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

Explore Sarajevo / Stories

History · ·3 min read

Sarajevo — Europe's first public toilet with running water was built here in 1529, and nobody puts it on the brochure

In 1529, Sarajevo built a public toilet with running water and a working sewage system. London did not manage this until 1858. The fact has never made it onto a tourism brochure.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

In 1529, this city had a public toilet with running water and a working sewage system.

London did not manage this until 1858, and only then because the Thames smelled so bad that Parliament could not sit. Paris got municipal sewers under Haussmann in the 1860s. Vienna was a late-nineteenth-century project.

Sarajevo had solved the problem 329 years earlier.

How

The man responsible was Gazi Husrev-beg, the Ottoman governor who, between 1521 and 1541, built essentially everything the old town still runs on. The mosque. The madrasa. The bezistan. The clock tower. The library. The hamam that is still standing. And, tucked into the civic infrastructure of the Tsar’s Mosque (Careva Džamija) complex, a public sanitation facility with piped water.

The Ottoman system that made this work was not magic. It was engineering. Spring water from the hills above the city was channelled through carved stone conduits into the mosque complexes, the fountains, the hamams, and the public facilities of the čaršija. The same gravity-fed system that provided drinking water at the Sebilj provided flushing water at the toilet.

The facility was part of a wider package. The Ottomans did not think of sanitation as a separate service. It was waqf, endowed infrastructure, funded in perpetuity by the revenues of the governor’s commercial properties. The mosque, the school, the bath, the toilet, and the fountain were all one endowment. You built them together because a city needs all of them.

Why nobody mentions it

Sanitation is not photogenic. The Sebilj gets the postcards. The hamam gets the architecture tourists. The toilet gets a footnote — literally footnote 12 in a Romanian political scientist’s 2015 journal article about Sarajevo as a border city.

But the fact is worth more than that. If you are walking through Baščaršija and someone tells you the city was a “primitive backwater” before the Habsburgs arrived (a line the 1887 Stix report helped establish and that our piece on Stix unpacks), you now have a one-line reply.

The city had running-water sanitation 358 years before Stix wrote that sentence.

What survives

The Tsar’s Mosque still stands on the south bank of the Miljacka, at the eastern edge of the bazaar. The water system that fed the complex (the carved stone channels, the fountain infrastructure) is the ancestor of the municipal water supply the city still uses. The springs that feed it are the same karst aquifers that make Sarajevo’s tap water as good as it is.

And if you visit the Gazi Husrev-beg complex and stand in the courtyard near the šadrvan fountain, you are standing next to piped water that has been running, in one form or another, since the 1520s.

Five hundred years of running water. And the brochure shows a cable car.

Sources

  • Miruna Troncotă, “Sarajevo — a border city caught between its multicultural past, the Bosnian war and a European future,” Eurolimes, 19, 2015, p. 125.
  • Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006).
  • Related on this site: The Gazi Husrev-beg complex, Sarajevo tap water, Edmund Stix’s 1887 report, Isa-Begov Hamam.

Sources & further reading

Keep reading

More from the guide.