Sarajevo in seven censuses — 175 years of counting a city
In the 1991 pre-war census, Sarajevo was 49.2 percent Bosniak Muslim. In the 2013 post-war census — the next one taken — it was 79.6 percent. The Serbian population fell from 29.8 percent to 11.2 percent in the same interval. That thirty-point demographic swing, compressed into the five years of the siege and its aftermath, is what Zejnilović and Husukić's 2018 ArchNet-IJAR article reads as the deepest structural change in Sarajevo's twentieth century. The seven censuses from 1851 to 2013 show it as a single line.
Sarajevo has been counted seven times over the last hundred and seventy-five years. The counts are imperfect. They are incomplete. They are sometimes politically edited. Their categories don’t line up neatly. They are also the best numerical evidence anyone has of what the city was at each of the moments someone decided to count it — from the Ottoman Baščaršija census takers to the post-Dayton enumerators who had to count a city the siege had changed beyond recognition.
Emina Zejnilović and Erna Husukić, both architects at the International Burch University in Sarajevo, published a 2018 article in ArchNet-IJAR on Culture and Architecture in Distress. Buried under an argument about T.S. Eliot’s criteria for cultural survival, the article carries five tables of demographic data covering 1851–2013. The article is open-access.
Those tables are the shortest legible summary of Sarajevan demographic history in English. What follows is a walking guide to what they show.
The seven counts
1. Late Ottoman (1851–1876)
Four registrations, made by the Ottoman administration in the tanzimat (reform) period, for the whole territory of Ottoman Bosnia, not just the city of Sarajevo, which the Ottoman sancak administrative geography did not usually count in isolation.
| Year | Muslims | Orthodox | Catholics | Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1851 | 328,000 | 400,000 | 178,000 | 10,000 |
| 1865 | 419,628 | 593,548 | 257,920 | 7,754 |
| 1871 | 541,000 | 340,000 | 156,000 | 5,000 |
| 1876 | 480,000 | 410,000 | 160,000 | 3,000 |
Ottoman-era registrations, whole of Bosnia. Source: Tanović et al. 2014, per Zejnilović & Husukić 2018, Table 1.
The Ottoman numbers are administrative, not demographic, they count male heads of household for taxation, and the totals are extrapolations that historians (Kadkani-Schmitt included) treat with caution. The rough shape is nonetheless legible: the Orthodox community is the largest, the Muslim community is the second-largest, and the Catholic community is a substantial third. Bosnia is not, at the end of Ottoman rule, a Muslim country. It is a plurality country.
2. Habsburg (1879–1910)
The Austrian administration counted Bosnia four times: 1879 (the first, taken thirteen months after the occupation began), 1885, 1895, and 1910 (the last, before the annexation of 1908 became the annexed status of 1910).
| Year | Muslims | Orthodox | Catholics | Jews | Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1879 | 448,749 | 496,375 | 210,216 | 3,426 | 249 |
| 1885 | 492,710 | 571,250 | 265,788 | 5,805 | 538 |
| 1895 | 548,632 | 673,246 | 334,142 | 8,213 | 3,859 |
| 1910 | 612,137 | 825,418 | 442,197 | 11,868 | 7,224 |
Habsburg censuses, whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Source: Tanović et al. 2014, per Zejnilović & Husukić 2018, Table 2.
Read down the columns.
The Catholic population more than doubles between 1879 and 1910, from 210,000 to 442,000. This is the Habsburg policy of encouraging Central European Catholic settlement in Bosnia (Kadkani-Schmitt’s 2017 PhD is the reference on the administrative mechanisms). The Habsburg quarter of Sarajevo, west of Baščaršija, was built to house them.
The Jewish population also grows sharply, from 3,426 in 1879 to 11,868 in 1910, more than triple. This includes the Ashkenazi communities arriving from the Habsburg lands (the Ashkenazi Synagogue on Ferhadija was built in 1902), added to the existing Sephardic population that had been in the city since the sixteenth century.
Orthodox and Muslim populations both grow in absolute terms, but neither category grows as fast as the Catholic and Jewish additions. The Habsburg period is demographic diversification, not homogenisation. It ends with Bosnia’s four confessional communities all standing at their historically largest sizes.
3. Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes / Yugoslavia (1921–1931)
The two interwar censuses of the newly-formed Kingdom of SCS (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929).
| Year | Muslims | Orthodox | Catholics | Jews | Others |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1921 | 588,173 | 829,360 | 453,617 | 12,031 | 7,259 |
| 1931 | 718,079 | 1,028,139 | 547,949 | 11,267 | 18,121 |
Kingdom of SCS / Yugoslavia censuses. Source: Tanović et al. 2014, per Zejnilović & Husukić 2018, Table 3.
The Kingdom census continues to count by religion, not by ethnicity, a Habsburg-era administrative habit that would change under socialism. Between the two censuses, all three main confessional communities grow, roughly in proportion. The Jewish community holds steady in absolute terms.
4. Socialist Yugoslavia (1948–1991)
The Yugoslav censuses shift from confessional to ethnic categories, and the categories themselves change over time. The percentages below are of the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
| Year | Muslims % | Orthodox % | Catholics % | Others % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1948 | 30.7 | 44.3 | 23.9 | 1.1 |
| 1953 | 31.3 | 44.4 | 23.0 | 1.3 |
| 1961 | 25.7 | 42.9 | 21.7 | 9.7 |
| 1971 | 39.6 | 37.2 | 20.6 | 2.6 |
| 1981 | 39.5 | 32.0 | 18.4 | 10.1 |
| 1991 | 43.5 | 31.2 | 17.4 | 7.9 |
Yugoslav censuses, whole of BiH. Source: Tanović et al. 2014, per Zejnilović & Husukić 2018, Table 4.
