History · July 27, 2026 ·8 min read

Sarajevo Christmas Eve/12/24 — the Trans-Siberian Orchestra hit whose 'white-haired cellist' was 36

The six-minute rock instrumental that combines God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen with the Ukrainian Carol of the Bells is a triple-platinum American Christmas fixture. Paul O'Neill said its 'white-haired cellist in Sarajevo' was the emotional spark. The real Sarajevan cellist was 36, played Albinoni's Adagio at a bread-line crater in May 1992, and to this day has not been consulted, credited, or paid by the band that made a career of the image.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Sarajevo Christmas Eve/12/24 — the Trans-Siberian Orchestra hit whose 'white-haired cellist' was 36 — Ph: **Migdad Rešidović** · source · Pexels License

Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 is a six-minute instrumental rock composition by Robert Kinkel, Paul O’Neill, and Jon Oliva that combines the English carol God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen with the Ukrainian folk melody Shchedryk (better known in Peter Wilhousky’s 1936 English arrangement as Carol of the Bells). It was first released in 1995 on the Savatage album Dead Winter Dead and re-released in October 1996 as the second track on the debut album of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Christmas Eve and Other Stories. As of November 2016 the single had sold over 1.3 million downloads in the United States (Wikipedia, Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24), making it one of the best-selling Christmas instrumentals of the download era. The parent album is triple-platinum certified.

The song is credited by its composers as inspired by a Sarajevan cellist during the 1992–1995 siege of Sarajevo. In Paul O’Neill’s own words: “He came every night and began playing Christmas Carols from that same spot. It was just such a powerful image — a white-haired man silhouetted against the cannon fire, playing timeless melodies to both sides of the conflict amid the rubble and devastation of the city he loves.”

The real Sarajevan cellist O’Neill is generally understood to be referencing is Vedran Smailović, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra. Almost none of the specific details in O’Neill’s narrative match him. Smailović was 36 in the summer of 1992, not white-haired. His signature cello performances were in daytime, not at night. They happened in late May and June 1992, not on Christmas Eve. And what he played was neither God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen nor Carol of the Bells nor any other Christmas carol; it was the piece known to the world as Tomaso Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor (which, as later musicology has confirmed, is almost certainly a 1958 composition by the Italian musicologist Remo Giazotto, not an eighteenth-century original).

The gap between the two stories — the American rock instrumental and the Sarajevan cellist it borrows from — is what this piece is about.

The song, briefly

Dead Winter Dead was a 1995 Savatage concept album about a Bosnian Serb boy and a Bosnian Muslim girl falling in love during the Bosnian war. Savatage were a Florida progressive-metal band founded in Tarpon Springs in 1978; Jon Oliva sang and played keyboards, his brother Criss played guitar until Criss was killed by a drunk driver on 17 October 1993. Paul O’Neill was the band’s producer and lyricist through the early 1990s and was, in effect, the album’s author. Robert Kinkel was the album’s second keyboardist. The album was recorded and released in the shadow of Criss Oliva’s death and set against the backdrop of a siege that at the time of writing was still ongoing.

Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 sits at the emotional midpoint of the album and functions as an instrumental interlude between two vocal tracks about the same fictional couple. Under the Savatage name the single peaked at #65 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Wikipedia, song entry). When O’Neill, Oliva, and Kinkel re-released the same recording a year later as the second track on Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s Christmas Eve and Other Stories (October 1996), the song became a much bigger commercial event: #34 on Billboard’s Hot Adult Contemporary Track chart on 6 January 1996, and via the Trans-Siberian re-issue #29 on Mainstream Rock Tracks on 3 January 1998.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra plays the piece on essentially every stop of their annual winter tour, which runs November through late December across roughly forty US arenas. It is the song that made the group a Christmas fixture and — arguably — the single most-performed rock instrumental of the download era.

Paul O’Neill’s cellist

Paul O’Neill’s narrative, told and re-told in interviews between 1996 and his death on 5 April 2017 at 61, describes an old man — white-haired, standing in the town square of Sarajevo, silhouetted against cannon fire, playing Christmas carols on his cello through the night, night after night, as two armies destroyed each other around him. He said the image was what let him find the shape of the song (per O’Neill’s remarks in Something Else Reviews, 16 February 2012).

The narrative is powerful, and the song is genuinely well-made. What the narrative is not is documentary. The cellist O’Neill describes is a composite: neither a named person nor an event that can be traced to a specific date or location in Sarajevo. It sits in the register of the modern parable — closer in feel to Steven Galloway’s 2008 novel The Cellist of Sarajevo than to any siege history.

Vedran Smailović

The actual siege had a cellist. He is a specific person — born 11 November 1956 in Sarajevo, trained at the Sarajevo Music Academy, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra. He played in the ruins of the city continuously between April 1992 and December 1993, when he and his family evacuated through the Tunnel of Hope with instruments in hand.

