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Heritage · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — Hotel Central opened in 1889, and Vancaš put horseshoe arches on the front

Josip Vancaš was 30. Hotel Central was his first big Sarajevo commission. He decided the right decorative language for a new imperial hotel in an occupied Ottoman city was not Vienna Historicism but Vienna Historicism with Islamic motifs bolted on — horseshoe arches, muqarnas cornices, arabesques, an onion dome over the corner tower. Selling the Orient to Habsburg visitors, 130 years before the tourism board.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Josip Vancaš was 30 years old in 1889. He had arrived in Sarajevo three years earlier, in 1886, a fresh graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts with a commission to design the Sacred Heart Cathedral. That building consecrated on 14 September 1889. On the same city map, in the same season, his other big commission was going up — a hotel on the corner of Franz Joseph Street and Ćumurija.

It opened in 1889 as Hotel Central. It was the second hotel in the city, after Hotel Europe, which had opened two years earlier. It sits on what is now Zelenih Beretki — same street, different name — and it is still, in 2026, a hotel.

Here is the odd thing about Vancaš’s design. The hotel is a European four-storey commercial block, with retail on the ground floor, a ballroom on the piano nobile, and rooms above. Perfectly conventional for late-1880s Vienna or Prague. But Vancaš dressed it in Islamic decoration. Horseshoe arches on the first floor. Muqarnas motifs on the cornices. Arabesque friezes. A small onion dome over the corner tower.

The reason was marketing. The empire was selling Bosnia to European travellers as the closest Orient to Vienna, and the hotel’s decoration was part of the pitch. A visitor arriving from Budapest or Vienna, on the newly opened railway, would step out of the station and, within twenty minutes, walk into a lobby that felt convincingly Eastern without being so foreign it was unsettling. Horseshoe arches, muqarnas, arabesques — the visual vocabulary of Islamic architecture without the specific Ottoman-Bosnian details.

Vancaš’s first big Sarajevo year

The story on this site is usually that Karlo Paržik is the Habsburg-era Sarajevo architect — the one who did the Vijećnica, the National Museum, the Ashkenazi Synagogue. That is partly a reflection of the fact that Paržik was Czech and stayed. Vancaš, who was Croatian-Slovenian by background, was based partly in Zagreb, and his name gets slightly less coverage in the Sarajevo-only literature. But by strict count of Sarajevo commissions Vancaš is ahead — 200-plus buildings across the Habsburg-era portfolio.

1889 was his breakthrough year. The Sacred Heart Cathedral consecrated in September. Hotel Central opened around the same time. Both were his commissions, both won on competitions or personal appointment. He was still living at the small office he had rented on what is now Ferhadija. And on the drawing board, already, was the Napredak building, the Gazi Isa-begova banja (a Habsburg-era hamam), and the Ženetić residential-commercial block on Ferhadija that would open in 1898.

Two hundred more Sarajevo buildings followed. Any afternoon walk from Baščaršija to Marijin Dvor puts you in front of ten of them.

What Vancaš borrowed and where he borrowed it from

Vancaš was not an Islamic-architecture scholar. Neither was Paržik. Neither was anyone else on the Habsburg architectural bench. What they were using was the standard nineteenth-century European Orientalist vocabulary — the same repertoire the British had put on Brighton Pavilion in 1815, and that Owen Jones had catalogued in The Grammar of Ornament in 1856, and that every European architect trained after about 1860 had in his sample book.

The specific elements on Hotel Central were:

  • Horseshoe arches on the first-floor windows, borrowed from the Andalusian-Moorish tradition — Alhambra, Córdoba’s mosque, the like.
  • Muqarnas — the stalactite-honeycomb pattern — worked into the cornices. Muqarnas are a Mamluk and Persian device rather than an Andalusian one, but the vocabulary was fungible in the 1880s.
  • Arabesque friezes — the geometric-vegetal patterns — worked into the polychrome tiling.
  • An onion dome over the corner tower. This is more Central European than Islamic; Vancaš would use variations of the corner-tower-with-dome trick on ten other Sarajevo buildings.

None of it was authentically Ottoman-Bosnian. The Ottoman buildings across the street on Baščaršija — the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, the Kolobara han, the Morića Han — do not have horseshoe arches or muqarnas cornices. Ottoman Sarajevo used pointed arches, stone rustication, and clay-tile roofs. Vancaš was not copying what he could see two blocks east. He was reaching for a generic European idea of “Islamic architecture” and applying it to a European hotel.

What the hotel became

Hotel Central stayed a hotel for the entire twentieth century, through five state changes. Habsburg, then Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, then independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. The name stayed the same. The interior was renovated several times. The exterior is very close to what Vancaš drew.

Today the building is owned and managed by an Irish company, Templeville Developments Ltd., which runs it as a mid-range boutique hotel with a spa and gym in the basement. If you check in, you sleep in a Habsburg-era Vancaš building with Islamic decoration on the facade, at Habsburg-era prices adjusted for inflation. Which, given the city, feels about right.

Vancaš was 30 in 1889. He designed another 200-plus buildings before he died in 1932. The one on the corner of Zelenih Beretki and Ćumurija is where the run started.

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