Sarajevo War Hostel — a father, a son, and a bunker built in an apartment
In an ordinary apartment building somewhere in central Sarajevo, a man who fought as a cable operator through four years of siege gives three-hour bunker tours to backpackers, in-character, with fake bandages and a soundtrack of artillery. Helen Orr's PhD dissertation is the fullest account of Sarajevo's most peculiar war-tour institution.
The Sarajevan war-tour industry has, over three decades, developed a specific vocabulary of sites, the Tunnel of Hope, the Yellow Bastion, the bullet-shell trinket shops of Kazandžiluk. Most are real remnants of the 1992–1995 siege. One is not.
The Sarajevo War Hostel is the most peculiar of them. A hostel in the strict sense — you can book a bed for the night — run by a family in an ordinary residential apartment building. Its rooms are named after siege-era themes. Its common area displays real siege-era artefacts. And in a former aunt’s apartment adjacent to the guest rooms, the family has built, log by log, a full-scale replica of a wartime military bunker. Plywood-and-log ceiling reinforced with layered nylon stockings and packed earth. An audio track of city artillery. A scripted three-to-four-hour tour.
The fullest academic account is Chapter 4 of Helen M. Orr’s 2019 UNC dissertation. Orr spent time at the hostel between 2015 and 2018, interviewed the family, took the tours, and treats the whole operation as an ethnographic object worth understanding on its own terms. Everything here is either paraphrased from her chapter (with attribution) or a note on the visitor experience she also documents.
The family, and the names
A father and son run the War Hostel. The father, Jasmin, was a Bosnian Army soldier during the four years of the siege, a cable operator whose job was to run and repair the telephone lines that connected the frontline bunkers, dodging enemy fire from bunker to bunker on the outer defensive ring of the city. His son was three years old when the siege began and seven when it ended. In a video that his father filmed at the time, Orr describes watching it during the bunker tour, the son can be seen playing with his mother, artillery audible in the background. Jasmin filmed it, Orr writes, “in case he died in the war and there was no trace of the child that he had had.”
The son’s birth name is Arijan. As an adult, when he began running the war hostel with his father, he changed his name to Nula Jedan, Bosnian for “zero one”, or “0 1”. His father’s radio call sign during the war. The son told Orr the choice has a second meaning: it is a name without ethno-religious identity, a name of numbers rather than a name of a people, chosen as a reminder that “we are all, first and foremost, humans.” Orr notes that in the Bosnian context, where a name usually signals ethno-confessional background, the choice reads as a deliberate refusal.
Jasmin, at the time of Orr’s fieldwork, spoke no English. Nula Jedan speaks fluent English. On the bunker tour, Jasmin plays himself. Nula Jedan translates.
How the War Hostel began
The tour started by accident. The family had, for years, been renting rooms in their apartment as an ordinary hostel through a booking agency. Guests would check in and, inevitably, ask: “What tours do you give?” At first they gave none, Nula Jedan would offer to walk them around the neighbourhood informally, and if they wanted to pay him something, they could. Then, after some time, a group of English visitors expressed strong interest in the war. Nula Jedan, according to Orr, said to his father: “People are interested in the war. You’ve been there, you know. Why don’t you show them the Frontline where you fought?”
Jasmin’s initial reaction: “No one would be interested in that. I hated it there. Who would be interested in that?”
The son talked the father into it. Jasmin took the English visitors in his car to the front-line positions where he had served, and mimicked the actions of war from bunker to bunker (per Orr’s summary of Nula Jedan’s account). The tourists, in Nula Jedan’s phrasing, “turned out to be amazed by it. And they paid him quite a lot because it turned out to be quite emotional.”
That was the beginning. Over the following years, the family gradually formalised the tour, refined its structure, and, as bunkers on the actual siege line became harder to access (some had collapsed, some were on private land, some were in the rain), hit on the idea of building their own bunker inside a spare apartment. Nula Jedan asked his father: “You built bunkers, right? Why don’t you build one here?” They built the first version in one of the hostel dorm rooms, then moved it to the aunt’s adjacent apartment, and later added a trench.
Nula Jedan tells his tourists: “This is the only trench bunker replica in the world.” Whether the claim is strictly true is beside the point; the sentence is part of the performance.
The bunker tour, as Orr documents it
The tour lasts three or four hours. Its content is a lecture on how to survive under siege conditions, delivered inside the bunker in near-total darkness. Orr’s Chapter 4 gives a scene-by-scene account that reads, in places, like a stage direction. The core sequence:
Arrival. Guests are led through the hostel corridor, past a display of collected artillery pieces and mortar casings, and into the bunker itself. They sit on benches built into the walls, which are made of stacked wooden logs padded with army blankets. At the front of the bunker is a small table with what looks like a candle on it. Behind the table sits an audio-visual set up for the movie nights the bunker also hosts.
Setup. Nula Jedan settles the guests in, then leaves. When he shuts the door, the room goes almost entirely dark, only the candle stub burns. Then an audio track begins to play: a recorded soundtrack of siege-era artillery, shots, and explosions. Orr writes that the guests sit in the darkness listening to the gunfire for about a minute, though it feels longer.
