The Journal · Explore Sarajevo
Long-form pieces from a small editorial bench in Sarajevo — coffee, sevdah, the bobsled track, the books that survived five empires, the streets you cannot pronounce. Written slowly. Sourced honestly. None of it AI-assembled.
43.8563° N · 18.4131° E
Latest story · 30 May 2026
Heritage · 30 May 2026
Eight museums, three days, one short editorial about which ones are worth the time and in what order.
Sarajevo has more museums than its size suggests. Eight of them are worth real time, and most can be seen on foot from the city centre in two long days. Here is which to go to, in what order, with addresses, hours, and the time each one actually needs.
Editor's picks
If you have ninety minutes, read these three. They cover, between them, what the journal cares about: heritage, ritual, and the city's working memory.
The Sarajevo Haggadah is a Sephardic Hebrew manuscript made in Northern Spain around 1350, in Sarajevo since at least the late Ottoman...
Sarajevo gets compared to other cities a lot. Istanbul for the bazaar, Vienna for the Habsburg quarter, Berlin for the war-history walks....
Sarajevo has five annual festivals worth planning a trip around — the Film Festival in late August, Baščaršija Nights through July, the...
The full archive
20 field notes, oldest at the bottom. Filter by category or scroll.
Sarajevo has more museums than its size suggests. Eight of them are worth real time, and most can be seen on foot from the...
The Sarajevo Haggadah is a Sephardic Hebrew manuscript made in Northern Spain around 1350, in Sarajevo since at least the late Ottoman period, held...
Sarajevo gets compared to other cities a lot. Istanbul for the bazaar, Vienna for the Habsburg quarter, Berlin for the war-history walks. The comparisons...
Sarajevo has five annual festivals worth planning a trip around — the Film Festival in late August, Baščaršija Nights through July, the Winter Festival...
Sarajevo is the only European capital where you can walk for ninety minutes in a straight line and pass through four centuries of architecture:...
Sarajevo had at least seven Ottoman stone bridges in its 16th-century prime. Four survive: Šeher-Ćehaja (1585), Kozija Ćuprija (16th c.), the Latin Bridge (1798...
Sarajevo is not on UNESCO's World Heritage List, and probably never will be in the form most travellers expect. Two other UNESCO registers do...
Sarajevo sits in a valley, which is why every walk uphill is also a free viewing platform. Nine vantage points worth the climb, ranked...
Bazardžani. Bravadžiluk. Čizmedžiluk. Sarajevo's bazaar streets sit on the page like a typo. Here is how to read them, mispronounce them, and survive the...
Sarajevo is the European capital where the seam between Ottoman and Habsburg architecture is marked by a brass plate set into a pedestrian street....
Ryan Sidhoo's first feature, The Track, follows three teenagers training as luge athletes on the shell-pocked ruin of the 1984 Sarajevo Olympic course. Co-produced...
The Bosnian word sevdah comes from the Arabic sawda, meaning melancholy. The music it names is older than the American blues and shares an...
Inat does not translate. The closest English word is stubbornness, but inat is stubbornness with honour. The most famous example in Sarajevo is the...
Bosnian coffee is not a beverage. It is an excuse. To slow down, to sit, to listen.
For the price of a tram ticket and a cable-car fare you can swap café noise for pine silence and watch Sarajevo light up...
A pigeon-soundtracked, coffee-paced wander through Sarajevo's 1462 Ottoman bazaar. The places locals love and the ones travellers usually miss.
Ten little grilled sausages, a fluffy somun bread, a spoon of kajmak, raw onion. The whole soul of Bosnian comfort food, refined to ten...
Sevdah is Bosnia's blues. Songs of love, longing, and loss, sung over saz and accordion in small rooms that smell of plum brandy and...
Forty minutes from the city you can ski on the same slopes that hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, for a fraction of the cost...
Walk the Miljacka from Vijećnica to Skenderija and you cross five centuries of architecture without leaving the riverbank.
