A local's guide to Sarajevo. Long-form guides to destinations, neighbourhoods, and hidden corners, written by someone who lives in the valley and pays for his own coffee.
The Ivan Štraus building opened in 1983 as the flagship of the 1984 Winter Olympics. Ten years later some of the first shots of the siege were fired from its upper floors,...
The catalogue
Sarajevo’s working synagogue, built in 1902 in pseudo-Moorish style by the Austro-Hungarian administration for the Jewish community that had grown...
The Avaz Twist Tower is Sarajevo’s tallest building (142 metres, completed 2008). A small public observation deck on the 35th...
Built for the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Games and last raced for the 1991 World Cup, the bobsled and luge track...
Ferhadija is the broad pedestrian street that begins at the Sarači–Sarači transition (marked by the Meeting of Cultures line in...
A small, deliberately unflashy memorial museum to the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995. Founded by photographer Tarik Samarah in 2012,...
Founded in 1882 to a design by Karel Pařík, Hotel Europe (Hotel Evropa) was the first purpose-built hotel of the...
A locals' atlas
Bosnia’s first third-wave specialty coffee shop, opened in 2018 by Rešad Strik — a former Hollywood and Ertuğrul actor who...
A café-museum dedicated to Josip Broz Tito, last leader of socialist Yugoslavia. Inside, walls of communist-era memorabilia, vintage telephones, busts,...
A quiet park on the south bank of the Miljacka, named in Ottoman Turkish for “Horse Square”, a 15th-century horse...
Sarajevo’s working brewery, founded 1864. The oldest industrial plant in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by 1907 the largest brewery in the...
A tiny teahouse on a cobbled lane above the Sebilj, where Husein and Dijana Džirlo serve 53 different teas, traditional...
A single ground-floor museum at the north foot of the Latin Bridge. The building was Moritz Schiller’s Delicatessen in 1914;...
The journal
The Ivan Štraus building opened in 1983 as the Olympic showcase, launched two opposing political parties in 1990–91, briefly served...
Between 1909 and 1910, two British women published widely-read travel books about Bosnia at exactly the moment the region was...
R.W. Seton-Watson visited Sarajevo in 1912 and 1913 before the assassination, returned in 1920 and 1925 to interview the surviving...
Béni Kállay ran Bosnia-Herzegovina from a desk in Vienna between 1882 and 1903. His twenty-one-year tenure as Common Minister of...
The canton’s development strategy cites three numbers that, taken together, form one of the sharpest paradoxes in the Sarajevan economy:...
In 1878, a Habsburg military officer named Armand Schweiger-Lerchenfeld published in Vienna a 245-page ethnographic study of newly-occupied Bosnia titled...
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