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Culture · ·6 min read

Sarajevo — the Vogošća trolleybus came back in 2024, after 28 years off the map

The line was cut in 1992 when the war started. It didn't come back after the war. It didn't come back for the next 26 years either. In 2024 it finally reopened — and one Vogošća resident called it 'being written back onto the city map.'

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

A pattern happens after a war ends. Physical infrastructure that was destroyed — bridges, tram lines, whole neighbourhoods — either gets rebuilt fast, or it doesn’t, and then it gets rebuilt slowly, over decades, in the order that political will and budget allow.

Sarajevo’s most-celebrated version of this is the Trebević cable car, which came back in 2018 after 26 years off. That story is nicely dramatic. It reopened on 6 April 2018, which is the Day of the City. It was funded largely by a Dutch physicist married to a Sarajevan. The mayor spoke. There were tears.

Fewer people know the quieter version of the same story, further down the same list, on the suburban north-west edge of the city.

The Vogošća trolleybus came back in 2024. It had been gone since 1992. Twenty-eight years.

What Vogošća is

Vogošća is one of the nine municipalities of Sarajevo Canton. It sits on the northern ridge above the city, about seven kilometres from the centre by road. Population around 28,000. Historically a mixed-industry suburb, the Volkswagen plant was here in the socialist Yugoslav period, along with textile factories and a large light-industrial complex. It’s a working-class residential district. It has its own high school, its own hospital wing, its own football club. It is not central Sarajevo. It is not a tourist destination. It is a place people live.

Before the war, Vogošća was connected to central Sarajevo by the trolleybus network — the electric-overhead public transport system Sarajevo has run since 1980. The Vogošća line was one of the busier corridors: workers came into the city centre, students came out to the vocational schools, families used it Saturday afternoons. It ran roughly every 15 minutes at peak, cost one lira and later one KM, and connected people in Vogošća with the ordinary rhythm of the city.

Then April 1992 came. The war cut the overhead lines. The trolleybus stopped. Some of the wire was salvaged during the siege. The buses that survived were repurposed. Vogošća was cut off from the spine of civic infrastructure that had made it feel like part of the city.

What replaced it — and what that meant

After the war, Vogošća got buses. Diesel buses, running on the same route the trolleybus had, at rougher intervals, subject to traffic. The buses worked, more or less. Vogošća residents could get to central Sarajevo. But — and this is the argument the sociologist Jasmin Ademović unpacks in a 2025 paper in the Sarajevo Social Science Review — a bus is not a trolleybus.

Ademović interviewed Vogošća residents about the difference. His finding: the loss of the trolleybus was, for many residents, a durable loss of civic status. A trolleybus stop looks permanent — it has infrastructure, wires, poles, a schedule that goes back decades. A bus stop is a sign on a pole. A trolleybus route says: your neighbourhood is a permanent part of this city. A bus route says: we can move this any time.

Between 1995 and 2024, Sarajevans in Vogošća waited for the trolleybus wires to come back. Every few years the topic came up. Every few years the answer from the Cantonal Ministry of Transport was: not yet. Not enough budget. Not the priority. Twenty-eight years of not-yet.

What finally happened

The technical fix is not dramatic. The Cantonal transport agency GRAS (Gradski saobraćaj Sarajevo), working with the Sarajevo Canton budget and — like most Sarajevo public transport modernisation — some EBRD-adjacent financing, rebuilt the overhead wire, procured a small fleet of modern trolleybuses (the same Solaris Trollino low-floor vehicles Prague uses), and reopened the Vogošća corridor in early 2024.

The first trolleybus of the new service ran on a weekday in early 2024. Ademović’s paper records the date and the reaction of one resident he interviewed:

“It felt like we were being written back onto the city map.”

Read that line again slowly.

A trolleybus. A working piece of overhead urban infrastructure. In a suburb of 28,000 people. Coming back after 28 years. And a resident’s reaction is not “finally, my commute is better.” It is: we are being written back onto the city map.

That is the quality of what public transport does, in a city that has fought hard for what it has. It says: you are here, you are part of this, we planned for you. The trolleybus — being what it is, permanent, wired, formal — says this louder than any bus does.

Why this belongs in the same story as the cable car

The cable car got the big anniversary. The Day of the City. The Dutch physicist. The tears.

The trolleybus got a Cantonal transport-ministry press release and a “we did it” photograph.

But the trolleybus is the more important story for how the city actually rebuilt itself.

The cable car connects the centre to a mountain. It’s romantic. It’s Instagram-friendly. It matters, and the site’s destination page for it is one of the pieces I’m proudest of.

The trolleybus connects a working suburb to its jobs, schools, doctors, and grandparents. It is not romantic. It is what makes the suburb feel like a city, and the fact of its 28-year absence is what makes the fact of its 2024 return meaningful.

If you asked a Sarajevo urbanist which piece of returning infrastructure has done more for the everyday health of the city as a lived thing, they’d tell you the trolleybus. Ademović’s research is in agreement.

What to do with this

You are probably not going to Vogošća on your Sarajevo trip. There is no particular tourist reason to go there. If you take the Trebević cable car up and look north across the valley, you’ll see the district climbing the northern ridge. That’s it. That’s the neighbourhood. The trolleybus wires, if you look carefully, run up the main road out of the city into it.

But when you’re in Sarajevo, and you’re thinking about the way the city has been rebuilt over the last thirty years — a way that’s genuinely different from Berlin’s or Warsaw’s or Belgrade’s post-conflict-city rebuilds — remember that the measure of success isn’t always the shiny landmark project. Sometimes it is a set of overhead wires in a working-class suburb, waited for over 28 years, and finally strung up in 2024.

And someone in Vogošća, watching the first trolleybus turn the corner at 07:15 that morning, said what an interviewer wrote down.

It felt like we were being written back onto the city map.

That is the version of a city coming back that the tourism brochures don’t put on the front, and that the site is here to record.

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