Sarajevo Roses — the two-hundred-odd shell craters marked in red resin, made by ordinary citizens with no government project
After the siege ended, someone in Sarajevo started filling the mortar-shell craters in the pavement with red resin. There was no formal government project. There was no funding. There was no plaque. Just a slowly-spreading practice of marking the spots where three or more people had been killed by a single shell. About two hundred markers were made in the first years after the war. Perhaps a hundred survive. What they are, why they were made, and where to find them.
Walk any street in central Sarajevo (Ferhadija, Zelenih Beretki, Zmaja od Bosne, Alipašina) and look at the pavement. Occasionally, embedded in the concrete or the asphalt, you will see an irregular star-shaped area of dark red resin, roughly a metre across, its edges radiating outward like a splash.
These are the Sarajevo Roses (Sarajevske ruže). Each one marks the spot where a mortar shell fell during the 1992–1995 siege and killed three or more people. The shape is the shape of the shell impact: the central crater and the radiating splash pattern of the shrapnel. The red is the red of blood that was spilled at that spot.
There was no formal government project to make them. There was no municipal budget. There was no plaque design competition. The practice began organically in the first year or two after the war and spread through the city as an informal act of civic memory. Approximately two hundred were originally created. Roughly a hundred survive today.
The site’s destination page, Sarajevo Roses, gives the walking-visit details and the practical tips. This piece is longer-form: a short history of how the practice began, what events the largest Roses mark, and why the practice matters for reading postwar Sarajevo.
Who first filled a crater with red resin
The origin of the practice is not fully documented. Multiple accounts circulate; none is fully verifiable. What is documented is that in the summer of 1996, a few months after the Dayton Peace Agreement, several individual Sarajevans began, independently, filling shell craters with red-tinted epoxy resin.
The most-cited early account attributes the practice to Nedžad Kurto, a Sarajevan architect and urban planner, who is said to have proposed the idea of marking shell impact craters in an Oslobođenje article in early 1996. The suggestion was that craters where multiple people had died should be preserved rather than repaired, and marked with red resin as a civic gesture.
Whether Kurto was the first to actually do it, or whether independent individuals began doing it in the same period, is contested. What is not contested is that by late 1996 the practice was widespread across central Sarajevo, that individual citizens, small NGOs, and neighbourhood associations were sourcing the resin and doing the work themselves, and that the city administration was tacitly accepting rather than either endorsing or preventing the practice.
Unlike, say, the state-commissioned Vraca Memorial Park (Bogdan Bogdanović 1981; damaged in the siege) or the Eternal Flame (Juraj Neidhardt 1946), the Sarajevo Roses were not designed as a formal memorial project. They were a civic-scale, individual-scale response to a memory practice that emerged in the historical moment of Sarajevo 1996. No architect designed them. No committee approved them. They emerged.
What each Rose means
Each individual Sarajevo Rose marks a mortar-shell impact where three or more people were killed. The three-person threshold is not a rule; it is a rough working convention. Some Roses mark craters from single explosions that killed just two or three people. Others mark craters from mass-casualty events that killed dozens.
The larger Roses (the ones marking mass-casualty events) are the ones with the strongest civic weight:
Markale Market, 5 February 1994. A 120mm mortar shell landed in the central Markale market at 12:37 p.m. and killed 68 people and wounded 144. The Markale market rose is on Mula Mustafe Bašeskije, near the market entrance. It is the largest Sarajevo Rose, and it is the one that international press coverage of the siege most often shows.
Markale Market, 28 August 1995. A second 120mm shell landed at approximately the same spot at 11:10 a.m., killing 43 people and wounding 75. The second Markale shell was the event that triggered the NATO bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb positions, which eventually forced the negotiations that produced the Dayton Peace Agreement. A separate rose marks the second event, adjacent to the first.
Vaso Miskin Street, 27 May 1992. Three mortar shells landed on a bread queue at Vaso Miskin (now Ferhadija), killing 22 people and wounding around 100. The rose is on Ferhadija at the corner near the Museum of Sarajevo. It is one of the older and better-preserved Roses.
Klara Cetkin, 22 January 1994. A mortar shell landed on a group of children sledding, killing six children. The rose is on Klara Cetkin street. It is small and easily missed.
Sarajevska pivara, 12 July 1993. A shell landed at the entrance of the Sarajevo Brewery where a water-collection queue had formed. It killed twelve people. The rose is on Ilidža bulevar.
