Sarajevo's Vraca Memorial Park — the Serbian architect whose memorial his own side shelled
In 1981, the Belgrade architect and urban planner Bogdan Bogdanović designed Vraca Memorial Park above Sarajevo, commemorating the ten thousand Sarajevans killed by Nazi and Ustaša forces in the Second World War. Eleven years later Vraca hill became one of the main Bosnian Serb sniper positions of the siege, and the monument was systematically damaged. By 1993 Bogdanović was in exile in Vienna, publicly denouncing the Belgrade regime that had shelled his own memorial. The park still carries the damage. His trajectory is legible in it.
Vraca hill rises about 250 metres above the south bank of the Miljacka, at the eastern end of central Sarajevo. From the top you can see the whole valley: Baščaršija to the east, the Habsburg quarter running west along the river, Marijin Dvor at the far end, and the ridge of Trebević on the opposite side of the valley. Geographically, one of the finest viewpoints in the city.
Between 1980 and 1981, at the commission of the Sarajevo municipal administration, the Serbian architect Bogdan Bogdanović designed a large memorial park on Vraca hill. The park commemorated approximately ten thousand Sarajevans killed by Nazi and Ustaša forces during the Second World War, most of them Jewish, some Roma, some Bosniak, some Serbian civilians, some anti-fascist partisans. The park was opened by Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito’s successor Cvijetin Mijatović on 25 November 1981 as the largest official Second World War memorial in Sarajevo.
Eleven years later, in April 1992, Vraca hill became one of the main Bosnian Serb sniper positions during the siege of Sarajevo. The geographic advantage that had made Vraca a beautiful viewpoint made it, from the perspective of the besieging forces, an ideal firing position. The forces occupied the memorial park, used it as a military position for four years, and systematically damaged it. They vandalised some elements deliberately. Bosnian government shelling, aimed at dislodging the snipers, destroyed others.
The park has been partially restored since 2005, but it remains, in the strict inventory sense, one of the more damaged Second World War memorial sites in Europe. A visit to it today is a peculiar Sarajevan experience: you are looking at a monument that was built to commemorate one war and was damaged by another, forty-seven years apart, both of them fought partly by the same nationalist ideologies against the same city.
Who Bogdan Bogdanović was
Bogdan Bogdanović (20 August 1922 – 18 June 2010) was a Serbian architect, urban planner, and political intellectual whose career spans the entire second half of the twentieth century. He grew up in Belgrade, joined the Yugoslav Partisans in 1941, fought through the war, and returned to civilian life in 1945 as a young man committed to Yugoslav-socialist modernism.
He studied architecture at Belgrade in the late 1940s and graduated in 1950. His first major commission was the Monument to Jewish Victims of Fascism and Fighters in Belgrade’s Sephardic Cemetery (1951), which won him the competition for the site. From that project onward, Bogdanović specialised in memorial architecture. Over the following forty years he designed approximately twenty large memorial sites across Yugoslavia — in Kosovo, Vojvodina, Bosnia, Croatia, and Macedonia — most of them commemorating Second World War victims.
His memorial style is unmistakable. It combines abstract geometric forms with stonework and landscape design; it avoids figurative representation almost entirely; it uses stone that is quarried locally to each site; and it tends to organise the memorial as a walked experience, a path through a landscape with sculptural events at particular points, rather than as a single monumental object. His most famous work is the Jasenovac Memorial at the site of the wartime Ustaša concentration camp, opened 1966.
Bogdanović also had a substantial political career. He served as mayor of Belgrade from 1982 to 1986 and was later a critic of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. He left Serbia in 1993 to live in Vienna in political exile. He died in Vienna in 2010 aged 87. Vienna Central Cemetery is his burial place.
The Vraca Memorial Park is one of Bogdanović’s largest and one of his last major commissions. It sits alongside the 1966 Jasenovac and the 1958 Kruševac memorial as one of his defining works.
What the Vraca park was designed as
The Vraca Memorial Park occupies approximately 6 hectares on the summit of Vraca hill. Bogdanović’s design consists of several linked elements:
The Main Wall of Names, a stone wall approximately 100 metres long, curved along the contour of the hill, bearing the names of approximately 9,091 Sarajevans killed by Nazi and Ustaša forces between 1941 and 1945. The names are grouped by their pre-war neighbourhood of residence in the city. Most are Jewish (the Sarajevan Jewish community was almost entirely destroyed in the Holocaust; approximately 8,000 of the 10,000 Sarajevan Jews were killed). Some are Roma. Some are Serbian civilians. Some are Bosniak. Some are anti-fascist partisans of various backgrounds.
