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Heritage · ·5 min read

Sarajevo — the Sacred Heart Cathedral was consecrated on 14 September 1889, and it is the third 1889 building in this series

Vancaš's neo-Gothic Catholic cathedral was consecrated on 14 September 1889. The same year, Paržik opened the sharia-judge school on Sagrdžije. The same year, Vancaš opened Hotel Central on Franz Joseph Street. Three big buildings in one calendar year, one for each of three different faiths or functions, all commissioned by a Habsburg state that had been running Bosnia for eleven years. The Cathedral is still the seat of the Archbishop of Vrhbosna.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Three buildings opened in Sarajevo in 1889. Each was significant. Each was commissioned by the Habsburg administration that had been running Bosnia since 1878. Each was designed by an architect trained in Vienna or Prague — nobody local — and each was built on a site that had been Ottoman fabric a decade earlier. The buildings were:

  • The Šerijatska škola on the corner of Sagrdžije and Čemerlina, opened 6 April 1889. Karlo Paržik’s five-year higher-education institution to train sharia judges for the Muslim community. Fake Moorish arches on the outside, Islamic legal education inside.
  • Hotel Central on the corner of Franz Joseph Street and Ćumurija, opened later in 1889. Josip Vancaš’s first big Sarajevo commission — a European hotel dressed in Islamic decoration, to sell the city to Habsburg-era tourists as the closest Orient to Vienna.
  • The Sacred Heart Cathedral on Franz Joseph Street (now Ferhadija), consecrated 14 September 1889. Vancaš again — this time in neo-Gothic. Two Romanesque bell towers. A rose window over the west door. Modelled on Notre-Dame de Dijon.

That is three buildings by two architects in one year, for three different constituencies: Muslim (the school), foreign visitors (the hotel), and Catholic (the cathedral). The Habsburg administration was in a hurry. Bosnia in the 1880s was a construction site.

Why Vancaš, and why neo-Gothic

The Sarajevo Catholic community in 1878 was small. The Habsburg occupation brought a wave of Catholic administrators, soldiers, and settlers, and by the mid-1880s the community had grown enough that the existing parish church on Latinluk (across the Miljacka in Latinska Ćuprija) was no longer big enough. The Archdiocese of Vrhbosna, re-established by Rome in 1881, needed a proper cathedral.

The competition was won by Josip Vancaš in 1884. Vancaš was 25, a Croatian-Slovenian recent graduate of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He was ambitious, well-connected, and had the right education for what the Vatican and the Habsburg administration wanted — Central European ecclesiastical Gothic, not local Bosnian anything.

Vancaš picked Notre-Dame de Dijon as his model. Not the more famous cathedrals of France — Chartres, Reims, Amiens — but the smaller, sharper Burgundian cathedral in Dijon, whose proportions Vancaš thought would work at Sarajevo scale. He compressed the plan (Sarajevo’s Sacred Heart is 41.9 metres long, less than half the length of the largest French cathedrals), moved the rose window down over the west door, and produced a compact neo-Gothic building that reads as European Catholic without pretending to be Chartres.

Construction ran 25 August 1884 to 9 November 1887. Building supervision was contracted to Baron Karl Schwarz of Vienna. The stained glass in the five apse windows was designed by Vancaš and executed by the Tiroler Glasmalerei in Innsbruck.

The interior finishes took another two years. On 14 September 1889 the Bishop of Dubrovnik came up for the consecration ceremony, and the cathedral was formally in use.

What it is today

The Sacred Heart is the seat of the Archbishop of Vrhbosna, and the largest Catholic cathedral in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was damaged during the 1992–95 siege — shrapnel scars on the exterior stonework, some interior water damage — but not destroyed. The damage has been repaired over the last two decades. The building functions as an active parish and as a diocesan seat; regular mass is said in Bosnian and occasionally in Latin.

Two features of the cathedral show up on the flag and coat of arms of Sarajevo Canton:

  • The design above the west door — a stylised Romanesque relief of the Sacred Heart — is part of the Canton’s flag and seal.
  • The two Romanesque towers appear on the flag and coat of arms of the City of Sarajevo itself.

Which is an unusual thing to note: the city’s official emblems carry the silhouette of a Catholic cathedral built by a Habsburg administration to serve a minority community, in a city that has always been majority Muslim. The reason is not that the cathedral is the largest religious building in the city — the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque is more historic — but that the twin Romanesque towers are the most visually distinctive silhouette on the flat Habsburg quarter, and the city administrators who designed the modern emblems picked what they thought made the strongest civic image.

The three-building 1889 pattern

The three 1889 buildings in this series — the sharia school, Hotel Central, and the Sacred Heart Cathedral — are not the only Habsburg-era buildings from that year. But they are the three that tell you the most about what the empire was trying to do.

The empire had occupied a Muslim province. Its response was to fund Muslim institutions (the sharia school), to promote the province to European visitors (Hotel Central), and to build for the Catholic minority the state itself represented (the cathedral). All three buildings were designed by Central European architects trained in Vienna or Prague. All three used decorative vocabularies borrowed from somewhere else — Andalusian Moorish for the school, mixed Islamic Historicism for the hotel, French neo-Gothic for the cathedral. None of them looked like traditional Bosnian architecture.

That last point is worth sitting with. The Habsburg architectural response to Bosnia was to reach for foreign templates — Cairo, Granada, Dijon — rather than to build in the local Ottoman-Bosnian idiom that was still visibly present two hundred metres east in Baščaršija. The reasons were partly political (the empire did not want its state buildings to look Ottoman) and partly professional (nobody on the Habsburg architectural bench was trained in Ottoman-Bosnian design). But the effect, taken together, is a Habsburg quarter of Sarajevo that reads as generic Central European Historicism with Orientalist decoration, not as a Bosnian city.

The Sacred Heart, in that context, is the most straightforward of the three. It doesn’t pretend to be local. It is a Burgundian Gothic cathedral, drawn by a Vienna-trained Croatian, built by a Viennese contractor, consecrated by a Dalmatian bishop, and it is doing exactly what the Catholic Church wanted it to do in 1889 and still does today.

The bells ring on Sunday mornings. Locals attend mass. The Archbishop of Vrhbosna, currently Cardinal Vinko Puljić, uses it as his seat. It is the third 1889 building in this series, and it is still, one hundred and thirty-seven years later, doing its original job.

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