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History · ·5 min read

Sarajevo — the largest book-burning in history was one night in August 1992

The Nazis burned about 20 million books, but spread across 45 places over years. Sarajevo lost 1.25 million in one night. Twenty-five mortars on the library, forty more on the streets around it to keep the fire brigade away. Water to the district was cut in advance.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Everyone learns about the Nazi book-burnings. The 1933 bonfire in Berlin’s Opernplatz. The Heinrich Heine line about how a country that burns books will eventually burn people. The whole thing has a fixed place in the twentieth-century memory of what you’re not supposed to do.

Fewer people know that the Nazis burned about twenty million books, and that those twenty million were spread across roughly forty-five different fires over twelve years.

Even fewer people know that the single biggest book-fire in the whole recorded history of book-burning happened on one night in Sarajevo, in August 1992.

That night, 1.25 million books were destroyed at Vijećnica. Not spread over forty-five fires. Not over twelve years. One building. One night. Six times what all the Nazi book-burnings totalled in a single one of their forty-five bonfires.

The person who wrote the arithmetic down was Kemal Bakaršić, the chief librarian of the National Museum, in an essay published in The New Combat in 1994. He was there.

What that night actually looked like

The building was the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It had been in the striped Habsburg-Moorish Vijećnica on the Miljacka since 1949. Around two million volumes total. Seven hundred manuscripts and incunabula. The fullest surviving run of nineteenth-century Bosnian periodicals from the national-revival era.

Then this:

Twenty-five mortar shells hit the building on the night of 25 August 1992. Then, so the fire brigade couldn’t get to it, forty more shells were fired at the surrounding streets. And, as though someone had planned it that carefully, because someone had, the water supply to the whole district was cut in advance.

That’s not a fire that happened. That’s a fire that was arranged.

The building burned for three days. About 1.25 million books were destroyed. Most of the manuscript collection was gone. The losses ran to sixty percent of the periodicals and the entire manuscript register of nineteenth-century Bosnian intellectual life.

Bakaršić’s line about this, in his 1994 essay, is one of the ones you don’t forget after reading it:

“The Nazis burned about twenty million books. But they took twelve years to do it, and forty-five places to do it in. In Sarajevo, one day and one night, one building: a million and a quarter.”

It was the biggest single book-fire in recorded history. It is still the biggest single book-fire in recorded history. And it happened thirty years ago on the corner of the Miljacka where you can now take a photo of a lovely restored building without knowing what happened there.

Why it counts as more than an accident

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later prosecuted the burning of Vijećnica as evidence of the systematic destruction of Bosnian cultural heritage. It wasn’t strays. It was targeted, and everybody at the ICTY who looked at the evidence came to the same conclusion, including on the damning detail that the water supply cut happened before the shelling, not because of it. Somebody in the Bosnian Serb command had done the arithmetic on how to make a building burn.

The library was, in the classification that international humanitarian law uses, a cultural property. Firing at it is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property. The calibrated attempt to prevent firefighting is what turned it from a war crime into a signature one.

The bit most guidebooks skip

If you walk to Vijećnica today, as most first-time visitors do; it’s on every walking-tour route including ours, you’ll see a small stone plaque on the ground-floor entrance. It reads, in Bosnian:

“Na ovom mjestu srpski zločinci u noći 25/26. avgusta 1992. godine zapalili su više od 2 miliona knjiga, časopisa i dokumenata.”

(“On this site, Serbian criminals on the night of 25/26 August 1992 burned more than 2 million books, magazines and documents.”)

The plaque counts everything — books, periodicals, working documents — so its number goes higher than Bakaršić’s book-only number. Both are true. Both correct one particular thing. Two million cultural items destroyed in one night, in one building, in the middle of what was already the longest siege of a European capital in modern history.

If you also read our story about Aida Buturović, the National Library staff member who was killed by a sniper outside the building carrying books out under fire that same week, you get the human side of the arithmetic. She was 32. She’d worked at the library since finishing her degree. Wikipedia has two paragraphs on her.

What to do with this

Walk to Vijećnica. Look at the plaque. Look at the sandstone façade Karel Pařík drew in 1891, and the roofline they rebuilt from photographs after 1996. Look up at the windows on the top floor, and know that on 25 August 1992 the whole roof was open flame and someone had made sure the fire brigade couldn’t get through.

There’s a small permanent exhibition inside on what was destroyed and what was saved. Twenty minutes. Free. If you’re doing the walking tour, you’ll pass it anyway.

The largest book-burning in history is one of the things that happened here. It’s not on the tourism board’s brochures — not because they’re hiding it, but because it’s the kind of fact travel copy doesn’t know how to put next to “where east meets west.”

But now you know.

Two million items. One night. One building. Read the plaque.

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