History · October 15, 2026 ·7 min read

Sarajevo's Velika avlija — the Sephardic courtyard between two synagogues, and Laura Papo's living room

Between Mula Mustafa Bašeskije Street and Ferhadija — at the exact seam where the Ottoman čaršija meets the Habsburg grid — sits a small, half-visible courtyard 27 metres wide and 50 metres deep. It contains two synagogues: the Old Temple, built in 1581 and the oldest synagogue in Bosnia; and the New Temple, built in 1870. Both were converted into a museum and a gallery. The courtyard is officially named for Laura Papo Bohoreta, the Sephardic Sarajevan writer. Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić, in their 2021 Faculty of Architecture book, treat it as their first case study.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Walk west from the Sebilj along Ferhadija for about three minutes. Slow down as you pass the pedestrian traffic thickening around the point where the mosque-flanked Ottoman street opens into the Habsburg-grid section of the city. On your right, to the north, is a small, half-visible break in the block. If you turn into it, you find yourself in a courtyard about the size of a football penalty box: 27 metres wide, 50 metres deep, opening north onto the busy Mula Mustafa Bašeskije tram-and-traffic street. Trees, a plaza, two solid stone buildings that don’t look like anything else on the block.

You are standing in the Velika avlija Laure Papo, the Grand Courtyard of Laura Papo Bohoreta. One of the most historically layered pieces of urban ground in central Sarajevo, and until Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić published their 2021 book Urban Rooms of Sarajevo (Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo), it had almost no dedicated scholarly literature.

What is in the courtyard

Two synagogues.

The Old Temple (Il Kal Grande in Judeo-Spanish, Stari hram in Bosnian) was built in 1581. It is the oldest surviving synagogue in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The building has been damaged and rebuilt more than once. Zagora and Šamić note that fires ran through the surrounding Sephardic quarter several times over four centuries, most consequentially in 1879, when a fire destroyed the Sephardic residential quarter called Sijavus-pasine daire that had grown around the synagogues. The Old Temple survived. It has been converted into the Muzej Jevreja Bosne i Hercegovine, the Museum of Jews of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and holds the community’s permanent historical exhibition.

The New Temple (Il Kal Nuevo) was built in 1870, just eight years before Habsburg rule began. It was built to accommodate the growing Sephardic congregation. Today it functions as a gallery. Zagora and Šamić describe it as the site’s “key architectural and cultural highlight”, the more visible of the two buildings, and the one you tend to see first when you enter the courtyard.

The two synagogues sit as freestanding solids, asymmetrically placed in the void, Zagora and Šamić’s phrase. Neither is aligned to the perimeter of the site. They face each other at an angle, with the trees and small garden between them.

The name

The full name of the courtyard is Velika avlija Laure Papo Bohorete, after Laura Papo Bohoreta, the Sephardic Sarajevan writer of the interwar period. Papo Bohoreta wrote in Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), the language of Bosnia’s Sephardic community, which their ancestors had brought with them after the 1492 expulsion from Spain and preserved for four centuries in the Ottoman lands. Her body of work, plays, essays, ethnographic sketches, documented Sephardic women’s lives in Sarajevo. The naming of the courtyard is a modern act of civic memory: naming a piece of ground for the writer who most systematically recorded what happened on it.

A page from the Sarajevo Haggadah, the 14th-century illuminated Passover manuscript brought to Sarajevo by Sephardic Jews after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. The manuscript is held at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and is inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World International Register (2017). It is the most-cited artefact of the same Sephardic community whose synagogues stand in Velika avlija Laure Papo. — A page from the Sarajevo Haggadah. The same Sephardic community, its most famous artefact, held elsewhere in the city. Photograph: **National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Zemaljski muzej)**, Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain (PD-Art)

The Sephardic quarter the courtyard belonged to, Sijavus-pasine daire, was named for the Ottoman Siyavuş Paşa, who endowed it in the sixteenth century as accommodation for the Sarajevan Jewish community. When the 1879 fire destroyed most of that quarter, the Habsburg administration rebuilt the block to European specifications. The taller apartment buildings around today’s courtyard, with their Habsburg-grid frontages, replaced the courtyard’s traditional Sephardic housing.

What survives on the perimeter

Zagora and Šamić spend the first pages of their case study on the courtyard’s perimeter: the buildings that box it in on all four sides. The perimeter is a very Sarajevan mix.

On the north, the multi-storey Habsburg-era apartment blocks that were built after the 1879 fire. Their rear facades face into the courtyard; their front facades face onto Mula Mustafa Bašeskije Street. The two frontages read completely differently. The fronts are decorated, addressed to the public street; the rears are plain, addressed to the courtyard.