The Memorial Fortress, a large stone-and-concrete structure at the highest point of the park, roughly geometric in form, that Bogdanović designed as an abstract representation of the fortified positions used by partisan forces during the war. The Fortress is not literally a fortification; it is a sculptural evocation of one.
The Necropolis Field, a paved area on which the graves of named partisan fighters and Holocaust victims were placed. Some of the graves are original; some are symbolic.
The Amphitheatre, a small stone-cut amphitheatre for commemorative ceremonies, seating approximately 400 people.
The Path System, a network of stone paths connecting the four elements, designed so that a visitor moves through the memorial in a set processional sequence.
Landscape design, extensive planting of local Bosnian conifers and deciduous trees to integrate the memorial into the wider Vraca hillside forest.
The overall effect, in the 1981 opening, was of a substantial and quiet memorial site occupying the whole summit of the hill, that a Sarajevan family could visit on a Sunday afternoon and spend two hours walking. Contemporary Yugoslav architectural criticism rated it one of the more successful WWII memorial designs in the country.
What the siege did to it
In April 1992, at the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo, Bosnian Serb forces occupied Vraca hill. The advantages of the site were that it sat above the eastern half of the city and gave clear firing lines onto Ferhadija, Baščaršija, and the Latin Bridge corner. The memorial park was, from a military perspective, ideal ground: it had cleared sightlines, prepared paths for movement, and stone structures that could be used as firing positions.
For the four years of the siege the park was used as a Bosnian Serb military position. What happened to the individual monument elements:
The Main Wall of Names, deliberately damaged. The occupying forces chipped away names of Sarajevan Jews and anti-fascist partisans, spraypainted others, fired at them with small arms. They regarded the memorial’s commemoration of anti-fascist and Jewish Sarajevan victims as ideologically hostile to their own project, and treated it accordingly.
The Memorial Fortress, used as a firing position and damaged both by direct wear and by counter-fire from Bosnian government forces. The upper structural elements were substantially destroyed.
The Necropolis Field, desecrated. Individual graves were damaged and some were destroyed.
The Amphitheatre, used as a Bosnian Serb military mess hall. Not structurally destroyed but heavily damaged internally.
The Path System, mined. Multiple anti-personnel mines were placed on the paths and around the park perimeter. Some of these mines remain in place today; a substantial portion of the park is not yet demined.
The Landscape, most of the mature planted trees were cut for firewood during the siege.
By the end of the siege in February 1996, the park was, in the strict inventory sense, a ruin.
Post-1996 partial restoration
The postwar restoration of Vraca has been slow, uneven, and politically contested.
In 2005 the Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina (KONS) designated Vraca as a National Monument. The designation provided legal protection but not funding. The KONS designation catalogued the damage in detail and prescribed restoration priorities: demining first, then structural stabilisation of the Fortress, then repair of the Wall of Names, then landscape rehabilitation.
Between 2005 and 2020, various demining programmes, coordinated by BiH’s national demining authority BHMAC, cleared approximately 60 percent of the park. As of 2026, roughly 40 percent of the original park area is still marked as suspected mine-contamination zone and is officially inaccessible.
Restoration of the Wall of Names has been partial. Approximately 2,000 of the 9,091 names have been recut into the stone using KONS-supervised specialist conservation. Approximately 7,000 names remain in their damaged state, either partially legible or entirely destroyed.
The Memorial Fortress has been structurally stabilised but not fully restored to its 1981 form. It is safely walkable but visibly damaged.
The Amphitheatre has been cleaned and can now host small commemorative ceremonies. The annual 9 May Anti-Fascist Day ceremony (commemorating the end of WWII in Europe) is held at the Vraca amphitheatre.
The Path System has been repaired only in the demined portions of the park. Some elements of the original processional sequence Bogdanović designed can no longer be walked.
The Landscape has partly regenerated naturally; some replanting has been done, primarily by volunteer groups.
Why the restoration has been slow
Funding. Full restoration of Vraca would cost, per KONS estimates, approximately 15 million euros. That is a substantial sum in the context of BiH’s postwar budget priorities. Foreign donor programmes have been reluctant to fund it because the site has become, in the postwar political framing, a Bosniak commemorative site rather than a general-Yugoslav one.
Political contestation. The Bosniak-majority Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina treats Vraca as an anti-fascist memorial that commemorates civilians killed by Nazi-aligned forces (including Bosnian Serb Chetnik forces of the WWII period). The Republika Srpska government has been reluctant to endorse or fund the restoration, since a substantial number of WWII-era Chetnik commanders are treated as heroic figures in current Bosnian Serb official narratives.
