Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / War Childhood Museum
Hidden Gem · Stari Grad (Logavina) · 3 min read
War Childhood Museum
A small museum on Logavina, built from the donated possessions and one-paragraph stories of children who grew up in wars.
- Established
- Opened 27 January 2017
Address
Logavina 32, Stari Grad
Hours
Typically 11:00–19:00 daily. Verify on arrival.
Price
~12 BAM adult; reductions for students and children
Getting there
8 minutes' walk uphill from the Sebilj, on the right-hand side of Logavina before the cemetery.
Time needed
An hour for the permanent collection; longer if you watch the video testimonies in full.
Best time
Mid-morning or early afternoon. The rooms are small and a quiet visit reads better than a crowded one.
Coordinates
43.8597° N 18.4297° E
Navigate
The War Childhood Museum (Muzej ratnog djetinjstva) is a small museum on Logavina street, eight minutes’ walk uphill from the Sebilj, in the Stari Grad municipality. It is the only museum in the world dedicated to children’s experience of war, and it builds its collection from one source: objects donated by people who were children during the 1992–1995 Siege of Sarajevo (and, in the museum’s expanded remit, in other recent conflicts).
Each object — a doll, a hand-stitched bag, a maths book, a Walkman, a teddy bear, a kerosene lamp, an asthma inhaler — is displayed beside a single short text written by the donor, a paragraph or two in the donor’s own voice, telling what the object was, who they were when they had it, and what it meant in the eight or nine months you can survive on a single small object.
There is no graphic photography. There are no weapons. The display is at child’s-eye level, the lighting is soft, and the captions are short. The cumulative effect — across maybe a hundred objects in the permanent collection — is one of the most distinctive museum visits anywhere in Europe.
How it was made
Founded by the Sarajevo writer Jasminko Halilović. In 2010, when he was 21, Halilović published a book called War Childhood: Sarajevo 1992–1995, an anthology of around a thousand short paragraphs from people who had been children during the siege — each one between a few sentences and half a page. The book sold widely in Bosnian and was translated into multiple languages. Out of the project, Halilović and a small team built the museum’s first physical collection: people who had written paragraphs for the book then donated the object the paragraph was about.
Doors opened on 27 January 2017 in a small building on Logavina. In 2018 the museum received the Council of Europe Museum Prize, one of the most-cited museum awards in Europe, citing its “contribution to the understanding of European cultural heritage” and its “original and innovative approach to a sensitive subject”. Its work has since expanded beyond the Sarajevo siege — temporary exhibitions and ongoing oral-history projects documenting children in Syria, Ukraine, Lebanon, and other current conflicts.
How to use the visit
Small — two floors, perhaps ten rooms. An hour is enough for the permanent collection; ninety minutes if you watch the video testimonies in full.
A reasonable order: walk in, take a guide leaflet (English available), and start on the right of the ground floor. Read each caption. Do not skip. The strength of the museum is in the cumulative weight of small things, and skipping erodes that weight quickly.
The temporary exhibition on the upper floor rotates every few months and often deals with children in current conflicts. It is shorter than the permanent collection but worth the additional twenty minutes.
A shop on the ground floor sells the two published anthologies — Halilović’s original War Childhood and the more recent expanded volume — and a small selection of postcards from the museum’s collection. Buying a copy is the cleanest way to take the museum home.
A practical note
This museum is not graphic. There are no images of the dead, no weapons, no remains. The impact is in the everyday objects and the testimonies. It is suitable for older teenagers and adults. Younger children may find the structure (object + paragraph) harder to read than the more overt iconography of the Tunnel of Hope or Galerija 11/07/95. Either of those is a more direct introduction for younger visitors; the War Childhood Museum is the harder, more interior visit.
For a longer war-history day, the conventional sequence is Tunnel of Hope (morning, Ilidža) → Galerija 11/07/95 (early afternoon) → War Childhood Museum (late afternoon). It is a heavy day. Eat early, eat well, and allow a quiet evening afterwards.
Sources & further reading
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