Roughly a hundred other Roses mark smaller-scale events across the city, each of them a shell, a date, a set of names.
The rose that is not there
Not every place where three or more Sarajevans died in the siege has a Rose. The making of the Roses depended, in the immediate post-war period, on someone knowing the event, having the resin, having the time, and having the physical access to the crater. Many events were memorialised. Many others were not.
The killings by sniper fire are not marked. A sniper who killed three people at the same crossing over several days did not leave a crater. There is no impact geometry to fill with resin. The visual logic of the Rose depends on the shell crater. What the Roses commemorate, therefore, is not the total civilian death toll of the siege (approximately 11,000 people) but the subset who died in identifiable mortar-shell events.
The distinction is not marketed. It is not written anywhere. You have to work it out by walking. When you find a Rose, you know that at that spot a shell exploded and killed at least three people. When you don’t find a Rose at a spot where you happen to know something bad happened, that is the absence of a crater and not the absence of memory.
The state of the Roses now
The Roses have been under gradual erosion since about 2005. Several factors:
Road resurfacing. When streets are repaved as part of ordinary infrastructure maintenance, the Roses are usually covered over. Occasionally the resurfacing crew will preserve the Rose by working around it. More often it is destroyed. The Sarajevo municipal administration has, since 2010, adopted an informal policy of trying to preserve Roses during resurfacing, but the policy is applied inconsistently.
Resin degradation. The epoxy resin used in the mid-1990s Roses was consumer-grade material, not designed for long-term outdoor exposure. Twenty-five years of freeze-thaw, UV, and pedestrian traffic have degraded it. Many Roses are now faded pink rather than red, or have partially crumbled.
Traffic redesign. Some Roses were on streets that have been converted to pedestrian zones or one-way traffic since 2000; others were on streets that have been widened or reconfigured. In each case the Rose was either preserved, moved, or lost.
Vandalism. A small number of Roses have been deliberately damaged in the postwar period, both by nationalist actors who dispute the events they commemorate and by ordinary vandalism.
The current state, as of a walking survey I did in 2026, is roughly 60 to 100 Roses still visible in central Sarajevo, of the original ~200. The number depends on how you count faded fragments.
Why they matter
The Sarajevo Roses matter as an artefact of postwar Sarajevo because they are, on the evidence, one of the very few memorial forms in the city that emerged from the population rather than from the state. The Vraca Memorial Park was designed by a Belgrade architect for a socialist state programme. The Eternal Flame was designed by Neidhardt for the Sarajevo administration. Even the Alija Izetbegović mausoleum at Kovači Šehid was commissioned by the family and by the SDA party.
The Roses were made by individuals working with buckets of resin in the summer of 1996. They mark places where people died because ordinary Sarajevans decided that those places should be marked. The memorial form (red resin filling a mortar crater) has since been imitated in other post-conflict cities (Beirut, Baghdad, Aleppo), but the Sarajevo Roses were, per the documentary evidence, the first.
They are also a piece of Sarajevan civic infrastructure of memory that the postwar city produced without a plan and without a budget. The organic character of the practice reflects a fact about Sarajevo in 1996: the state was still forming. The municipal administration barely existed. The Federation and Republika Srpska boundaries had just been drawn. NATO was still on the ground. What Sarajevo had, in that moment, was ordinary citizens with a memory of what had happened and access to the pavement outside their homes.
They filled the craters. They left them there. Thirty years later some are gone and most are fading. What was there before them, in memory, is still there. The pavement is just the reminder.
For visitors
For the walking-visit details, the practical tips, and the recommended cluster at Markale, see the destination page, Sarajevo Roses. The destination page is the on-the-ground guide.
Sources
- Suada Kapić et al., Sarajevo Survival Map (Sarajevo: FAMA International, 1996). The FAMA International documentation project on siege-era Sarajevo civic life, including the emerging memorial practices.
- 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 1. UNC CDR.
- Markale Market Memorial Museum, permanent exhibition on the 1994 and 1995 shell events.
- Sarajevo City Museum, records of the postwar memorial practices.
- Nedžad Kurto, Oslobođenje article, spring 1996.
- Various Oslobođenje and Dnevni avaz coverage of the emerging Rose practice, 1996–2005.
- Emily Gunzburger Makaš, Rebuilding Mostar: International and Local Visions of a Contested City and Its Heritage (Cornell University Press, 2007), for the comparative post-war memorial-practice literature.
Sources & further reading
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