ABSTRACT
Sarajevo has many layers of identity, which have changed quite dramatically in the last 100 or so years. In the course of the twentieth century, the Bosnian capital became embroiled in 11 years of war, which left deep scars on its population. Prior to the Ottoman conquest, Sarajevo (Vrhbosna) had been the site of settlement since the Neolithic period and it expanded in the sixteenth century after the Ottoman Turks captured Bosnia, pushed out the native Bosnian Catholic kings and incorporated the region into their empire. At this time, many native Catholics and Orthodox converted to Islam. Gazi Husrev-Beg (1480-1541) who is buried in the city, did much to augment the already existing small settlements in the area. Over the next 500 years, Sarajevo became a village city nestling in a beautiful golden valley with parks and gardens. It grew as an important Ottoman trading-centre, bringing together people with diverse origins. Egyptian merchants developed their skills in calligraphy and its bedestan (covered market) sold silks and fabrics from all over the Middle East. Catholic and Orthodox shepherds and peasants came to the city to sell agricultural products and to buy fabric. A Jewish cortijo (courtyard) was constructed in the late sixteenth century, near to the market that housed the artisans and craftsmen who had fled persecution in Spain. Old cities inevitably bear the scars of pestilence, violence and natural disasters. Despite its rivers, gardens, parks and fortunate climate, Sarajevo could not be easily defended from the surrounding mountains. Its numerous trees were used to hang the defeated soldiers of 1878, 1914 and 1945. Its streams and rivers became the frontline in the siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995, the city’s hotels provided key locations for violence in 1914 and 1992, as well as a meeting-place for people from all religious groups (Karahasan 1994: 89-90). Habsburg campaigns of conquest in the Balkans by Prince Eugene of Savoy led to the sacking and torching of Sarajevo in 1697; fires also devastated the city in 1879, hence the prevalence of dirne (thick fire doors) in the old city. Mula Mustafa Ševki Bašeskija, a former Janissary, chronicled life in Bosnia’s largest city from 1746 until 1804, describing the different mahalle (districts) of the city, some of whose names derived from the flowers that grew there. Of these mahalle, two were Jewish, 12 were Christian and 90 were Muslim. In particular, Bašeskija recorded the devastation of the plague, which raged for three years after 1783 and killed
thousands across Bosnia. In 1878, the Habsburgs took Bosnia from the Ottomans and administered the region until they annexed it in 1908. Their army surrounded the hills around Sarajevo and a local Muslim, Muhamed Hadžijamaković, organised the city’s armed resistance. He bravely fought on, but was eventually hanged from an oak tree along with seven other defiant Muslim leaders. Both Serbs and Muslims had resisted the Habsburg annexation, about 80 per cent of the total population of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Eventually the authorities pacified the Muslims but the Serbs remained implacably opposed to Habsburg rule. Sarajevo became the focus for much of the administrative ‘improvement’ and was settled by Catholics and a small number of Ashkenazi Jews from outside the region. The city’s population rose from just over 20,000 in 1885 to 50,000 by 1900. Many Catholic citizens emigrated to the Bosnian capital after the late 1870s. The crisis that ignited the First World War started among the angry Orthodox Serb youths of the city, who had come from the countryside to be educated in the Habsburg high schools. Many had joined a revolutionary society Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia). For them, Bosnia belonged with Serbs, Montenegrins and other South Slavs rather than in a state dominated by Germans and Hungarians. The rather porous borders of the country and close cultural links with other South Slavs reinforced their political aims. On arriving in Sarajevo in June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg had stayed at Hotel Austria, in the predominantly Serbian suburb of Ilidža, which retained its majority until 1996. Ilidža, source of the Vrelo Bosna, and a popular tourist destination at the time had been linked to Sarajevo by a tram in 1885. Franz Ferdinand travelled through the city in an open-top car, arriving at the Vijećnica, a neo-Moorish building that had been built just a few year earlier to incorporate the Islamic traditions of the city with Central European architectural trends. The Vijećnica later became the National Library and a well-known, badly-damaged symbol of the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. On 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Pan-Serbian Ujedinjenje ili smrt (the Black Hand) assassinated Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie just a few minutes after leaving the Vijećnica. Bosnian society had serious internal divisions before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, and suffered from high levels of rural poverty, which the Habsburgs had failed to redress. The promotion of Catholicism and toleration of Islam left the Orthodox Serbs, who made up about 50 per cent of the overall population, without strong internal sources of authority. Events in the city after the assassination bear testimony to the extent of the crisis. Narodna Obrana, a leading Sarajevo newspaper, compared the destruction in the city to the Russian pogroms. The city’s largest hotel, Hotel Evropa, owned by a Serb, Gligorije Jevtanović, was demolished at the hands of an angry mob (Mitrović 2007: 18). It also suffered extensive mortar damage during the 1990s siege (Donia 2006: 315). Within a month of the assassination, several thousand Serbs had been jailed and Princip’s childhood home had been destroyed by arson. ‘Srbe na Vrbe’ (Hang the Serbs from the Willows!), a violent anti-Serb slogan from the
1902 riots would be revived as the militia rounded up and hanged political opponents of the regime. Mitja Velikonja (2003: 141) regards the persecution of Serbs by the Habsburg regime during the First World War as an ‘ominous harbinger of things to come’. Within a few weeks, emperor Franz Joseph had declared war on Serbia, and the Drina Valley, a few miles from Sarajevo, became a key theatre during the early stages of the war. Towards the end of 1918, after four years of relentless warfare, the Habsburg monarchy collapsed and the new state of Yugoslavia emerged under the Serbian Karadjordjevic dynasty. A dramatic reversal of fortune for the Bosnian Orthodox Serbs would continue with the redrawing of internal boundaries in 1929, putting Sarajevo in the so-called Drinska banovina, which stretched from what is now Serbia into Bosnia. However, the Serbian monarchy itself collapsed in April 1941 after the Nazi invasion; Hitler and his local fascist allies determined to reverse the Habsburg defeat in the First World War, and in particular to punish the perpetrators of the 1914 assassination. The Princip memorial in Sarajevo was removed and delivered as a birthday-present to The Führer in 1941 (Greble 2011: 55). Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a Muslim carpenter from Stolac and one of the 1914 conspirators who had tried (unsuccessfully) to kill the Bosnian governor Oskar Potiorek on a previous occasion, had managed to slip out of Bosnia in 1914 to neighbouring Montenegro before being arrested and held in Nikšić. He broke out of custody there and lived as a free and pardoned man between the wars. The fascist, pro-Nazi Ustaša effectively rescinded his pardon and executed him in Sarajevo in 1943.
