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Heritage · ·7 min read

Sarajevo's Svrzo House has a country cousin — the čardaklija, catalogued as proto-modern bioclimatic architecture

If Svrzo House is the urban Ottoman-Bosnian dwelling most visitors to Sarajevo will see, the čardaklija is its country cousin — the multi-storey timber-and-plaster house of the wealthy village landowner. Ahmet Hadrović's 2025 architectural study is the technical catalogue. A guide to the vocabulary, and where to see them.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Most of what you can see of the traditional Ottoman-Bosnian house inside Sarajevo is urban. Svrzo’s House in Bistrik — reachable from Kovači street — is the canonical preserved 18th-century example: walled avlije, šadrvan fountain, wooden shutters, clean separation of male and female sides. You can walk in for 5 BAM. The house that appears in every guidebook. For the wider Ottoman domestic tradition, see also the interiors at the Gazi Husrev-beg complex and the courtyard at Velika avlija Laure Papo.

Leave the city and drive an hour into the mountains, north or west, through the Zvijezda-Konjuh chain toward Vareš, Ilijaš, Olovo, Kakanj, or up through Konjic toward Bjelašnica, and you start to see a different house. Bigger. More vertical. Same materials, timber frame, stone base, whitewashed plaster, hipped roof, but a specifically rural spatial logic. That house is the čardaklija.

The reference is a 2025 article by Ahmet Hadrović, professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Sarajevo. Over ten years Hadrović photographed and drew dozens of surviving čardaklija houses across northern Bosnia. The article runs 32 pages, in English, with about a hundred of those photographs and drawings.

What the čardaklija is

The čardaklija is the house of the wealthy rural landowner in Ottoman Bosnia. Hadrović’s opening sentence names it precisely: “The Bosnian chardaklija house is, first and foremost, the house of wealthy people in the countryside.” Not the poorest, not the town-house. The house of the rural family with land, livestock, and, often, an extended family of several generations living under one roof.

The name comes from the čardak, the upper-floor rooms formed within the roof volume of a truncated hipped roof. A house with čardaks is a čardaklija. The word is a description of the geometry.

The archetypal čardaklija has three or four storeys:

  • Basement (magaza). Usually only under one tract of the ground floor, used for storing food, tools, and sometimes livestock. Built into the slope, so it is never fully buried.
  • Ground floor (kuca, literally “house”). A large central room with an open hearth (ognjište), around which the family lives, cooks, and gathers. The operative living space.
  • First floor. Rooms accessed by a wooden staircase from the kuca. The divanhana, a large airy gallery on the first floor, is the south-facing living space for family and guests.
  • Attic / čardaks. Additional rooms in the roof volume, often for sleeping or seasonal storage.

The vertical development responds to family size. Hadrović catalogues eight types (Type 1 through Type 8) with different horizontal and vertical arrangements. Type 1 is the simplest, a two-storey house with basement plus ground floor. Type 8 is the fully-developed multi-generational čardaklija with basement, ground floor, two upper floors, and attic. In one house Hadrović documents, four generations have lived simultaneously.

Morića Han, the surviving 16th-century traveller's inn in Baščaršija, whose central courtyard shares the enclosed-avlija tradition of the rural čardaklija house type this article covers.
Morića Han's courtyard. The urban cousin of the čardaklija. Photograph: Jennifer Boyer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

The vocabulary

The čardaklija has its own interior vocabulary, none of which appears in any English-language guidebook. Learning three or four words changes what you see when you walk in.

  • Kuca, literally “house”. The central common living room with the open hearth. The word for the whole building is the same word as for its central room, which tells you where the operative meaning is.
  • Divanhana, the airy first-floor gallery. Etymology: Turkish divanhane, “chamber of the divan”. The room where the family sits together in daylight and where guests are formally received.
  • Čardak, the upper-floor room in the roof volume. Plural: čardaks.
  • Basamak, the wooden staircase from the ground floor to the divanhana. Steep, made of oak or beech.
  • Magaza, the basement or storeroom.
  • Dimluk, the chimney. In the earliest čardaklijas, the chimney was central; in later houses, it moved to the wall.
  • Hatule, the wooden console counter above the open hearth, on which cooking pans and household utensils were kept.
  • Rafe, wooden shelves along the wall.
  • Dulafi, wall niches recessed into the plaster for storing dishes, kitchen utensils, and containers for coffee, sugar, and spices.
  • Baškaluk, the formal reception room, sometimes called the head’s room, the room where the male head of the family received important guests and had “serious” conversations. Usually one of the two rooms directly adjacent to the kuca.
  • Hamamdžik, a small in-house bathroom, often carved out under the staircase or into a wall niche.

Hadrović’s article catalogues these terms with photographs from named houses. The vocabulary is Bosnian-Slavic with substantial Ottoman-Turkish loanwords, in the pattern the whole traditional Bosnian house occupies.

