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Heritage · ·7 min read

Sarajevo Old Jewish Cemetery — 3,850 Sephardic tombstones, second-largest in Europe

On the south slope above the Miljacka, thirty-one thousand square metres of Sephardic sepulchral culture. Three thousand eight hundred and fifty tombstones in seven plots. A Geniza with fourteen crates of Hebrew books buried in 1916. Second-largest Jewish sepulchral complex in Europe, per the dossier submitting it to UNESCO in April 2018. Closed for burials in 1966. A guide to the cemetery on the hill behind Grbavica.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Sarajevo Old Jewish Cemetery — 3,850 Sephardic tombstones, second-largest in Europe
Ph: Julian Nyča · source · CC BY-SA 3.0

Walk south from the Latin Bridge, cross the Ars Aevi footbridge, and climb the switchbacks that go up behind the Grbavica sports hall. Twenty minutes on foot from the centre, at the point where the concrete stops and the pines begin, a gate opens onto a hillside that reads, at first, as forest floor. Only after you have walked a few metres in do you see the stones. Low, wide, tilted into the slope, uncarved on the tops, worn smooth by weather. Thirty-one thousand square metres of them. About three thousand eight hundred and fifty stones in total, arranged into seven plots that follow the contours of the hill.

The Old Jewish Cemetery of Sarajevo, Staro jevrejsko groblje in Bosnian, Bet ha-almin ha-yashan in the community’s own vocabulary. The working record of Sephardic Jewish Sarajevo from about 1630 until burials ended in 1966. Bosnia and Herzegovina submitted it to UNESCO’s Tentative World Heritage List on 3 April 2018 (Ref. 6334) under four cultural criteria. KONS designated it a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004.

Most first-time visitors never come here. A mistake worth correcting on a slow afternoon.

The dates that matter

The Hevra Kadiša, the Jewish burial society, of Sarajevo was founded in 1558, two years after the earliest documentary record of Sephardic Jews living in the city (the Sarajevo court sijill of 1557). The community had arrived from the Iberian Peninsula, mostly via the Ottoman Adriatic, in the decades after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. Nobody knows where the community’s earliest generations were buried.

The cemetery on the Kovačići slope is dated by community records to around 1630. No earlier documentation survives. The oldest tombstones lie next to a medieval stećak necropolis at Borak, the same stone tradition that produced the Bosnian tombs on our stećaks story, and the Sephardic stones resemble the stećci in scale and arrangement. Two sepulchral cultures met on the same hillside.

Burials ended in 1966. A new Jewish cemetery further out at Bare, north of the city, replaced it.

The UNESCO Tentative List submission was made in 2018 in the context of an ICOMOS Germany / Jewish Community of Germany initiative. A Berlin conference in April 2011 had proposed a serial transnational nomination of Jewish cemeteries across Europe. The Sarajevo dossier was written into that framework.

A page from the Sarajevo Haggadah — the most-cited artefact of the Sephardic community whose 3,850+ tombstones fill the Old Jewish Cemetery at Kovačići.
The Sarajevo Haggadah. Same community. Photograph: National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Zemaljski muzej), Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain

What you actually see

The cemetery is on a steep slope, south-facing, terraced roughly by generation. Approach from the western gate at the base and walk upward. The seven plots are named by the community for historical reference; they are not signposted on the ground.

The stones themselves come in four rough forms, and Trapara’s stećak catalogue reads onto them cleanly:

  • Flat slabs covering the grave, oldest form, closest to the medieval ploče.
  • Chest tombs (sanduci), the most numerous form. Rectangular, waist-high, often on a plinth.
  • Sarcophagi with saddle-shaped roofs, the prestige form, cousin to the Herzegovinian-school sljemenjaci.
  • Cross-shaped or narrower upright stones, later forms, sometimes marking rabbinical graves.

The inscriptions are in square Hebrew script, cut by specialist stonemasons who worked from the community’s Hebrew calligraphy. The oldest are almost entirely worn. Many of the mid-19th-century stones are still readable by a Hebrew reader.

Beyond the burial ground itself, three structures are worth naming.

The main gate, a monumental gate in the north wall of the enclosure, dating to the Habsburg period.

The cemetery chapel, Ciduk Adin, built 1923–1924 by the engineer Scheiding. Architecturally historicist, mixing Habsburg-era stylistic references with Jewish decorative motifs. Funeral prayers were said here. Closed most of the time; the Jewish community, small but working, opens it on request.

