Sarajevo's imperial nostalgia — how the Habsburg quarter became a tourism economy
The 2014 reopening of Vijećnica, the redevelopment of the Habsburg quarter, the tourist economy of Baščaršija — all fit inside a wider Balkan post-1989 pattern. Miloš Jovanović's 2025 UCLA article on "imperial nostalgia" gives the framework. Applied to Sarajevo, it reads more sharply than to any of his four case cities.
Walk Ferhadija on a Saturday afternoon in April. Habsburg apartment buildings, restored in fresh cream. Copper craft studios under the arcades. A Neo-Moorish tram shelter. A young couple photographing their table at a “cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian” café. The scene reads as heritage. Miloš Jovanović, a UCLA historian, argues in a July 2025 article that it also reads as a mechanism.
The article, Imperial nostalgia in the era of post-socialist urban change, is in Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. Open access, 19 pages. Its argument, in one sentence: urban restructuring in Habsburg- and Ottoman-legacy cities after 1989 has been shaped by a recoding of imperial history as heritage, a recoding that celebrates cosmopolitan pasts and, in the same move, drives real-estate speculation, tourism branding, and Europeanisation.
Jovanović’s four case cities are Rijeka, Belgrade, Vienna, and Istanbul. Sarajevo is not among them. The framework travels here cleanly anyway.
The framework, briefly
Jovanović’s terminology is precise. He does not argue that historians of Habsburg and Ottoman Central Europe have been wrong. He argues that the emergence of the “New Habsburg History” and the “New Ottoman History” as academic paradigms in the 1990s produced a body of scholarly work that has been, subsequently, mobilised by post-socialist municipal authorities, real-estate developers, and EU-integration bureaucracies to do specific commercial and political work.
The paradigmatic case is Vienna. The 2015 Austrian National Library exhibition Wien wird Weltstadt (Vienna Becomes a World-City) explicitly linked the Habsburg past to Vienna’s contemporary status as a global tourism and real-estate destination. The catalogue argued that Vienna’s cosmopolitan Ringstrasse-era identity was the historical origin of its twenty-first-century global appeal. The framing was scholarly, well-cited, and materially useful: it added value to Habsburg-era buildings (the Zinshäuser) in ways that translated directly into higher rents and higher sale prices.
Jovanović’s other three cities show variations on the pattern. Rijeka rebranded its Habsburg-era sugar refinery (the Šećerana) as the anchor of its 2020 European Capital of Culture bid. Belgrade repackaged the former Ottoman quarter of Dorćol as a hipster-cosmopolitan real-estate market. Istanbul deployed similar processes in Kuzguncuk and Sultanahmet. In each case, imperial nostalgia functions as what the geographer David Harvey calls a “spatial fix”: capital finds a physical location in which historical narrative can be turned into rent.
Why the framework applies unusually sharply to Sarajevo
Sarajevo is not in Jovanović’s cases, but the pattern he describes is legible in the city in three places.
The Vijećnica reopening. The Sarajevo City Hall, originally opened in 1896 as the seat of Habsburg municipal administration, converted to the National Library in 1949, gutted by artillery on 25 August 1992, and left as a burnt shell for twenty-two years, held its reopening ceremony on 9 May 2014, with the building fully opened to the public on 17 July. The date was deliberate. The May ceremony was timed to the run-up to the 28 June 2014 centenary of the Sarajevo assassination, the day Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand a few metres downstream on the Miljacka, and the moment that Serbian, Bosnian, and Habsburg imperial histories became legible to Western media in a single frame.
The reconstruction was funded by the European Union, the Austrian government, Spanish grants, and Bosnian federal contributions. The reopened building is now Sarajevo’s most-photographed façade and the primary anchor of the city’s tourism industry. Its reopening framing, as a symbol of both a shared Habsburg past and a shared Balkan Europeanisation future, is exactly the imperial-nostalgic move Jovanović names. The Sarajevo version is more compressed than the Vienna version (one building, one date, one financing coalition), but the operative logic is the same.
Baščaršija’s tourism economy. The Ottoman bazaar, coppersmiths, small cafés, mosques, the Sebilj, Kazandžiluk with its bullet-shell trinkets (see the story), is Sarajevo’s other main tourism anchor. The bazaar generates most of the city’s small-business hospitality income. The current form in which visitors encounter it is a specifically Habsburg-era construction. As Ross Cameron’s 2023 article on British tourist literature demonstrates (see the Moser story), the “Oriental” aesthetic that late-nineteenth-century upper-class British visitors were invited to consume in Bosnia was actively engineered by the Habsburg administration under Kállay from 1882 onward. The Baščaršija a modern visitor walks through was, in significant part, curated for Central European tourism a century and a quarter ago. The 2010s renewal of that tourism industry, with hostel-tour operators, war-tour packages, and Instagram-friendly ćevapi restaurants, reactivates the same commercial logic. Jovanović’s framework fits the reactivation cleanly.
