Sarajevo 1957 — the year they published the big book and burned the big han
The received view of 1957 in Sarajevo is a book and a plan. Less remembered is what the same year did to the city's Ottoman fabric — the Mevlevijska tekija flattened by the communist authorities, the Morića Han burned in December — and the one small opening on Bravadžiluk that outlived them both.
The received view of 1957 in Sarajevo is a book and a preface. Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt published Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno — Architecture of Bosnia and the Way to Contemporary — in Ljubljana that year, with Le Corbusier writing the preface. It became the founding document of Bosnian architectural modernism, and the frame Neidhardt would use for the next twenty years of Sarajevan planning (see Grabrijan and Neidhardt).
The book is the part of 1957 the city remembers.
The part it does not remember is what the same year did on the ground. The Mevlevijska tekija, built in 1462 by Isa-beg Ishaković as the first Sufi lodge in the city he had just founded, was flattened by the communist authorities. In December, the Morića Han on Sarači, the sixteenth-century han (traveller’s inn) that had held 300 travellers and 70 horses through Ottoman and Habsburg Sarajevo, burned. The one opening from 1957 that is still running is a small ćevabdžinica on Bravadžiluk. Its owner’s family name was Ferhatović. Three generations later, they are still on the grill.
The book Le Corbusier prefaced
Grabrijan died in 1952. The book he had been writing with Neidhardt for fifteen years was finished by Neidhardt alone and published five years later in Ljubljana, at Državna založba Slovenije. It carries both names on the cover. Le Corbusier — who had known Neidhardt directly, from Neidhardt’s 1933–35 years at 35 Rue de Sèvres — wrote the preface.
The argument the book made was that the Bosnian Ottoman house was already modernist in spirit. The doksat bay window, the divanhana first-floor room, the avlija courtyard, the terracing on the slope so each house preserved the sightline of the house behind it — Grabrijan and Neidhardt read these as principles, not as picturesque features, and argued the modern Bosnian architect should build on them rather than clear them away. It was a rare kind of book: two Central-European-trained modernists arguing for the intellectual dignity of an inherited local tradition, and doing it in the language of Le Corbusier’s universalism.
That argument shaped four decades of Sarajevan planning, most visibly on the Marijin Dvor axis and in the Ciglane housing of 1976. It is the part of 1957 that made it into English-language architectural histories.
What was flattened, spring 1957
Isa-beg Ishaković, the same Ottoman commander who founded Sarajevo in 1462, established the city’s first Sufi lodge that year on the north bank of the Miljacka at Bentbaši. It belonged to the Mevlevi order, the whirling dervishes of Konya. Eugene of Savoy’s raiders burned it down in 1697. Vedžihi-paša rebuilt it in 1781 with a small mosque beside it. It stood for another 176 years.
In 1957, the communist Yugoslav authorities demolished it completely. The site is on the same bend of the river you now cross on the way from Baščaršija toward Vratnik. There is nothing to see there. The specific reasons for the 1957 demolition are not clearly recorded in the sources this site has drawn on, and would repay proper archival work.
The oldest continuously-operated institution in Sarajevo, in the strict sense of a named building with a continuous purpose, was gone by the end of the summer.
What burned, December 1957
The Morića Han sits on Sarači, halfway between the Sebilj and the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, in the tightest heart of Baščaršija. It was built in the sixteenth century as part of the Gazi Husrev-beg endowment — the same vakuf that runs the mosque, the library, and the covered bezistan — and it was designed as a merchant’s inn for the Balkan trade routes that ran through the city. At capacity it held 300 people and 70 horses. The courtyard is Ottoman two-storey wood, the ground-floor arcade in dressed stone.
In December 1957 the han burned. Not to the ground — the stone shell survived — but the interior wooden galleries went. It sat scorched for the better part of fifteen years while conservators argued about what to do with it. The restoration ran from 1971 to 1974, working from the surviving stone and old photographs. In 1998 the vakuf took the building back and it is again in Gazi Husrev-beg endowment hands.
If you stand in the courtyard today, everything above the arcade line was rebuilt from the ground after the 1957 fire. What you are looking at is a very careful copy.
What opened, on Bravadžiluk
Eleven years before Željo opened, in 1957, a man named Ferhatović started grilling ćevapi on Bravadžiluk, the short pedestrian street that runs east from the Sebilj. The shop he opened is still there. His sons inherited it. Their sons run it now. Three generations of the same family on the same grill, and Petica Ferhatović is the oldest still-operating ćevabdžinica in the city (see the ćevapi shortlist for how it sits alongside the four other Baščaršija institutions).
Portions come in fives and tens. The bread is fresh somun, the onion is raw and fresh, the meat is beef-and-lamb hand-mixed. On a Tuesday morning before eleven, the counter is quiet and you can hear the grill. On a Saturday at one in the afternoon, you queue.
That is the opening from 1957 that is still functioning as a building for its original purpose, without needing to be rebuilt.
What survives
The manifesto is more famous than the ćevabdžinica. That says something about how architectural history is written. What survives from 1957 in Sarajevo, as physical fabric on the ground, is: the ideas in a book that shaped everything you can walk on Marijin Dvor and Ciglane; a restored old inn on Sarači that came back through fifteen years of careful work in the 1970s and is now used for cafés and small shops; a new Mevlevi tekija at the Kovači memorial complex, opened in spring 2013 with donations from the Municipality of Selçuklu in Turkish Konya, that carries the name and the order of the older one; and, on Bravadžiluk, five ćevapi in a somun.
The 1957 opening that lasted longest without needing to be rebuilt is the ćevabdžinica. Sixty-nine years on the same grill.
Sources & further reading
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