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Architecture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo Salomova palata — Ottoman porches inside a 1912 façade

Rudolf Tönnies designed the Salomova palata in 1912 for the Salom brothers, Jeshua and Morris. Nine window bays across the street façade. On axes three and seven he pulled the first-and-second-floor windows out on stone consoles, referencing the Ottoman doksat — the traditional Bosnian closed porch. Above the ground floor, eight 2.5-metre figures in Bosnian folk costume. Nobody at the time wrote about the hybrid. Trapara found it in 2019.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Stand across Maršala Tita from number 54, look up, and count the vertical window axes. There are nine. The building is Salomova palata, Vienna Secession, 1912, Rudolf Tönnies, designed for the Salom brothers.

Look at axes three and seven from the left. The windows on those two are pulled slightly forward from the façade plane, on stone consoles. It’s subtle. Nobody who isn’t looking for it sees it.

That is the doksat, the traditional Ottoman-Bosnian closed porch, hiding inside a Vienna Secession apartment block. Boris Trapara found it in the archive in 2019. It’s not on any tour signage. It’s not marked. It’s just there.

What a doksat is, in Ottoman-Bosnian residential vocabulary

The doksat is the architectural feature of traditional Bosnian houses (the čardaklija rural type, the urban Sarajevo residential houses) where the upper floor is pulled out on wooden or stone consoles to project beyond the ground-floor footprint. It functions as:

  • A weather-protected outdoor room on the upper floor, closed with wooden lattice screens that let air through but block sightlines.
  • A street-facing seat for the household women to observe the street without being observed in return — the Ottoman-Bosnian residential privacy pattern.
  • A structural amplification of the upper-floor space, so a narrow ground-floor footprint can expand at the private-life level.

Sarajevo has hundreds of vernacular doksats, the Old Town houses, Isa-Begov Hamam, Morića Han. It is not a feature you find on a Habsburg-era apartment block.

That’s the point Trapara makes.

What Tönnies did

Nine axes across the Maršala Tita façade. Seven of them (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9) get standard Vienna Secession fenestration, paired sash windows, restrained stucco banding at the sills, standard Habsburg middle-class apartment grammar.

On axes 3 and 7, the first-and-second-floor windows are pulled forward on stone consoles, projecting about 40 cm from the façade plane. The corner detailing references the wooden-console detailing of traditional Bosnian residential doksats.

Tönnies didn’t build a full doksat — that would have been impossible under Habsburg fire code and structural-load constraints for an apartment block. He built a structural-decorative reference to one. Stone consoles instead of wood. Standard sash windows instead of wooden-lattice screens.

But the visual signal is unmistakable. On axes 3 and 7 of a Vienna Secession apartment block, in the middle of the Habsburg administrative quarter, two Ottoman-Bosnian residential porches.

The BiH-folk-costume figures

The other decorative programme on the façade is sculptural. On the first-floor level, across all nine axes, eight large decorative figures, each about 2.5 metres tall, sculpted in stucco-and-plaster relief, in traditional Bosnian folk costume.

The four male figures wear traditional Bosnian dimije (baggy trousers) and fes, one in Muslim dress, one in Serbian Orthodox, one in Catholic Croat, one in Sephardic Jewish. The four female figures wear dimije and headscarves in the same four confessional variants.

That’s a compact ideological statement, the four confessional communities of Bosnian civil life, on a Jewish-owned building, at eye-level height, in the middle of the Habsburg-administrative quarter. In 1912 the specific reading was Kállay-era Bosniak-unity, the Habsburg argument that the four communities were one civic people. The Salom brothers, commissioning a Vienna Secession apartment block for their Jewish family, chose the same decorative programme.

Why nobody wrote about the doksat at the time

Trapara’s argument in Ch. 2.4.1: the doksat detail was, in 1912, not classifiable. Vienna’s architectural journals read the building as a Vienna Secession block. Sarajevo didn’t yet have an institutionalised Bosnian-language architectural press to read it differently. The hybrid was invisible in the critical vocabulary of the day.

Tönnies himself, in his few surviving 1912 statements about the design, described it only as “a residential block for a Bosnian professional-class client, in modern Vienna style with specific Bosnian references.” The references are not itemised.

The doksat becomes legible only when someone reads the façade with the vernacular Bosnian residential vocabulary in mind. Trapara in 2019 did that. Before Trapara, nobody had named it in print.

What to do with this

Walk to Maršala Tita 54, south side of the street, one block east of Marijin Dvor. Count the nine axes. Look at the third from the left. Notice the small projection of the first-and-second-floor windows on stone consoles. That’s the doksat.

Look at the seventh axis. Same detail on the other side.

Look up at the first-floor level and count the eight folk-costume figures. Read them left to right, Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish, then the four female variants.

Then walk into the hidden atrium at the centre of the block and read the whole building as one thing. Vienna Secession on the street. Two Ottoman doksats worked in. Eight BiH-folk-costume figures at eye level. Hidden Ottoman-style atrium at the centre. Commissioned by Jewish Sarajevan civic professionals in 1912.

That’s what a single Habsburg-era Sarajevo building can carry, when the architect responds to the site and the client.

Sources

  • Boris Trapara, From Vienna to Sarajevo (INALCO Paris and IBU Sarajevo, 2019), Ch. 2.4.1, pp. 116–118.
  • Habsburg Landesregierung building-permit records, 1912 — the Salomova palata construction file.
  • Historijski arhiv Sarajevo, Tönnies architectural legacy.

Sources & further reading

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