What the interior looks like

Hadrović calls the čardaklija interior “empty” — meaning uncluttered, spatially generous, arranged so that from the kuca you can see the divanhana above and, from the divanhana, look back down into the kuca.

“Unlike the house of the ‘European housing culture’ where each residential function is separated into separate spaces… in the Bosnian chardaklija house most of the residential functions are united by the central space of the living room called the ‘house’.” , Hadrović 2025, p. 356

The open hearth is the central point. Around it: cooking, eating, family conversation, guest reception, storytelling. In the archetypal čardaklija the ognjište is not a fireplace in the Northern-European sense (a wall recess with a chimney above); it is an open low platform in the middle of the floor with the fire built directly on it, smoke rising into a central dimluk. The smoke blackens the ceiling beams over decades; the beams become part of the house’s atmosphere.

Two rooms adjacent to the kuca, the male head’s baškaluk and, opposite it, usually a female or family room, divide by function without dividing the atmosphere. The doors between them are wide and open. In summer the whole house breathes together.

Where the čardaklijas survive

Hadrović photographs family houses in villages across northern and central Bosnia. The main regions:

  • Zvijezda-Konjuh mountain range (central-north Bosnia)
  • Vareš, an old mining town; the Brković family čardaklija appears in Hadrović’s Figure 11
  • Kraljeva Sutjeska, a village that was the medieval Bosnian royal seat; the Dusper family house is documented
  • Around Konjic, the villages of Gornji Zovik and Gorani, Smajić family and Hrnjica family houses
  • Near Kakanj, Starposle village, Zumra Dzider’s house in Crnoc village
  • Near Srebrenik, Spionica village, Suljagić family
  • Near Kalesija, Dzafići village, Hamidović family
  • Near Tešanj, Hrvatinovići village, Korajlić family; Trepče village, Hasanbašić family
  • Near Tuzla, Gornja Tuzla village, Bugilović family
  • Near Gornji Vakuf, Voljevac village, Zekotić family

And, closer to Sarajevo:

  • Bjelašnica plateau, Lukomir village. Hadrović documents the Comor family house here (his Figure 14).

Lukomir, the čardaklija you can walk to from Sarajevo

Of the villages Hadrović photographs, Lukomir is the one a Sarajevo visitor can reach in a day. A Bjelašnica mountain village at about 1,500 metres altitude, forty kilometres south-west of Sarajevo, accessible by 4x4 track from Umoljani (which itself sits at the end of the paved road from Tarčin).

Lukomir has been in the Sarajevo tourism press for at least a decade, Wikipedia calls it “the highest and most isolated permanently inhabited village in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, and while both superlatives are contested, the village is legitimately remote and legitimately still inhabited. About twelve to fifteen families live there year-round in stone-and-timber houses of the čardaklija type. In summer, more families come up from the valleys and the village opens; in winter, most of the houses are shut and the population contracts to a handful of hardy elders.

The Lukomir houses are on the simpler end of Hadrović’s typology, Type 1 or Type 2, ground floor plus a single upper floor, no full čardak development because the winter climate makes a large upper-floor room impractical to heat. But they carry the same vocabulary, kuca with open hearth, dulafi niches, rafe shelves, wooden basamak, that Hadrović documents in the larger valley houses.

Getting there: a summer 4x4 trip (June to September) from Sarajevo, roughly two hours each way. The last few kilometres are unpaved. The village has one small guesthouse offering pita and coffee to visitors. On a busy summer Saturday the ratio is roughly one villager per two visitors. Respect it.

The half of the tradition you probably haven’t seen

Svrzo’s House is what most visitors mean when they say “traditional Bosnian house.” But that is one of two halves. The čardaklija is the other. Same vocabulary, same principles of view and privacy and multi-generational plan, translated onto a hillside farm instead of a walled urban plot. If you have walked Svrzo’s and stopped there, you have seen the merchant’s version and missed the landowner’s. Lukomir is the fastest fix, an hour and a half from the tram stop, on a good day in July.

Hadrović’s article is the working reference. Sixty-plus houses drawn, plans of eight types, room-by-room glossary. Free download.

Sources

  • Ahmet Hadrović, Traditional Elements of Equipment and Interior Design of the Bosnian Chardaklija House, International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Growth Evaluation 6:2 (March–April 2025), 352–383. ISSN 2582-7138.
  • Svrzo’s House, Museum of Sarajevo, the canonical urban Ottoman-Bosnian dwelling in the city. Wikipedia
  • Lukomir village, Bjelašnica, surviving traditional-house mountain village accessible from Sarajevo. Wikipedia
  • Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (Ljubljana, 1957), the classical modernist reading of the same architectural tradition.

Sources & further reading

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