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Sarajevo 1885 — Trebević stopped being a mountain, became forest #1401

Before the Habsburgs, Sarajevans went up Trebević and cut winter firewood. It had worked that way for four centuries. In 1885 the Landesregierung renumbered every forest around the city as a state municipality, put a warden on it, and made casual gathering a 5-to-50-forint offence. Within a decade Sarajevo's average winter firewood cost had tripled.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Most accounts of the Habsburg transformation of Sarajevo focus on the buildings, Vijećnica, Sacred Heart, National Museum. What they skip is what the same administration did to the mountains around the city.

Kadkani-Schmitt’s Chapter 3 does the mountains. She reads the 1885 Landesregierung Sammlung (annual regulatory compilation) and finds one specific ruling on p. 490 that changed everything about how Sarajevans got winter firewood.

Four centuries of walking up Trebević

Before 1878, the forests around Sarajevo, Trebević to the south, Igman and Bjelašnica to the west, Jahorina to the south-east, were communal-use land (mera) under loose Ottoman state title. Nominally the sultan’s. In practice, the mahalas that abutted the mountains used them.

A Sarajevan household could cut winter firewood on Trebević without a permit. The customary limit was household-scale, enough to warm one house through one winter. If you wanted a larger cut for a building project, you told the muhtar.

Kadkani-Schmitt estimates that pre-1878 Sarajevo drew about 90% of its winter firewood from the surrounding forests. Roughly 6,000 households in the 1878 city relied on the mountains for heating fuel.

That was the pattern for approximately four hundred years.

The Sammlung, p. 490

The Habsburg administration didn’t dismantle this by decree. It dismantled it by reclassification.

The 1885 Sammlung, the annual compilation of Landesregierung regulations, designated each named forest as a distinct state municipality: a Waldgemeinde (forestry municipality) with hard cadastral boundaries and its own line in the administrative ledger. Title moved from Ottoman vakuf and the sultan to the Habsburg state. Any gathering of wood, stone, hay, mushrooms or other forest product now required a permit issued in Sarajevo.

Casual gathering, the customary household firewood cut, became an offence. Fine of 5 to 50 forints for a first offence. 100 forints and confiscation of tools for repeat offenders.

For scale: the average Sarajevan labourer’s monthly wage in 1885 was about 25 forints. A first offence could cost you two months’ pay.

What the wardens did

The K. u. k. Bosnisch-Herzegowinische Forstverwaltung, the Habsburg Bosnian-Herzegovinian Forestry Directorate, was established in Sarajevo in 1886, one year after the Sammlung. It employed about 120 forest wardens across the province by 1890, of which around 30 were stationed in the Sarajevo Canton area.

The wardens were initially Austrian and Czech professional foresters transferred from the imperial forestry service. From the mid-1890s locally-recruited Bosnians were trained at the Habsburg forestry school at Vareš.

In the first five years of enforcement (1886–1890), the Sarajevo Canton saw about 1,400 forestry-offence prosecutions. Around 800 convictions.

By 1900, Sarajevans had stopped going up Trebević for casual firewood. The habit was gone.

The bill

A Sarajevo household’s winter firewood cost in 1878 was about 10 to 15 forints. You paid only the labour of hauling from the mountain, since the wood itself was free.

By 1895 the same household’s winter firewood cost 35 to 55 forints, the labour plus the licensed-merchant markup plus the state forestry tariff.

Roughly a 250% increase in a single essential household expense over one decade. The Habsburgs called it modernisation of the province’s forestry resources. The Sarajevan household called it what it was.

The four Waldgemeinden

The four mountain forests around Sarajevo got their numbers in the 1885 classification:

  • Trebević: Waldgemeinde Nr. 1401
  • Igman: Waldgemeinde Nr. 1402
  • Bjelašnica: Waldgemeinde Nr. 1408
  • Jahorina: Waldgemeinde Nr. 1412

Each had a hard boundary, a state-appointed warden, and a tariff structure. The numbers survive in the modern Bosnian forestry administration with different code sequences but the same jurisdictional lines. When the 1984 Winter Olympics were held on Bjelašnica, Igman, Jahorina and Trebević, they were held on ground that had been legally-designated Habsburg state forestry municipalities for 99 years.

What to do with this

If you take the Sarajevo Cable Car up Trebević, you are riding through what has been a state-owned forestry area continuously since 1885. The trail system, the fire breaks, the timber-harvest cycles all descend from the Habsburg regime imposed that year.

If you walk the ridge trail at Bjelašnica, same story. Different Waldgemeinde number.

The primary source, the 1885 Sammlung, volume 8, is at the Historical Archive of Sarajevo. It’s German, administratively dense, and nobody reads it. Kadkani-Schmitt’s Chapter 3 is the accessible summary.

Sources

  • Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt, Framing Bosnia (UC Berkeley PhD, 2017), Ch. 3, pp. 160–162.
  • Sammlung der Verordnungen und Kundmachungen für Bosnien und die Hercegovina, 1885, p. 490.
  • K. u. k. Bosnisch-Herzegowinische Forstverwaltung administrative records, 1886–1918.

Sources & further reading

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