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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo — yes it's the capital, and the name literally means 'the place around the palace'

Isa-beg Ishaković founded Sarajevo around 1462 to be an Ottoman regional seat, built around his palace. The name comes from Turkish saray, meaning palace. Four different states have used it as a capital since: Ottoman sanjak, Habsburg province, socialist Yugoslav republic, and the independent country. Not without interruptions. But through every one of those regimes, Sarajevo held the role. And Bosnia's four main religious communities — Muslim, Serbian Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish — still keep their central place of worship within a five-minute walk of each other in the Old Town.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Yes. Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

That’s the answer if you came for the answer. What follows is worth five minutes. Sarajevo didn’t drift into being a capital — it was founded to be one, around 1462, by a named person for a stated reason. The name says so.

What the name means

The word Sarajevo comes from the Turkish saray, meaning palace or governor’s residence, plus the Slavic suffix -evo. Literally: “the place around the palace.”

The palace was built by Isa-beg Ishaković, an Ottoman Bosnian frontier commander. Construction started in the late 1450s, before the formal 1463 conquest of the Bosnian Kingdom. His Vakufnama (endowment deed), the document that establishes Sarajevo as a formal settlement, is dated 1462. That’s the year most people cite as the founding. Some scholars prefer 1461 (earliest construction) or 1463 (the conquest itself).

Isa-beg chose the site deliberately. The narrow Miljacka valley offered defensible geography, water, and roads to both Constantinople and the Adriatic. A pre-existing medieval Bosnian settlement gave him something to build outward from: Vrhbosna (“top of Bosnia,” named for the upper Bosna region and the river-source area a few kilometres west, at what’s now Vrelo Bosne).

The 1462 endowment gave the new settlement a mosque, a public bath, a han (traveller’s inn), a market complex, and the bureaucratic apparatus of a regional Ottoman seat. Sarajevo was purpose-built to be a capital — of the Ottoman sanjak (province) of Bosnia.

That’s why the city has the name it has. It grew up around Isa-beg’s saray.

Four states, one city, 560-plus years

Sarajevo has been the capital of Bosnia, or a capital of Bosnia, across four successive states. Not continuously in every year of every regime — two interludes are worth naming honestly. But through every one of these regimes, Sarajevo held the capital role at some level.

  • 1462–1878: Ottoman sanjak, then eyalet. From Isa-beg’s endowment until the Habsburg occupation. The sanjak was upgraded to a full eyalet in 1580, and to a vilayet in 1867. Sarajevo was the administrative seat for most of it. But there’s an interlude the guidebooks skip. After the Ottoman-Habsburg wars of 1697–99, the pasha’s residence moved to Travnik, about 90 km north-west, and stayed there until 1850. For that century and a half, Sarajevo remained the largest and richest city in the province, but it wasn’t the seat of the pasha. The seat came back in 1850. Sarajevo was formally the capital of the Bosnia Vilayet from 1867 through the 1878 handover. Baščaršija, the Gazi Husrev-beg complex, the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral (1863–1868), and the Old Temple all date from this Ottoman period. The city grew from Isa-beg’s few thousand people to tens of thousands by the mid-17th century.

  • 1878–1918: Habsburg province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Regional capital of the joint Austro-Hungarian administration, continuously across these forty years. This is the period that built the Vijećnica, the Sacred Heart Cathedral, the National Museum, the Ashkenazi Synagogue, and the electric tram network. Population roughly doubled, to just under 52,000 by 1910.

  • 1918–1992: Yugoslav-era capital, with one interruption. Sarajevo was the regional seat of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia until 1929. That year, King Aleksandar abolished the historical Bosnian borders and split the country into nine banovine. From 1929 to 1941 Bosnia as a unit didn’t exist. Sarajevo was reduced to capital of the Drina Banovina, which covered only part of Bosnia plus parts of Serbia. The unified Bosnian republic came back under socialist Yugoslavia in 1945. From then until independence, Sarajevo was capital of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the era of the 1984 Winter Olympics, the Marijin Dvor axis, the Ciglane housing estate, and Yugoslav modernism.

  • 1992–present: independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. The independence referendum ran 29 February to 1 March 1992. Alija Izetbegović declared independence on 3 March 1992. EEC and US recognition followed on 6 April 1992. Sarajevo has been the capital of the sovereign, UN-member state ever since. That includes the 1992–1996 siege, the 1995 Dayton peace accords, and the reconstruction period.

Four states, one city, 560-plus years. Not one unbroken line of capital status. The Travnik and Drina-Banovina interludes cut into that story. But through every one of the four regimes, the city carried the role.

The practical numbers

  • Population: 275,524 in the city proper (2013 census, latest official); Sarajevo Canton total 413,593.
  • Country population: 3,531,159 (2013 census).
  • Altitude: approximately 550 metres above sea level at the Miljacka embankment (sources give 500–550 depending on the reference point); up to 1,627 metres at the summit of Trebević to the south.
  • Coordinates: 43.8563° N, 18.4131° E.
  • Area: 141.5 km² for the city proper; 1,276.9 km² for the Sarajevo Canton.
  • Currency: Bosnian convertible mark (BAM), pegged to the euro at 1 EUR = 1.95583 BAM (a fixed rate, not a floating one).
  • Official languages: Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian — all three mutually intelligible variants of the same South Slavic language, using both Latin and Cyrillic scripts.
  • Time zone: Central European Time (UTC+1; UTC+2 in summer).
  • International airport: Sarajevo International Airport (SJJ), 12 km south-west of the centre. See our airport-to-city-centre guide for practical transport.

Four confessional communities, five minutes’ walk

The single most-cited fact about Sarajevo: its four historical religious communities — Muslim (Sunni), Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Jewish (originally Sephardic, later also Ashkenazi) — all keep their central place of worship within roughly five minutes’ walk of each other in the Old Town.

The four buildings:

  • Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque (1531): the largest historical mosque in the country, on Sarači in the middle of Baščaršija.
  • Serbian Orthodox Cathedral of the Nativity of the Theotokos (Saborna crkva Presvete Bogorodice, 1863–1868): the principal Serbian Orthodox cathedral, on Zelenih Beretki, about 200 metres west of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque. The much older 16th-century Stara pravoslavna crkva (Church of the Holy Archangels), roughly a block away, is a separate smaller building. See our destination page.
  • Stari hram / Old Temple (built 1581; reconstructed after fires in 1697, 1778, and 1813): the historic Sephardic synagogue in the Velika avlija courtyard, about 200 metres south-east of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque. Now houses the Museum of Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  • Sacred Heart Cathedral (built 1884–1887, consecrated 14 September 1889): the largest Catholic church in Bosnia, on Trg Fra Grge Martića, about 600 metres west of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque. Designed by Josip Vancaš after Notre Dame de Dijon.

All four within roughly five minutes’ walk. That’s not an accident. Isa-beg’s Ottoman charter permitted non-Muslim confessional communities to build their own principal worship spaces inside the walled precinct. Successive administrations preserved and expanded the arrangement.

Sarajevo became the capital of a plural country because it was already, on the ground, a plural city.

What to do with this

If you have an afternoon, walk the Miljacka river route from the Latin Bridge east to the Vijećnica. Within twenty minutes you’ll pass three of the four principal worship buildings (Gazi Husrev-beg, the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral, the Old Temple), plus the Habsburg civic monuments, plus the Ottoman bazaar Isa-beg founded.

That’s what 560-plus years of capital-city layers look like on foot, in one continuous walk.

Sources

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