On the east, a row of small buildings that Zagora and Šamić describe as “echoing the oriental urban pattern of Bascarsija”. They read as vernacular Ottoman-scale infill rather than Habsburg block. Small shops and tourist attractions occupy the ground floors, and are busy through most of the day. This eastern edge is the site’s most active perimeter.

On the south, the rear of the Ferhadija shopfronts. Ferhadija is the old town’s most frequented pedestrian street, and its northward-facing rear walls close the courtyard.

On the west, modest single-family houses, the last remnants of the pre-fire domestic scale.

The courtyard is bounded on all four sides by four different registers of Sarajevan architecture, Ottoman-scale infill, Habsburg apartment block, Sephardic pre-fire vernacular, and Ferhadija shopfront. A legibly Sarajevan urban artefact in a way that a single-period courtyard would not be.

The trees

Zagora and Šamić note the vegetation:

Two tall poplars.
Several pines.
A chestnut tree.
Two small circular arrangements of benches around green patches, in front of the New Temple.

The trees are structural elements of the courtyard’s design. Zagora and Šamić write that the two poplars, planted centrally, would function as “metaphors for the tekija dervishes”, but that image belongs to their other case study, Tekija cikma. For Velika avlija the trees are more straightforwardly civic. They are what makes the courtyard readable as a plaza and not just an alley. They are old enough that removing them would be a scandal.

Why Zagora and Šamić chose it as Case Study Number One

The book’s larger argument is that Sarajevo’s public spaces are best understood not as squares and streets but as enclosed, human-scale “rooms”, pieces of ground whose walls are the surrounding buildings. Velika avlija Laure Papo is the archetypal such room. Zagora and Šamić lead their case-study section with it because:

It is spatially legible: a clear rectangular void with defined walls.
It carries four hundred years of layered history in a single ground plane.
It is on the exact seam between two urban grids — Ottoman and Habsburg — and shows how the seam behaves under pressure.
It is under-used today. The northern strip has been turned into on-ground parking. The western spaces are unclear in ownership. The southern shopfronts of Ferhadija do not open into it. The courtyard, in short, is a first-class urban room that is being lived in as a service corridor.

The book’s proposed interventions, pedestrianising the north edge, activating the frontages, adding pop-up cafes and small playgrounds, using unified pavement to knit the site visually, are the kind of “urban acupuncture” Zagora and Šamić recommend for Sarajevo more generally.

What to look at when you visit

The courtyard is public. No entrance ticket for the courtyard itself. The two synagogue buildings, the Museum of Jews inside the Old Temple, and the gallery inside the New Temple, have their own opening hours and admission.

If you visit, take time to notice the exact geometry:

Enter from Mula Mustafa Bašeskije Street through the northern opening.
Stop at the tree line and look south. You see, in one frame, the New Temple’s front elevation, and behind it the roofs of the Ferhadija shopfronts.
Turn east toward the small buildings that echo the čaršija scale.
Turn west toward the modest houses.
Note that the ground plane is almost silent: the Bašeskije traffic barely reaches this deep into the site.

Zagora and Šamić describe the courtyard’s atmosphere as “highly introverted and intimate, and its human-scale proportions, enclosure, memory of place, and patterns of use insinuate the modes of its potential transformation into an urban room”. The courtyard is small enough to be a room. It is old enough to hold a claim. And it is quiet enough, five metres in from the tram line, to make you notice you are somewhere specific.

Sources

Nermina Zagora and Dina Šamić, Urban Rooms of Sarajevo: Transforming Urban Public Spaces Using Interior Design Tools (Sarajevo: Faculty of Architecture, University of Sarajevo, 2021), Case Study 1 “Velika avlija Laure Papo,” pages 246–252. ISBN 978-9958-691-97-3. Faculty of Architecture PDF.
Alija Bejtić, Ulice i Trgovi Sarajeva: Topografija, Geneza i Toponimija (Sarajevo: Muzej Grada Sarajeva, 1973) — the standard reference on Sarajevo’s streets, cited by Zagora and Šamić for the 1879 fire that destroyed Sijavus-pasine daire.
Muzej Jevreja Bosne i Hercegovine, permanent exhibition on the history of the Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina, housed in the Old Temple.
Related pieces on this site: Old Jewish Cemetery in Kovačići, The Sarajevo Haggadah, Sarajevo has five urban rooms, Sarajevo 1879 und 1884, The Historical Museum of BiH.

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