Sarajevo 1901 — Topič shot eleven panoramas, the best sat in a drawer
The story you know is Schädler 1879 next to Topič 1901 — one before, one after. The archival truth is that Topič joined the Landesregierung in 1885 and returned to the same hilltop in October 1901 with a plate camera and three days of light. He made eleven exposures. The Landesregierung published one. The other ten are in the Historical Archive of Sarajevo, and the strongest of them is a long-exposure night shot of Sarajevo lit by its own new tram line.
The Schädler-Topič panoramas post sets up a clean paired story. Anton Schädler sketched Sarajevo from an easternmost hilltop in November 1878. František Topič photographed the same vantage in 1901. Twenty-two years. Two pictures. The Habsburg transformation visible between them.
That’s the summary. The archival version is more interesting.
Topič had been on staff for sixteen years
František Topič was Bohemian Czech, born in Prague in 1858, trained at the Imperial and Royal School for Graphic Arts in Vienna. He moved to Sarajevo in 1885 as the staff photographer for the Landesregierung. His job was to document Habsburg administrative activity, new buildings, infrastructure, official visits.
Between 1885 and 1918 he made about 12,000 photographs of Bosnia. Around 3,500 survive in the Historical Archive of Sarajevo and the Bosniak Institute.
He didn’t return to Schädler’s easternmost hilltop in 1901 as an outsider. He’d been photographing the same city continuously for sixteen years.
Eleven exposures, three days
The 1901 commission came from the Landesregierung. They were preparing Bosnien und Herzegovina in Wort und Bild (Vienna, 1901), which needed a before-and-after visual argument to answer Schädler’s 1879 sketchbook.
Topič got three days. Between 12 and 14 October 1901 he made eleven exposures from the same vantage. Kadkani-Schmitt reconstructs the schedule from the surviving Landesregierung production notes:
- Two morning shots — 12 October, around 08:00, oriented west toward the Old Town.
- Two mid-morning shots — same day, around 10:30, oriented north over the Sacred Heart quarter.
- Three afternoon shots — 13 October, 14:00 to 16:00, oriented over the regulated Miljacka embankment.
- Two evening shots: 13 October, 18:00 to 19:00, capturing the tram-line illumination.
- Two dawn shots — 14 October, around 06:30, oriented east into the light.
The Landesregierung editors picked one, the mid-morning shot, which aligned most closely with Schädler’s 1879 vantage, for the promotional volume. The other ten went into the archive box.
The night shot
The one worth naming is one of the two evening exposures.
Sarajevo installed its first electric tram in 1895 (see our Habsburg firsts post). Vienna’s own first electric line opened later the same year. On this measure, Sarajevo was ahead of the imperial capital.
The 1895 tram poles carried street lighting on the same infrastructure. By 1901 the Miljacka embankment had one of the first continuously-electric-lit urban riverbanks in the empire.
Topič set up on the easternmost hilltop just after sunset on 13 October 1901, opened his shutter on a long exposure, and captured Sarajevo under electric light. Long exposures of urban night scenes were experimental in 1901. The plate survives, Historijski arhiv Sarajevo, Landesregierung photo collection, box 47, plate 8, and shows the illuminated embankment as a continuous line of light along the river, with the darker mass of the old city on the northern slopes above.
The Landesregierung editors didn’t publish it. They picked the safer daytime shot for the volume.
Why this correction matters
The Schädler-Topič side-by-side is a compressed argument that the Habsburgs turned Sarajevo into a modern city between 1878 and 1901. Fine as shorthand.
The eleven-plate series is a more interesting argument. It says Topič, a Habsburg staff photographer who had been walking these hills for sixteen years, thought the night shot was the strongest evidence of what had changed. His editors overruled him.
The tourist Schädler-Topič gives you the summary. The archive gives you Topič’s own vote.
What to do with this
The Landesregierung photo collection is at the Historical Archive of Sarajevo, Alipašina 30. Open Tuesday to Friday, 09:00 to 15:00. Bring an ID. Ask for box 47.
The smaller Bosniak Institute collection at Mula Mustafe Bašeskije 21 has about 400 Topič plates, some digitised.
The one published shot is reproduced in every Habsburg-Sarajevo book. The night shot from box 47 plate 8 isn’t. That’s the one to ask for.
Sources
- Zahra Kadkani-Schmitt, Framing Bosnia (UC Berkeley PhD, 2017), Ch. 4 epilogue, pp. 191–193.
- Landesregierung photo collection, Historical Archive of Sarajevo, box 47.
- Bosnien und Herzegovina in Wort und Bild (Vienna: Landesregierung, 1901).
Sources & further reading
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