Explore Sarajevo A local's guide to the city. 0 PDF guide $5 Search

Explore Sarajevo / Stories

History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo Historical Archive — 14,000 Ottoman units, a 1631 dictionary, and a siege-war fund the staff actively collected while under shelling

The Istorijski arhiv Sarajeva was founded on 3 May 1948, in the attic of the Vijećnica, in 40 square metres of borrowed space. It moved twice, once to Koturova Street in 1973 and once to Alipašina 19 after the siege. It holds 14,000 archive units from the Ottoman period, the first Bosnian-Turkish dictionary printed in Istanbul in 1631, family funds of the Svrzo, Despić, Fadilpašić and Jeftanović houses, and a siege-war fund the staff actively assembled while the city was still being shelled. Every unit survived.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Two Sarajevo archives come to mind when travellers hear the word. The National and University Library, the one that burned in the Vijećnica on the night of 27 August 1992. The Oriental Institute, burned three months earlier. Both are stories of loss.

A third archive, less-known, did not burn. Everything in it is still there. The Istorijski arhiv Sarajeva, the Historical Archive of Sarajevo, sits at Alipašina 19, three blocks north of the tram line. The city founded it in the attic of the same building that burned in 1992, in forty square metres of borrowed space, on 3 May 1948.

The forty square metres

The National Committee of the People’s Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the City of Sarajevo made the founding decision. Yugoslav-era archival law, drawn up in 1946, required every city over a certain size to establish a municipal archive. Sarajevo, with a population then approaching 200,000, was well over the threshold. The archive would collect, catalogue and preserve every document the city government had generated from its founding onwards.

The problem was space. The Vijećnica, the seat of the National Library, had precisely one room going spare. An attic room. Forty square metres. The city’s first archivists worked shoulder-to-shoulder in a room the size of a two-bedroom flat’s living-room. The archive’s own institutional history is candid about the working conditions: “very few resources… narrow and inadequate space and other problems accompanied the work of the institution.”

The city did not appoint a director until 1951, three years after founding. Only then did the organisational structure take shape and permanent staff come on.

What is in the archive

The KiG Journal 2007 profile, the standard institutional description, enumerates the collections. In order of scale:

  • 14,000 archive units from the Ottoman period (approximately 1462–1878). These are documents in Turkish, Arabic and Persian, and include: general documents, defteri (registers), sidžili (judge protocols), salname (yearbooks), takvimi (calendars), manuscript and printed books, newspapers, journals, city plans and geographic maps. Among the manuscripts: the transcript of the Elvassijjetu Ebu Hanife — the Will of Abu Hanifa, the eighth-century founder of the Hanafi school of Sunni jurisprudence, whose death year (150 AH, corresponding to 767 CE) is recorded on the transcript.
  • The Sarajevo sarački esnaf register (the leatherworkers’ guild), with volumes from 1726, 1750, 1777, 1789 and 1823. The Sarajevo guild register is one of the most detailed surviving Ottoman-period professional records in Bosnia.
  • The Austro-Hungarian fund (1878–1918): comprising the Government’s Commissioner for the Capital of Sarajevo (1879–1918), the City Government (1879–1918), the District Court and several Military Courts (1914–1918). This fund is the primary documentary source for the Habsburg administration of Sarajevo, and the archive it holds is what serious dissertations on the period cite.
  • The interwar Yugoslav fund (1918–1941): including City Government Fund, District Court Fund, Funds of Commercial-Industrial and Craft Chamber, funds of private companies and schools.
  • A very difficult 1941–1945 fund: including materials from the Office for Jewish Real Estate Management (1941–1942) and the Office for Nationalized Property (1942–1945), documenting the wartime seizure of Jewish and other property under Ustaše rule. This is the record set that Yad Vashem and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum work with.
  • A Yugoslav-era fund (1945–1992): industry, commercial and craft companies, social-political organisations, societies and associations.
  • A siege-war fund (1992–1996): this is the one worth stopping on.