The most-cited episode is his 22-day performance in the crater on Vase Miskina Street (today Ferhadija, three blocks west of the Latin Bridge) after the 27 May 1992 mortar attack on the bread queue — one day for each of the twenty-two people killed. What he played every afternoon was the Adagio commonly attributed to Albinoni. It was not a Christmas carol. It was late May and June, not December. He was 36, not old. He played in the late afternoon, at the specific hour the mortar had landed the day before — not at night. The site’s separate long-form piece on Smailović and the Giazotto-Albinoni Adagio (published under the cellist played for 22 days at the massacre site) covers the full documentary record.

Where the two stories don’t match

Every specific detail in O’Neill’s narrative diverges from Smailović’s documented life:

Age. “White-haired man” in the O’Neill quote. Smailović was 36 in summer 1992 — fully dark-haired, with the beard and long dark hair that the BBC News footage of the period shows.
Season. “Christmas Eve,” 24 December. The signature Smailović performances were May and June 1992. There is no documentary evidence that Smailović played publicly on any Christmas Eve during the siege.
Repertoire. O’Neill’s cellist plays Christmas carols. Smailović played the Giazotto-Albinoni Adagio, David Wilde’s 1992 Cellist of Sarajevo for solo cello, and Bosnian sevdah arrangements. Not Christmas carols.
Location. O’Neill’s cellist plays in the “town square.” Smailović played at the Vase Miskina bread-line crater, in cemeteries during funerals (including Kovači Cemetery), and inside shelled halls. No town-square vigil is documented.
Time of day. O’Neill’s cellist plays “at night.” Smailović’s Vase Miskina performances were in the late afternoon.

None of these are gotchas about a song that never claimed strict biographical accuracy. They matter because they show that the song’s Sarajevo is a symbolic Sarajevo — not the Sarajevo the city itself actually lived through.

The silence

Vedran Smailović has publicly objected to at least one other work that used his identity without consultation. When Steven Galloway published his 2008 novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, Smailović told the press that Galloway had “stolen his name and identity” and said he expected damages, an apology, and compensation (Wikipedia, Vedran Smailović). A private meeting between Smailović and Galloway in 2012 defused the dispute; the novel remains in print.

Smailović has never made a comparable public statement about the Savatage/Trans-Siberian song. He was not consulted before it was written; he has not been credited on any release; there is no documented royalty arrangement. Whether the silence reflects acceptance of the song, distance from a genre he has no professional relationship with, or simply the calculation that a Florida rock instrumental from 1995 was not worth the trouble, is not on record.

The absence is itself notable. The song has now been heard in more American homes over the last thirty Christmases than any single work of Bosnian classical music has ever reached.

What the song has become

Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24 is played on US commercial holiday radio every December. It has been performed live by TSO more than a thousand times. It appears on Christmas playlists across Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon. It has been used in seasonal advertising, in high-school orchestral arrangements, and, more than once, in synchronised Christmas-lights displays timed to the recording.

None of this reaches Sarajevo. The song is not on Sarajevan radio. The city has no annual TSO tribute concert. The composers named the city in the title but never toured there. The cellist the composers imagined never existed; the cellist who did exist was never asked.

What the song is, culturally, is a Sarajevo made in Tampa, Florida, and shipped back to America as a Christmas image. It is a beautiful piece of rock arranging. It is also a piece of Sarajevo the city has almost no share in.

What to notice

If you have never heard it, listen once. The opening cello line, the strings that build under it, the guitar entry, the final combination of the English carol with the Ukrainian one — the piece is a genuinely well-made rock instrumental, and its emotional pull is not synthetic. Paul O’Neill is understood by everyone who worked with him to have loved the story he was telling. He did not misrepresent Smailović with any bad faith; he wrote around an image that had reached him at second or third hand.

The site’s separate coverage of Vedran Smailović — the actual 22-day cello performance at the crater on Vase Miskina — is the piece to read next. The two stories deserve to sit side by side. One is a beautiful myth built on the city. The other is what the city actually did.

Sources

Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24, Wikipedia. Composers, chart data, and the Paul O’Neill quote on the “white-haired man.”
Vedran Smailović, Wikipedia. Biographical dates, the Galloway dispute, absence of any documented TSO statement.
Christmas Eve and Other Stories, Wikipedia. Album release history and certification.
Paul O’Neill, in One Track Mind: Paul O’Neill on Key Moments With Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Savatage, Something Else Reviews, 16 February 2012.
Songfacts, entry on Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24.
Michael Talbot, Remo Giazotto and the Adagio: A Musicological Detective Story, Musical Times 152 (2011) — the definitive account that the Adagio Smailović played is a 1958 composition, not a Baroque original.

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