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Architecture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo National Theatre — 22 years before it staged its first play

Walk east along Obala Kulina bana and the third serious building on your left is the opera house. Boris Trapara traced its façade back to the 1877 Wiener Börse. And it opened in 1899 not as a theatre but as a private cultural club. It only became a theatre in October 1921, when the playwright Branislav Nušić stood on the stage and started the curtain.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Walk east along Obala Kulina bana from the Latin Bridge. The third serious Habsburg building on your left is the National Theatre. Every guidebook tells you it opened in 1899 as Sarajevo’s oldest performance venue. Every guidebook is wrong.

It opened in 1899 as a private club.

Pařík at 40, drawing a Vienna Stock Exchange onto the Miljacka

The commission went to Karel Pařík, the Czech architect who drew about seventy Habsburg-era Sarajevo buildings between 1884 and 1918. He’d been in the city fifteen years. He knew the Miljacka embankment quarter block by block, because he’d designed a good portion of it.

The client wasn’t the state. It was the Društveni dom, the Society House, a private civic-cultural club funded by the professional-and-administrative class of Habsburg Sarajevo. Concerts, receptions, balls. What the local Muslim and Serb communities did through Gajret and Prosvjeta, the professional class did through the Society House.

Pařík drew the plans in 1897. Construction wrapped in 1898. The building opened on 26 October 1899. It was not called pozorište (theatre). The word doesn’t appear in the 1899 documents.

Look at the façade from across the Miljacka. Three central bays under a shallow triangular pediment. Two-bay wings under attic parapets. Rusticated ground floor. Paired pilasters at the first-floor windows. This is the compact Italian-Renaissance civic grammar of late-19th-century Vienna. Boris Trapara’s 2019 dissertation traces the source precisely to the Wiener Börse (Vienna Stock Exchange) at Schottenring, designed by Theophil von Hansen and Carl Tietz between 1874 and 1877.

Pařík had studied at the Vienna Academy while Hansen taught there. The Stock Exchange had opened during his student years. Twenty years later, when Sarajevo needed an Italian-Renaissance civic block, Hansen-Tietz was what came out of his hand.

The Sarajevo version is smaller. Same grammar. If you know the Wiener Börse, you’ll see it.

The Nušić handover

The Society House worked as designed for twenty years. The empire that had funded it dissolved in 1918. The Habsburg professional class in Sarajevo lost its patron, its ceremony, and much of its money in one decade. The Society House had no operating budget by 1919.

Sarajevo’s small pre-war theatre companies had been performing in rented halls for two decades. In 1920 the new Ministry of Education transferred the building from private to state theatrical use. It opened as the Sarajevo National Theatre on 22 October 1921.

The opening-night speaker was Branislav Nušić, the Serbian playwright and diplomat, then head of the state theatre section in Belgrade. Nušić spoke first. Then a one-act of his own ran, followed by a short comedy by Ivo Ćipiko. That was the first evening.

Where the opera came from

The theatre had drama from 1921. It didn’t have opera. That started 25 years later, when the socialist Yugoslav reorganisation of cultural institutions folded Sarajevo’s first proper opera company into the newly nationalised building.

The founding performance was Bedřich Smetana’s Prodana nevjesta (The Bartered Bride), Sarajevo, 9 November 1946. Every conductor, tenor, and soprano the Sarajevo Opera has trained since traces their lineage back to that night.

The building was heavily shelled during the 1992–1996 siege, but never closed. The Sarajevo War Theatre worked in its foyer through mortar rounds. Reopened for full opera in 1998.

What to do with this

Stand on the north bank of the Miljacka, opposite the theatre. Look at the compositional geometry, three central bays, two-bay wings, shallow pediment. Recognise the Wiener Börse in it. That pairing is on no plaque outside the building. Trapara’s dissertation names it.

Walk seven minutes east and you’re at the Vijećnica, designed in the same decade by the same Pařík in a completely different style. In 1892 he drew Vijećnica in Pseudo-Moorish; five years later he drew this in Italian Renaissance. Same architect, two commissions, two different Viennas.

If you go to see an opera at the National Theatre, the current season programme is on the door. The room you’re sitting in was a private club for 22 years before it staged anything. It has been a working theatre for 105 years since. Both those numbers are worth carrying with you.

Sources

  • Boris Trapara, From Vienna to Sarajevo (INALCO Paris and IBU Sarajevo, 2019), Ch. 3.3, pp. 207–209.
  • Wiener Börse, Schottenring 16, Vienna. Hansen and Tietz, 1874–1877.
  • Sarajevo National Theatre archive — 1921 opening programme, Bosniak Institute.

Sources & further reading

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