The siege-war fund

During the 1992–1996 siege, the archive’s staff made a decision that not many archives in history have made under similar conditions. Rather than simply protecting the existing collection (the standard wartime archival protocol), they actively collected new documents from the surrounded city as the shelling continued. Government orders, humanitarian-aid records, newspapers, radio transcripts, posters put up on shelled walls, correspondence between besieged Sarajevans and international bodies. The staff went out during ceasefires, gathered material from apartments and offices, and brought it back for cataloguing.

The KiG profile records the decision in one dry sentence: “during the war years (1992–1996) employees of the Archive made a lot of effort and managed to save all materials.” The essential meaning of “all materials” (not just the existing collection but the newly-generated wartime material as well) is why this fund now ranks among the most important primary-source collections on the siege in existence. Every subsequent historian who has written on the siege of Sarajevo at a documentary level has worked with it.

The rare books

Hamid Dizdar organised the archive’s separate library, founded in 1948 by taking over books from the former District Court library. Dizdar, the Bosnian writer and elder brother of the great poet Mak Dizdar (the Kameni spavač poet), ran the library until his death in 1967. By 2007 the library held 20,000 titles, and the rare-book collection includes:

  • Potur Šahidija / Muhamed Havai Uskufija: the first Bosnian-Turkish dictionary in history, published in Istanbul in 1631, written in Arabic script. This is a foundational document of the Bosnian written language.
  • Ivan Frano Jukić (writing as Slavoljub Bošnjak), Zemljopis i povjestnica Bosne (Zagreb, 1851) — one of the earliest modern geographies of Bosnia in a South-Slavic language.
  • Maximilian Schimek, Politische Geschichte des Königreichs Bosnien und Rama, vom Jahre 867. bis 1741. (Vienna, 1787) — an early German-language political history of the medieval Bosnian kingdom.
  • The 17-volume Kitab-ul-muhassas — a great Arabic-language dictionary composed by Ebul Hasan bin Ismail (a Spanish Arab jurist who died in 458 AH / 1066 CE). Printed in Istanbul between 1898 and 1902. Considered “one of the most valuable works of old Arabic philology” still in a working library.
  • A 1737 Latin-language survey of Bosnia’s historical geography — Speciligium observationum historico-geographicarum de Bosniae (published in Leiden, Lugduni Batavorum). Rare enough that fewer than a dozen copies are known worldwide.

What the archive does today

The Historical Archive of Sarajevo publishes a scholarly journal, Glas Arhiva grada Sarajeva (Voice of the Sarajevo City Archive), continuously since 1960. Not one missed volume — sixty-five years of continuous scholarly publication, including through the siege. The archive’s own field guide, Vodič kroz fondove i zbirke Istorijskog arhiva Sarajeva, came out in 2003 and is still in print. It sits in the reading room at Alipašina 19 for anyone who wants it.

Notable exhibitions have been mounted every decade since the founding, the 1969 Sarajevo 1878–1941 in Documents of the City Archive; the 1972 Exhibition of Oriental Manuscripts held on the occasion of the 7th Congress of Archivists of Yugoslavia; the 1988 Through the Funds and Collections of the Historical Archives of Sarajevo on the 40th anniversary. There will be more.

What you can do with the archive

The archive receives researchers on request. Alipašina 19 is a short walk from the tram line — take number 1, 3 or 5 to Nedžarići and walk back, or walk up from the centre in twenty minutes. Reading-room hours are Monday to Friday, mornings preferred. Bring a letter of introduction if you are working on a particular fund; the staff will pull material for you the next day.

The 1631 Uskufija dictionary is not on general display: a rare-book holding, viewable by prior request only. The staff, in my experience, are patient and pleased when a researcher asks for something by name. Ask for the Uskufija, the Jukić 1851, and the Schimek 1787, and you will be handed what you asked for on a light table with a white cloth beneath.

The archive is here. Everything in it survived. The paper is still on the shelf. The reading room is open.

Sources & further reading

Keep reading

More from the guide.