The Geniza, the burial vault for damaged Hebrew books. The first Sarajevan Geniza burial took place on 3 July 1916. A second interred fourteen crates of books at an unrecorded later date. The Geniza is the reason the cemetery matters even for readers who are not interested in cemeteries: it connects this site directly to the Sarajevo Haggadah, the illuminated manuscript the community preserved rather than buried, and to the wider question of how Sephardic Sarajevo kept its texts.

Four memorials to victims of fascist terror, Second World War memorials added post-1945.

The Ashkenazi ossuary, built in 1962 after the older Ashkenazi graveyards elsewhere in the city were exhumed and the remains consolidated here.

Why the dossier claims four criteria

UNESCO submissions almost always cite one or two criteria. The Sarajevo dossier cites four:

  • Criterion (ii): the Sarajevo Sephardic sepulchral culture developed distinctly from Sephardic communities in Italy, Africa, or the Levant. The tombstones are cut from local Bosnian stone and follow local stećak-adjacent forms rather than Italianate or Ottoman-Levantine templates.
  • Criterion (iii): the cemetery is evidence of a Sephardic tradition that has continued in Sarajevo from the 16th century to the present. Tombstone forms, epigraphy, funeral rites all traceable across four centuries.
  • Criterion (iv): the cemetery is an example of a sepulchral culture developed in parallel with the Sarajevan hillside settlement’s right-to-a-view principle (see our neighbourhood story). The stones, like the houses of a mahala, are arranged so that each grave preserves a sightline down the valley.
  • Criterion (vi): the Geniza, and its association with the Sarajevo Haggadah, makes the site an anchor for the community’s textual tradition.

The dossier also claims, cautiously, that this is the second-largest Jewish sepulchral complex in Europe after the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague. Cite that ranking as “per the UNESCO submission” rather than as an established fact. Rankings of Jewish cemeteries by size are not consistently agreed on.

How to get there

The cemetery gate is on Kovačići street, at the top of the switchback climb from the Ars Aevi footbridge. From the Latin Bridge to the western gate is about twenty minutes on foot with a moderate uphill.

  • Free entry.
  • The gate is generally open during daylight hours. Small padlock, wooden gate, no attendant.
  • Wear shoes with grip. The hillside is steep and, after rain, slippery.
  • The community’s office at La Benevolencija on Hamdije Kreševljakovića 59 (in the old Sephardic quarter near the Miljacka) can arrange a guided walk with historical context. Ask ahead by a day or two.

No cemetery museum on site. The stones are the museum. If you want the fullest published account of what is there, Šefik Bešlagić’s 1989 Stećci, Kultura i umjetnost has the comparative apparatus for reading the Sephardic stones against the Bosnian medieval ones. Cvi Loker’s Yehudei Bosna (Jerusalem, 1997) is the standard Hebrew-language treatment.

A note on visiting

The cemetery is a working sacred site, not a monument in the tourist-attraction sense. The small resident Jewish community walks it, descendants of the pre-1941 Sarajevan-Jewish diaspora return to it, and scholars study it. Few tour groups come here. A difference worth respecting.

Cover your head, if you are a man. Do not touch the stones. Do not photograph specific graves without a reason. Do not pick anything up. If a stone is inscribed and a small pebble sits on top of it, the pebble was placed by someone who came to visit; leave it where you found it, and if you want to add one, small pebbles from the path are acceptable.

Come back down the slope, cross the footbridge, and get a coffee in Grbavica. The city keeps its history layered. You have just walked through a piece of it that most guidebooks do not name.

Sources

  • UNESCO Tentative List, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo, Ref. 6334, submitted 3 April 2018. Tentative list entry.
  • Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina, National Monument designation of the Old Jewish Cemetery, 2004.
  • Šefik Bešlagić, Stećci — Kultura i umjetnost (Sarajevo: Veselin Masleša, 1989).
  • Cvi Loker, Yehudei Bosna (Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi, 1997), Hebrew-language study of the Bosnian Jewish community.
  • Muhamed Kreševljaković, Sarajevo za vrijeme austrougarske uprave, 1878–1918 (Sarajevo, 1969), on the Habsburg-era community, including the 1923–24 Ciduk Adin chapel commission.
  • Moritz Levy, Die Sephardim in Bosnien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden auf der Balkanhalbinsel (Sarajevo, 1911), the classical German-language treatment of the Sephardic community.

Sources & further reading

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