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Heritage · ·6 min read

Sarajevo's iron fences — the pheasant on Sime Milutinovića 15, and other pieces you walk past

The Habsburg residential palaces of central Sarajevo hide, on their staircases and balconies, wrought-iron work that a visitor can walk within ten metres of and never look up at. A stylised pheasant on Sime Milutinovića Sarajlije 15. A Vancaš-designed altar fence that won an 1892 Vienna prize before it was installed in Sarajevo. A cast-iron owl on Titova 6. None of these are catalogued in the tourism materials. A short field guide to what to look up at when you walk the central Habsburg quarter.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Walk into the entrance hall of an old Habsburg-era palace on Strossmayerova, Vrazova, Ćumurija, or Obala Kulina bana, the kind of four-storey mixed residential-and-commercial building the administration commissioned between 1878 and 1918, and look up. You will see the staircase.

More precisely: the staircase’s iron fence.

They are usually black. Sometimes green under a dry old coat of paint. Occasionally repainted white by a well-meaning building manager in the 1970s. They are wrought, cast, and sometimes combined with wood. They carry floral rosettes, geometric knots, and, on Sime Milutinovića Sarajlije 15, a stylised pheasant at the top of the newel post.

They are, in the strictest architectural sense, the smallest surviving pieces of the Habsburg Sarajevan idea. When the buildings were designed, the same architects who drew the exterior drew the fence. When the fences were manufactured, they were sometimes serial and sometimes bespoke. When they went up, the Sarajevo of 1900 briefly had a staircase-fence culture at the level of Vienna and Budapest.

Boris Trapara’s joint PhD (INALCO Paris + IBU Sarajevo, 2019), the same volume that maps the Vienna–Sarajevo paired buildings, devotes Section 3.8 to a walking-tour catalogue of these fences. He photographed most of them himself in 2016 and 2018. What follows is a shorter guide to what he found, and where to see it.

What the fences are made of

Two decorative techniques dominate: cloisonné (French cloisonné, in the Trapara text often transliterated cloisdne), the classical Continental method of treating enamelled iron with compartments; and champlevé (champleri in Trapara), an older technique in which the iron itself is recessed and inlaid. Both techniques travelled with Habsburg trained metalworkers from Vienna to Sarajevo in the 1880s and 1890s. They did not travel alone.

The Ottoman craft tradition already present in Bosnia, the metalworking heritage of Kazandžiluk and the coppersmiths’ guild, met the Habsburg techniques in the same workshops. Professor Ibrahim Krzović (whose 1987 Arhitektura Bosne i Hercegovine 1878–1918 is the classical Bosnian reference on the period) argues that Ottoman-period metalwork in the Balkans had already, in the 15th century, influenced the Venetian-Oriental school of European metalcraft. What arrived from Vienna in 1880 was, in effect, an already-Balkan-inflected tradition coming back the other way. The Sarajevo fences of 1900 are Ottoman iron met by Central European iron in the same building.

The Vijećnica in Sarajevo, one of the Habsburg-era buildings whose iron fences and metalwork this article catalogues.
Vijećnica — one of the Habsburg buildings with surviving iron detailing. Photograph: Ladislav Boháč, Wikimedia Commons, CC0

The catalogue, by street

Trapara’s Section 3.8 catalogues something like twenty specific fences. What follows is a walking-tour subset, the ones worth pushing a door open to see. Every address is verifiable on foot.

Obala Kulina bana 20, Salom Palace, 1901. Architect Josip Vancaš. Two-story staircase fence with wrought-iron floral crown decorative elements repeated every three steps. The handle is wood. Trapara considers this fence unique in Sarajevo: the composition is not serial but continuously repeated with a floral central motif of leaves and fruits. In good preservation.

Ćumurija 5, a representative wrought-iron fence. Single flat iron elements repeated in series, with floral decoration and geometric shapes enclosed in a rectangular frame. Trapara treats this as the type-specimen: the average fence a Sarajevan of 1905 would have walked past a dozen times a day.

Ćumurija 6. The fence has been replaced at some point with an inadequate new fence, one that doesn’t match the original in scale or style. A useful example of what happens when a building loses its details.

Strossmayerova 3. Iron bars closed in circles, arranged serially in one whole staircase-fence. Trapara singles it out as a rare example where decoration develops in width, height, and space.

