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Architecture · ·3 min read

Sarajevo Sacred Heart — the Burgundian cathedral Vancaš shrunk to fit, with the rosette moved and one painter dead mid-fresco

Vancaš had one French Gothic church in his sketchbook when he took the commission. The plot in Trg Franje Josipa wouldn't fit it. So he moved the rosette from the transept to the front, shrunk the transepts to annexes, and cut the nave from nine bays to six. The two altars inside came from Vienna and Hradec Králové. The fresco painter died halfway through the job.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

If you stand on Trg Fra Grge Martića looking north at the Sarajevo Sacred Heart Cathedral, you are looking at a building the architect wanted to make bigger and couldn’t.

Josip Vancaš had one specific French church in his head, Notre Dame de Dijon, the compact 13th-century Burgundian church on the Place Notre-Dame in Dijon. He had spent a year in Paris in 1881–82, sketching Gothic ecclesiastical buildings, and Dijon was the one that stuck. When he took the Sarajevo commission in 1884, he wanted to build it again.

Trg Franje Josipa wouldn’t fit it.

What Dijon has, and what Sarajevo got instead

Notre Dame de Dijon has three horizontal registers on the front façade, deep transepts giving a strong Latin cross plan, and the rose window centred on the north transept.

Vancaš’s compressions, catalogued in Boris Trapara’s 2019 dissertation, Chapter 3.3:

Move the rosette. The rose window in Dijon is on the transept. Vancaš pulled it round to the front, that big round window you photograph, between the twin towers, is the Dijon transept rosette moved 90 degrees.

Shrink the transepts. The Latin cross plan of the Dijon original has full-height transepts extending north and south. Vancaš’s plot said no. He shrunk them to two-storey annexes flanking the nave, small chapels below, sacristies above.

Cut the nave. Dijon has nine bays. Sarajevo has six.

The finished dimensions: 35.5 metres long, 21.3 wide, 43.2 to the tops of the towers. The proportion of length to width is Dijon’s, applied to a shorter plot. If you know Dijon, you’ll read it in the ground plan.

Two altars, two empires

The interior went in between 1889 and 1893. The two flagship altars came from two different corners of the empire.

The western altar, the Immaculate Conception, was a personal gift from Franz Josef I. Sent from Vienna’s Imperial and Royal Court factory in 1890. Marble cut in Carrara, figures carved by Anton Fernkorn’s Vienna workshop.

The eastern altar, Cyril and Methodius, the Slavic apostles, came from Hradec Králové. A diplomatic gift from the Bohemian Catholic diocese, delivered in 1891. It was, in the Kállay-era ideological reading, a small Bohemian-Czech gesture of Slavic-Catholic solidarity in a Habsburg province.

Two altars. Two empires. Both channelled through Vancaš’s Dijon reworking.

The painter who died

The fresco cycle is the messiest attribution in the building. Trapara documents the problem on p. 204.

The commission went in 1891 to Alessandro Franchi, an Italian painter from Rome. He was to execute six major nave frescoes on Old and New Testament themes. Franchi began work. He died in Sarajevo in 1892.

The completion went to Alberto de Rohden, a South Tyrol painter based in Merano, who finished the cycle between 1892 and 1893.

The current attribution reads Franchi (started) and de Rohden (finished), which is a compact way of saying that the fresco cycle above your head was authored by two painters in a specific sequence of illness and death.

What to do with this

Stand on the front steps. Look up at the rose window. That is the Dijon transept, moved.

Walk around to the north side. Look at the compact annexes flanking the nave. Those are the Dijon transepts, shrunk.

Then walk seven minutes east to the Vijećnica and remember that in the same five years, 1884 to 1889, that Vancaš was building this Burgundian cathedral, Karel Pařík was drawing his first Vijećnica plan in Pseudo-Moorish, and Alexander Wittek was rebuilding the Sebilj as an Ottoman fountain. Same Habsburg administration, three architects, three styles, seven minutes’ walk apart.

That’s the density of 1880s Sarajevo building. Vancaš’s Dijon is one line of it.

Sources

  • Boris Trapara, From Vienna to Sarajevo (INALCO Paris and IBU Sarajevo, 2019), Ch. 3.3, pp. 202–207.
  • Vancaš legacy, Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo — the 1881–82 Paris sketchbooks.
  • Habsburg Landesregierung ecclesiastical building records, 1884–1893.

Sources & further reading

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