnian and English, short and factual. The framing is documentary, not commemorative — closer to the Imperial War Museum in London than to a memorial site like Galerija 11/07/95. Allow at least ninety minutes for the upper floor; two hours if you read everything.
The lower floor and the temporary exhibitions
Downstairs holds the museum’s rotating temporary exhibitions, which over recent years have covered everything from socialist-era industrial design to the history of the Sarajevo Jewish community to the cultural production of the siege itself. Check the museum’s site for what is currently up.
The lower-floor foyer also keeps a small permanent collection of Yugoslav-era posters, photographs, and memorabilia — much of it from the museum’s original Museum-of-the-Revolution period. A quietly fascinating archive of a state that no longer exists.
How to use the visit
For a single Marijin Dvor museum morning:
- National Museum (3 hours) — arrive at opening, see archaeology, ethnology, the botanical garden, and the Sarajevo Haggadah at one of the morning viewing windows.
- A short walk five minutes west along Zmaja od Bosne.
- History Museum of BiH (1.5 hours) — go straight to the upper floor for Besieged Sarajevo; the lower-floor temporaries afterwards.
The two museums together give you, in a single morning, the full historical arc of Bosnia and Herzegovina — from Illyrian helmets and Roman milestones at the National Museum, to the front pages of Oslobođenje from December 1994 at the History Museum.
Pair the afternoon with the War Childhood Museum on Logavina, fifteen minutes’ tram and walk back east — and you have read the country.
Sources & further reading
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