Strossmayerova 4. The first-floor fence is completely missing. Documentary evidence for what neglect looks like.

Marienhof, from 1899. The largest residential-business palace of Habsburg Sarajevo. Its iron staircase fence is not the most representative example, it is in a neglected state, but the fence is architecturally unusual: two composite units combined in the pattern (a + b + b + a + b + b + a + …) rather than the serial repetition seen elsewhere. Worth seeing for the pattern.

Mula Mustafe Bašeskije 31. An Art Nouveau fence, one of the very few of its kind in Sarajevo. Trapara compares it explicitly to the fences of Victor Horta’s palaces in Brussels. If you were curious how far the fin-de-siècle Art Nouveau vocabulary reached, this address is the far edge.

Zelenih beretki 16. Also Art Nouveau in language, though combining floral with geometric. Trapara calls it “material evidence of Sarajevo’s involvement in world architectural trends”, a small but load-bearing point about what Habsburg Sarajevo actually was.

Vrazova 16 and 18. In Trapara’s judgement, the finest examples of iron fences in the city. Both are combinations of circular and straight elements with floral decoration. Vrazova is a short street north of the Miljacka; both buildings are still standing.

Valter Perić 2 and Skenderija 7. Two fences that clearly point to serial production, the same fence in two locations, likely from the same workshop. Useful to see side by side.

Sime Milutinovića Sarajlije 15. The stylised pheasant. A wrought-iron figurative element, cast as the newel post’s decorative crown, different from anything else in Trapara’s catalogue. Trapara calls it “a valuable artistic contribution”, which is professional restraint for “unique in the city and delightful”. The building is in the Habsburg core; the pheasant is on the first-floor landing.

Behaudina Selimovića 7 and Kralj Tvrtko 10. The simplest of the catalogued fences. Named for completeness, worth seeing to calibrate the range.

The public and sacral fences

Beyond the residential-business palaces, Trapara catalogues iron fences on public and religious buildings. Four are worth noting:

Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1889). Interior altar fence by Josip Vancaš. Before installation, the fence was presented at the Vienna annual exhibition, where Vancaš received a special design award for it. This is one of the clearest single documented examples of Habsburg Sarajevan architecture being recognised at metropolitan level. The fence is still in place at the altar; the cathedral is open to visitors most afternoons.

Archbishop’s Seminary and Church of St. Cyril and Methodius. Outer and inner staircases, iron fences by Vancaš. The Seminary building is on Josipa Štadlera street.

Villa Mandić courtyard fence, Petrarkijna street. Architect Karel Pařík. A rare surviving Pařík-designed fence in a residential courtyard rather than an interior staircase.

The National Museum and National Theatre. Iron work by Pařík on both. The National Museum’s fences are visible from Zmaja od Bosne; the National Theatre’s are in the interior.

What earthquakes don’t do

Fences do not fall to earthquakes. They fall to overpainting, to well-meaning renovation, to inadequate replacements, and to the slow neglect Trapara documents building by building. In several palaces the first-floor fence is already gone or “completely replaced with a new inadequate fence.” Strossmayerova 1 has been repainted in a colour that “has completely covered certain decorative elements.” This is heritage disappearing at close range, one bucket of primer at a time.

Walk the four or five streets in Trapara’s list. You are looking at a slice of the Habsburg city no guidebook points to. Most of the fences will still be here in ten years. In twenty, fewer.

Sources

  • Boris Trapara, From Vienna to Sarajevo, role models and replicas in the architecture of Austro-Hungarian period, joint PhD dissertation (thèse en cotutelle), INALCO Paris and International Burch University Sarajevo, defended 13 December 2019, especially Section 3.8: New ornamental aesthetics: Iron fences in the residential and business palaces in Sarajevo. HAL: tel-02992615
  • Borislav Spasojević, Arhitektura stambenih palata austrougarskog perioda u Sarajevu, 2nd edition (Sarajevo: RABIC, 1999). The classical Bosnian reference on the residential palaces themselves.
  • Ibrahim Krzović, Arhitektura Bosne i Hercegovine 1878–1918 (Sarajevo: Umjetnička galerija BiH, 1987). The reference on the wider Habsburg-era architecture.
  • Vjekoslava Sanković Simčić, cited in Trapara Section 3.8 on the special aesthetic values of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Habsburg-period architecture.

Sources & further reading

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