The Marijin Dvor Habsburg quarter’s gentrification. West of Baščaršija, the Habsburg administrative quarter, the National Museum, the Main Post Office, the Marienhof, the residential palaces on Strossmayerova, Ćumurija, and Obala Kulina bana, the buildings whose iron fences that story catalogues, has been, since roughly 2010, the site of a slow real-estate revaluation. Building conversions, boutique-hotel refurbishments, and Airbnb operators have moved into the Habsburg residential palaces. The valorising narrative in which these conversions are marketed, “authentic imperial-era Sarajevan urbanity”, “Central European elegance”, “the city’s Habsburg heart”, is exactly the vocabulary Jovanović’s article predicts.
Two things Jovanović’s framework does not do
Jovanović’s article is careful about scope. The article avoids two things it would be tempting to accuse it of doing, and both matter.
First, it does not claim that historians should stop researching Habsburg and Ottoman history. His own analysis relies on that research. The Jovanović argument is not that the New Habsburg History is false, quite the opposite; the New Habsburg History is broadly accurate and represents genuine scholarly progress. His argument is that the political and economic uptake of the paradigm has been shaped by post-socialist neoliberal urban conditions that historians did not create and that they cannot control.
Second, it does not claim that all imperial-heritage restoration is a form of gentrification. Some restoration is straightforwardly good: the Vijećnica reopening restored a real cultural monument that was in real ruin, and the alternative was continued decay. What Jovanović names is a pattern in which restoration and gentrification tend to arrive together, and in which the narrative frame used to justify the restoration also tends to be the frame used to justify the accompanying real-estate revaluation. The two are not always separable in practice.
What a Sarajevan reading adds
Jovanović’s Balkan case cities were all imperial peripheries or capitals outside the direct siege trauma of the 1990s. Sarajevo is a city whose post-socialist urban transformation is inextricable from the 1992–1995 siege and its aftermath. Applying Jovanović’s framework to Sarajevo produces three complications that the framework itself does not treat but that a Sarajevan reader has to hold.
The siege damaged the imperial fabric. The Vijećnica was burned. The National Museum was shelled and its collections partially destroyed. The Post Office was hit. The Marienhof took damage. Rebuilding these buildings after 1996 was not, in the first instance, a valorising heritage project. It was necessary infrastructure. The valorising narrative was overlaid onto necessary work, and the two are hard to separate.
The ethnic transformation of the city changed who the heritage is for. The pre-war Sarajevan population that celebrated the Habsburg quarter’s cosmopolitan Central-European character included a substantial Serb minority, around 30 percent of the city per the 1991 census (see the seven-censuses story). The post-war population is roughly 80 percent Bosniak, and the Habsburg quarter has become one of the few urban spaces that carries a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic memory for a city that is, in demographic terms, considerably less multi-ethnic than it was. The heritage narrative therefore does slightly different political work in Sarajevo than in Belgrade or Rijeka. The heritage narrative does more than drive tourism income. It carries a public claim on Sarajevo’s pre-war identity that many current residents feel viscerally and refuse to relinquish.
The imperial-nostalgic reading of Baščaršija is complicated by the fact that Baščaršija was, in 1992–95, an actual target. Serbian besieging forces attacked the Vijećnica and the National Library because they carried a specific national-cultural meaning, the multi-ethnic Bosnian archive, that the besiegers wanted destroyed. In this context, “imperial nostalgia” as a valorising heritage frame does more than sell hostel beds. The frame reinforces a claim about what Sarajevo was, and refuses to concede that it was, in fact, destroyed. Whether that reads as good nostalgia or problematic nostalgia is a judgement each reader has to make. Jovanović’s framework applied to Sarajevo cannot decide it.
Reading list
Jovanović’s article is the primary reference. Nineteen pages, CC BY 4.0, readable straight through. The four case cities it treats, Rijeka, Belgrade, Vienna, Istanbul, provide the analytical apparatus for reading Sarajevo alongside them.
Complementary reading, in reverse chronological order:
- Cameron’s 2023 article on Habsburg-era British tourism (Moser story) for the historical origin of the tourism logic.
- Kadkani-Schmitt’s 2017 UC Berkeley PhD dissertation on Habsburg architectural politics (see the Vijećnica siblings story) for the imperial-administrative apparatus that created the fabric in question.
- Zejnilović and Husukić’s 2018 article on Sarajevan residential architecture through the four historical periods, particularly its post-war analysis of foreign-capital-driven construction on the city’s slopes.
Sources
- Miloš Jovanović, “Imperial nostalgia in the era of post-socialist urban change”, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 25:3 (2025), 413–431. Open access, CC BY 4.0. DOI
- Ross Cameron, “An Oriental Holiday: constructing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a destination in British tourist literature, c. 1890–1914”, Journal of Tourism History 15:3 (2023), 233–256. DOI
- Sarajevo City Hall (Vijećnica), reopening ceremony 9 May 2014 and public reopening 17 July 2014. Wikipedia
- David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), the theoretical source for Jovanović’s “spatial fix” argument.
Sources & further reading
- Miloš Jovanović, 'Imperial nostalgia in the era of post-socialist urban change', Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 25:3 (2025), 413–431
- Ross Cameron, 'An Oriental Holiday: constructing Bosnia and Herzegovina as a destination in British tourist literature, c. 1890–1914', Journal of Tourism History 15:3 (2023), 233–256
- Vijećnica reopening ceremony (9 May 2014) and public reopening (17 July 2014)
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