Sarajevo Kazandžiluk — the bullet that becomes a pen
Helen Orr's Chapter 1 traces the same metal through four stages: Lack (Bosnia had almost no weapons pre-war), Commodity (Yugoslav People's Army munitions), Waste (litter across the mountains after 1996), Commodity again (bullet-pens engraved in the 500-year-old cizeliranje craft on Kazandžiluk). One shopkeeper, Ismet, told her the leftover shrapnel from the surrounding hills was sold back to Baščaršija through the whole four years of the war.
Walk down Kazandžiluk, the coppersmiths’ street in Baščaršija. Most of the shop windows have engraved metal objects made from spent artillery shells and bullet casings. Pens, letter openers, small ornaments. Prices from 5 BAM for a small bullet-pen up to 200 BAM for the more ornate mortar-shell pieces.
Most first-time visitors read these as tourist kitsch. Helen Orr’s 2019 UNC dissertation, Chapter 1, is the ethnography that reads them differently. In her frame the objects are the fourth stage of a four-stage commodity cycle that starts in a Yugoslav-era munitions factory in the 1980s and ends on your shop counter today.
Stage 1: Lack
Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1980s had almost no civilian weapons. As a Yugoslav republic, its civilian ownership ran well below pre-war Croatia or Serbia. The 1991 Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) inventory catalogued about 1.6 million small-arms weapons distributed across the Bosnian territorial-defence system, most physically stored in JNA barracks under centralised control.
Civilian per-household ownership in pre-war Bosnia was around 12% (roughly one in eight households, typically a registered hunting rifle). Serbia was around 27%, Croatia around 21%.
When the war began in April 1992, that scarcity was the starting condition.
Stage 2: Commodity (the JNA armoury)
Between April and July 1992, the emerging Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) inherited or seized approximately 70% of the JNA armoury stockpile in Bosnia. Orr cites the ICTY Popović et al. prosecution documents:
- About 170,000 tonnes of small-arms munitions.
- About 1,000,000 tonnes of heavier artillery munitions.
Both figures moved from JNA control to VRS control in three months.
This is the industrial-commodity stage. The shrapnel, casings, and fragmentation residue that would eventually end up on Kazandžiluk started life in Yugoslav-era munitions factories, Bratstvo Novi Travnik, Pretis Vogošća, Igman Konjic, as state-manufactured commodities.
Stage 3: Waste
Between April 1992 and December 1995, Bosnian Serb artillery fired an estimated 1.5 million shells at Sarajevo alone (Sarajevo Documentation Centre post-war count, cited by Orr p. 34).
Each shell produces waste. Orr cites the US Army Corps of Engineers post-conflict assessment: about 300 grams of recoverable metal per shell for the fragmentation categories. For 1.5 million shells, that’s about 450 tonnes of metal waste deposited across the municipality of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996.
In economic terms, the shells were waste: objects with no immediate commodity value that would ordinarily be collected and disposed of as scrap.
That was the condition in 1996.
Stage 4: Commodity again (via cizeliranje)
The transition from waste back to commodity runs through the 500-year-old Sarajevan craft of cizeliranje.
Cizeliranje is decorative metal engraving, practised on Kazandžiluk since the first coppersmith shops opened there in the 16th century. Copper, silver, and (since the 1990s) brass. The hand tools have been in continuous use in Sarajevo since the Ottoman period.
Orr’s fieldwork identifies one practising shopkeeper by name, Azim, who works in the cizeliranje tradition and, since the mid-1990s, has incorporated war-shell material into his work. His shop is at the east end of Kazandžiluk, in a small ground-floor space that has been a coppersmith’s for about 200 years.
Azim gets the spent brass shell casings, the fragmentation pieces, and the bullet casings from a network of scrap collectors, then reshapes them with the cizeliranje tools. He prices the finished object at the labour cost of the engraving plus a war-souvenir markup.
What Ismet said
Orr also names a second shopkeeper, Ismet, who works in a different Kazandžiluk shop.
Ismet told Orr in 2016 that during the four years of the siege, individuals in the surrounding VRS-controlled areas (whom Ismet called “Chetnici”) sold the leftover shell-casings and shrapnel back to Baščaršija scrap-collectors, who passed the material to Kazandžiluk cizeliranje practitioners, who turned it into engraved objects sold, in the post-war years, to war-tour visitors from the same VRS-adjacent territory.
The metal, in Ismet’s telling, crossed the front line multiple times in four years.
The claim is hard to verify, and Orr flags the evidential difficulty. But it is what Ismet, a working cizeliranje practitioner, said in 2016. Orr notes in her field notes the shame in his voice; that is the detail that makes it credible as a working Sarajevan’s reading of the cycle.
Why this matters
Orr’s four-stage argument shows how the war’s metal is not discarded. It is re-absorbed into the 500-year cizeliranje craft on Kazandžiluk and turned into the engraved objects that now make up a large part of the Baščaršija souvenir economy.
The war, in Sarajevan material culture, is not in the past. It’s on the shop counters, in the form of engraved brass objects carrying the residue of the shells that fell on the city between 1992 and 1996.
That’s what you’re looking at when you look at a Kazandžiluk shell-pen.
What to do with this
Read Orr’s Chapter 1. It’s on the UNC Carolina Digital Repository, public and free.
If you buy a cizeliranje-engraved shell object, walk down Kazandžiluk and ask the shopkeeper about the craft. Do not adopt Azim and Ismet as your own personal contacts. They are Orr’s ethnographic subjects, and the site’s editor has not verified their individual identities. Cite Orr if you write about them.
The engraved object you might buy is a fragment of a shell fired at a Sarajevan neighbourhood between April 1992 and December 1995. That’s the commodity. The 500-year-old craft on Kazandžiluk is the reason it exists as a commodity today.
Sources
- Helen M. Orr, Sarajevo and the War: Atrocity, Commodity, and Transgression in Bosnia’s War Tours (PhD dissertation, UNC Chapel Hill, 2019), Ch. 1, pp. 31–37.
- ICTY Popović et al. prosecution documents on JNA armoury transfers, 1992.
- Sarajevo Documentation Centre — siege-era munitions inventories, 1996 post-siege count.
Sources & further reading
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