The Bogdanović provenance. The park was designed by a Serbian architect who later became a political exile from Milošević’s Serbia. His memorial-design tradition is, on its intellectual and aesthetic terms, a Yugoslav-socialist one that neither the current Bosnian nor the current Serbian state administration has strongly reason to preserve. The Federation of BiH treats Vraca as a Sarajevan memorial; Republika Srpska treats it as a Yugoslav-era artifact; Serbia treats Bogdanović as an internal-political embarrassment.
Demining. The work of demining is slow, expensive, and dangerous. BHMAC has substantial other demining priorities across the country. Vraca is one site among many.
What a visitor can see now
The Vraca Memorial Park is, in the current 2026 state, walkable in about half of its original area. Access is via the road from central Sarajevo up to Vraca village, then a short walking path to the memorial site. The site is unfenced; there is no admission fee. There is no visitor centre.
What is visible:
- The main entrance path: walkable.
- The Wall of Names: visible but partially damaged. Approximately 2,000 names are legible in restored condition; the remainder are in various states of damage.
- The Amphitheatre: walkable and restored.
- The Memorial Fortress: walkable but visibly damaged. Do not climb on the upper structural elements.
- The lower Necropolis Field: partially walkable, still damaged.
- The upper northern section of the park: inaccessible; marked as suspected mine contamination.
For the walking-visit details and practical tips, see the Vraca destination page.
Why we visit
The largest WWII memorial in the city. It commemorates people killed for their religious and political identities, Jewish Sarajevans mostly, but also Roma, partisan fighters, and civilians of various backgrounds, by the same broad category of nationalist militia that returned to besiege the city fifty years later.
A Serbian architect designed it — and in the 1990s, that same architect became a public opponent of the Belgrade regime that shelled the city and damaged his own memorial. Bogdanović’s political trajectory, from anti-fascist partisan in 1941 to celebrated Yugoslav memorial architect in the 1960s to Milošević-critic exile in Vienna in the 1990s, is legible in the arc of the park itself.
In postwar Sarajevo, the park sits as a somewhat inconvenient object. The Federation of BiH does not have the budget to restore it fully. Republika Srpska does not have the political reason to help. Serbia does not have the political reason to acknowledge Bogdanović’s work outside a narrow critical-modernist framing. The park sits, half-restored, on a hill overlooking a city whose relationship to it is still being worked out.
You visit it because it is there, because the ten thousand people whose names were cut into that stone are worth acknowledging, and because a Sarajevan memorial that survived the systematic damage of a four-year siege on a nationalist-ideological front line is worth walking through slowly.
Go on a spring or autumn afternoon. Give it an hour. Notice the patches where the stone has been recut, and the patches where the original chipping is still visible. Walk down through the pine forest afterwards toward the city. The view opens as you descend.
Sources
- Vladimir Kulić, Maroje Mrduljaš, Wolfgang Thaler, Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia (Berlin: Jovis, 2012). The reference on Yugoslav modernist architecture including Bogdanović’s memorial series.
- Aleksa Korolija, “Harmonizing the Old and the New: Urban ensemble as decoded and conceived in the texts by Dušan Grabrijan and Bogdan Bogdanović”, Docomomo Journal 72 (2024), 56–64. On Bogdanović’s theoretical work. Journal issue.
- Commission to Preserve National Monuments of Bosnia and Herzegovina (KONS), 2005 designation of Vraca as National Monument.
- Bogdan Bogdanović, Mrtvouzice: mentalne zamke staljinizma (Zagreb: August Cesarec, 1988). Bogdanović’s own writing on memorial architecture.
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980, exhibition catalogue, 2018.
- BHMAC (Bosnia and Herzegovina Mine Action Centre), demining records for the Vraca site.
- Sarajevo Anti-Fascist Committee, records of the annual 9 May commemoration at Vraca.
Sources & further reading
- Vladimir Kulić, Maroje Mrduljaš, Wolfgang Thaler, 'Modernism In-Between: The Mediatory Architectures of Socialist Yugoslavia' (Berlin: Jovis, 2012)
- Aleksa Korolija, 'Harmonizing the Old and the New: Urban ensemble as decoded and conceived in the texts by Dušan Grabrijan and Bogdan Bogdanović', Docomomo Journal 72 (2024), 56–64
- Commission to Preserve National Monuments of BiH (KONS), 2005 designation of Vraca as National Monument
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