Entrance. Nula Jedan bursts back through the door. He has changed clothes. The military uniform he wore during the setup has been replaced with a white t-shirt with fake red blood stains and a white bandage wrapped around his left arm. He plays surprised to see the tourists. In Bosnian, he asks: “Who are you? Are you lost? Foreigners? Do you speak English?” Then, in English, addressed to the audience: “How do you say, how do you say… WAR.”
The lecture. The next three hours cover the practical realities of siege life. How the cable telephones between bunkers worked. How the exterior fabric of a bunker was built, a layer of logs, a layer of women’s nylon hosiery for insulation, a layer of earth, a layer of stone, repeated three or four times. How to make a candle from cooking oil and a shoelace. How light was actually distributed inside a bunker, Nula Jedan produces a cigarette lighter and says “95% of the time, the only light you would see is this,” clicking it once for effect. How water was carried, Nula Jedan shoulders several giant plastic jugs from harness straps, two on his back and two on his front, picks up three more in his hands, and invites the tourists to try lifting them. How refrigeration was managed. How food was cooked. How pages of household books were burned for kindling.
The video. At the end of the sequence, Nula Jedan shows the video of himself as a three-year-old child, filmed by his father in the summer of 1993.
The exit. After the bunker, Nula Jedan escorts guests to a small room that has been kept curtained off during the tour. It is a display room, the collected artillery pieces, shells, and mortar casings the family has assembled over the years, with a corkboard on one wall for tourists to leave post-it notes. Orr transcribes a few of the older notes she saw pinned there. “Thank you for an eye-opening experience!” wrote a Finnish visitor named Jani who introduced himself as a UN peacekeeper. “Proud daughter of a UN soldier,” signed Jessica. “I hope you manage to spread the belief and way of life that we are all human first. Peace,” wrote Katie from the UK.
What Orr’s chapter argues
Orr’s Chapter 4 does not treat the War Hostel as a curiosity. Her argument is that it is a specific and unusually pure case of what the memory-studies scholar Marianne Hirsch calls post-memory, the phenomenon by which a war experience lived by one generation is transmitted to and re-performed by the next generation, sometimes in ways that carry the emotional weight of the original event and sometimes exceed it.
Nula Jedan was three when the siege began. He does not remember the war in the direct sense his father does. What he has, instead, is his father’s memories, absorbed through decades of daily proximity to a man who lived through it, and now, as an adult, re-performed nightly, in a room built to look like the bunkers his father repaired cables between. The bunker tour is not a museum exhibit and not a historical reenactment. A son performing his father’s war for a foreign audience, in a room they built together, using materials salvaged from the actual siege.
The complication Orr sits with, and does not resolve, is that this is also a business. Tickets have a price. Guests can book beds for the night. TripAdvisor reviews get written. The war hostel appears in international press. The economic transaction is real. What makes the War Hostel unusual is not that a family has commodified their war memory (see Bullets in Baščaršija for the wider trade), but that the commodification is so intimate and so performed. Jasmin, who initially thought his son was “absolutely crazy” for wanting to build a bunker inside their home, now stands in the room during the tour, beaming with pride. Orr describes the scene carefully.
Where to find it
The War Hostel sits at an address in central Sarajevo that Nula Jedan sends only after booking is confirmed — standard for hostels of its size, and is also, per Orr, a deliberate choice to preserve the atmosphere of the tour. The hostel is listed on TripAdvisor and Hostelworld. Bookings are individual (usually one to four visitors); walk-ins are not the norm. Rates as of 2026 are roughly 30 KM per night for a dorm bed and 30 KM per person for the Bunker Tour, but check current prices before you go.
Two things worth knowing.
The tour is in English, delivered mostly by Nula Jedan, with Jasmin playing himself in Bosnian and Nula Jedan translating. Bosnian-speaking guests report a fuller experience.
Nula Jedan’s parting message is universalist. He does not make political claims about Serbian responsibility or Western failure. His argument, at the end of three hours in a dark bunker, is that ethnicity, religion, and race are categorisations we invent, and that when we let them divide us we produce the conditions in which sieges happen. Whatever you make of the argument, it is the family’s chosen message, and it is not what most Bosnian war tours end on.
Whether the War Hostel is the right way to encounter the Sarajevan war is a judgement each visitor makes for themselves. Orr’s 30 pages of Chapter 4 are the best available preparation for making that judgement.
Sources
- Helen M. Orr, Sarajevo and the War: Atrocity, Commodity, and Transgression in Bosnia’s War Tours, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019, Chapter 4: War Child / War Guide: Post-Memory, Performance & Repetition, especially the section The Siege / Bunker Tour / Experience (pp. 136–144). UNC Carolina Digital Repository
- Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (Columbia University Press, 2012), the theoretical frame Orr uses.
- Sarajevo War Hostel, press coverage and listings on TripAdvisor and Hostelworld (2016–present).
Sources & further reading
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