The socialist numbers reveal a slow but continuous shift toward a Muslim plurality, as the Muslim population grows in absolute terms while the Orthodox share of the country contracts (in part through migration to Serbia). The 1961 census is a statistical outlier because the “Muslim” category was, in that year, replaced by “Undeclared”, the Yugoslav state’s brief attempt to fold Bosnia’s Muslims into a category of “ethnic Yugoslavs” who did not identify by nation. That attempt failed by 1971, when the “Muslim” (as national category) was reintroduced.
By 1991, on the eve of the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina is roughly 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Orthodox Serb, 17 percent Croat Catholic, with the remainder Jewish, Romani, other minorities, and a small but visible “Yugoslav” category, mostly urban residents of mixed marriages who refused a single national label.
5. Sarajevo, immediately before and after the war (1991 vs 2013)
The most consequential comparison in the whole dataset, and the one that requires most care in reading, is between the last pre-war census (1991) and the first post-war census (2013). Zejnilović and Husukić’s Table 5 does the most important work here.
| Category | Pre-war (1991) | Post-war (2013) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| count | share | count | share | |
| Muslims / Bosniaks | 259,470 | 49.2% | 319,245 | 79.6% |
| Serbs | 157,143 | 29.8% | 44,865 | 11.2% |
| Croats | 34,873 | 6.6% | 26,890 | 6.7% |
| Yugoslavs | 56,470 | 10.7% | , | , |
| Others | 19,093 | 3.6% | 10,118 | 2.5% |
Sarajevo city, per Markowitz 2007 and Federal statistical office data, cited in Zejnilović & Husukić 2018, Table 5. (Note: “Bosniak” replaces the earlier “Muslim” as the ethnonym after 1993; the “Yugoslav” category was retired.)
Two shifts dominate.
The Serb population of the city collapses, from 157,143 to 44,865, a drop of about 71 percent. This is the demographic signature of the siege, of the post-Dayton administrative divisions that placed most of the city’s ex-Serb neighbourhoods (Grbavica in part, and the whole of East Sarajevo) inside Republika Srpska, and of the war-era population movements more generally. The Serbs who lived in central Sarajevo largely did not return.
The Bosniak population grows in absolute terms, from 259,470 to 319,245, despite the siege deaths and emigrations. Bosniak refugees from eastern Bosnia arrived largely between 1993 and 1998 (Srebrenica, Žepa, Foča, Višegrad) who settled in the empty apartments in Sarajevo left by departing Serbs.
The Yugoslav category disappears, 56,470 people in 1991, zero in 2013. The 10.7 percent of pre-war Sarajevans who had refused a single national label are, in the post-war statistical apparatus, not a category. They are Bosniak, or Serb, or Croat, or Other. The label is not on the form.
The share numbers alone tell the largest story: Sarajevo in 1991 was 49.2 percent Muslim; Sarajevo in 2013 was 79.6 percent Bosniak. In two decades, the city passed from plurality-Muslim to overwhelmingly-Bosniak. That transition is the numerical shape of what happened. Not the whole of what happened.
What the tables do not tell you
The counts are of legal residents, not of a stable population. A person who lived in Sarajevo in 1991, was displaced to Germany in 1993, returned in 2001, was counted in 2013, this person appears in both the 1991 and 2013 columns, but their 22-year history is not visible in the data.
The categories change with each regime. Muslim in 1851 is a confessional category based on Ottoman millet administrative logic. Muslim in 1971 is a national-ethnic category constructed by the Yugoslav state. Bosniak in 2013 is a self-identification category adopted by the community itself in 1993. These are not the same word. They are three different words with the same letters.
The 2013 census was, and remains, contested. It was the first census in twenty-two years; it required the political agreement of three ethnically-defined constituent peoples to conduct; and its results were legally challenged by the Republika Srpska government for over a year before final publication. Read the numbers with awareness that every category was, at some point in 2013–2016, a political demand.
Even so, the tables are the numerical record we have. Zejnilović and Husukić’s article makes them available in English, in a standard format, in one open-access document. Their editorial contribution is small — they compiled tables already published in Bosnian sources — but the compilation is genuinely useful. Anyone writing about Sarajevan demographic history should read Tables 1 through 5 first.
Sources
- Emina Zejnilović and Erna Husukić, Culture and Architecture in Distress: Sarajevo Experiment, ArchNet-IJAR 12:1 (March 2018), 11–35, especially Tables 1–5 on Bosnian and Sarajevan population by religion 1851–2013. Open access. DOI
- Tanović et al. (2014), cited by Zejnilović and Husukić as the source for Tables 1–4.
- Markowitz (2007), cited by Zejnilović and Husukić as the source for Table 5.
- Federal Statistical Office of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2013 census results.
Sources & further reading
- Emina Zejnilović and Erna Husukić, 'Culture and Architecture in Distress: Sarajevo Experiment', ArchNet-IJAR 12:1 (2018), 11–35 — especially Tables 1–5
- Tanović et al., cited by Zejnilović and Husukić, on the historical census records
- Markowitz, referenced by Zejnilović and Husukić, on the Ethnic Composition of Sarajevo 2007
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