Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

October–November 2021.

As my Sarajevo series eases into its fifth instalment, I’d say it’s time for something a bit different. Sarajevo isn’t the first city that springs to mind when you think of Europe’s great museums. However, spend even a few days here and that assumption soon falls apart.

For a capital of its size, Sarajevo punches well above its weight, home to a clutch of small but deeply affecting collections that rank among the most powerful I’ve encountered anywhere. Over the course of a month living in the city, we made it our mission to seek them out.

Let’s kick things off with what is easily the most fun and lighthearted collection we visited: the Sarajevo Winter Olympics Museum. Dedicated to the XIV Winter Games the city hosted in 1984, the museum lives inside one of the loveliest buildings in the centre. Villa Mandić is an elegant house that has watched over the Mejtaš neighbourhood from its slope for more than a century.

Completed in 1903 for Nikola Mandić, a prominent Sarajevo lawyer, it was designed by the Czech architect Karel Pařík, one of the figures most responsible for giving the Bosnian capital its graceful Austro-Hungarian face. The villa lived several lives before the Olympics found it, serving at various points as the American consulate and later as a seat of the city’s communist committee.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

Its Olympic chapter began on the 8th of February 1984, when the museum opened its doors on the very day the Games themselves began. The aim was to gather the memory of those seventeen days under one roof. Today, more than 42 years later, the museum presents the stories of the 84′ Games alongside some wonderful objects that have survived the decades.

I’ve always been amused by sporting event mascots. Thus I was tickled to meet Vučko, a cheerful little wolf who remains one of the most beloved characters in Olympic history.

He was dreamed up by the Slovenian painter Jože Trobec, who took the wolf, long cast as a symbol of winter’s menace in Balkan folklore, and reinvented him as something warm and mischievous. Grinning out from posters, pin badges and postage stamps, he gave the Sarajevo Games a face that Bosnians still remember with real affection.

As a lifelong Cool Runnings fan, I was always going to love the corner devoted to the bobsleigh events. It was also the perfect accompaniment to one of our favourite Sarajevo days hiking the abandoned Olympic bobsleigh track on Trebević Mountain.

One name recurs throughout the museum: Juan Antonio Samaranch. The Spaniard who ran the International Olympic Committee from 1980 to 2001 was the most powerful figure in world sport. And it was he who opened this very museum on 8 February 1984, the day the Games began.

Juan Antonio Samaranch (1920-2010).

His presidency hauled the Olympics into the modern era of professional athletes and global sponsorship. This made his personal blessing of Sarajevo’s Games, delivered in the rooms of Villa Mandić, all the more meaningful. In fact, the museum’s planners even felt moved to put the jacket he wore during the opening ceremony on display.

The exhibition showcases a haul of medals from across the various competitions that year. According to the attached blurb, there were 222 medals for participants spread across 17 countries. SSSR topped the list with 25. Elsewhere, those Olympic stalwarts the East Germans won the most gold medals.

Above all, we loved all the artwork connected to the event. From branded mugs, stamps and stationery, to outfits, commissioned paintings and even the striking logo itself.

At first glance the emblem reads as a simple snowflake beneath the Olympic rings. But actually its geometry comes from the traditional embroidery of the Sarajevo region. Stitching local heritage into a global symbol, it remains one of the most striking marks the Winter Games has ever produced. I liked it so much I had it printed onto a t-shirt in one of the workshops in the old town.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

If you like your museums smaller, more intimate and with a chance of not encountering anyone, look no further than the fascinating Despić House. This building is one of very few Orthodox merchant homes to survive from the Ottoman period more or less fully intact.

It belonged to the Despićs, a wealthy Serb trading family whose business reached from Sarajevo to Istanbul, Vienna and well beyond. Moreover, several generations of the family lived within these walls spanning an impressive one hundred and fifty years.

The family’s most towering figure was Maksim Despić. It was he, together with his brother Mićo, who gave the house its enduring claim to fame. In the mid-nineteenth century the two founded the Theatre of the Despić Brothers, the first home-grown theatre anywhere in Sarajevo or Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Performances took place in the grand front room of the ground floor, with an invitation from the host your only way through the door. Mićo himself was the company’s leading actor, while the bill leaned on comedies by renowned Balkan writers. The parties that followed each show turned the house into a gathering place for Sarajevo’s elite.

Despić House.

When the last of the Sarajevo Despićs left the city at the end of the 1960s, the house became a museum on the condition that it keeps telling the story of an old Serbian merchant family. As we explored, it was worth slowing down for the details, because the family’s taste is written into every surface.

The ceilings bloom with gilded acanthus scrolls curling around painted medallions. What’s more, there are hand-painted garlands of white blossom and green leaf run on warm terracotta.

Magnificent green-glazed ceramic stoves embossed with Art Nouveau flowers inhabit several rooms. Add to that family paintings, and leaded-glass lamps with little metal turrets that glow like hanging fortresses.

If you want to double up on another small and intimate experience, the Museum of Literature and Performing Arts is just around the corner from Despić House, literally one-minute on foot. We didn’t get around to exploring this one, but from what I can see it has decent reviews.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

For those of you with good memories, a few weeks back I briefly mentioned the main branch of the Museum of Sarajevo 18781-1918 that sits just across the road from the Latin Bridge. One afternoon we made sure to pop our heads into this small but absorbing collection.

Prior to entering, we spotted the engraved section of wall that marks what is arguably Sarajevo’s most historic spot. Yes, it was right here (more or less) on the 28th of June 1914 that Gavrilo Princip fired the shots that killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. His wife Sophie, the Duchess of Hohenberg, also died in the attack.

The museum occupies the former Schiller delicatessen. Back in 1914 its workers and customers witnessed first-hand the two pistol cracks that set the First World War in motion. While the museum traces the four decades of Bosnia’s Austro-Hungarian rule, much of the exhibit deals squarely with the events of Ferdinand’s fateful visit to Sarajevo.

There is a panel showing Franz Ferdinand’s movements during his Sarajevo stay, as well as mugshots of the young conspirators. Princip’s trousers and bag, both apparently worn on the day, sit somewhat mournfully in a glass display case.

They also have the gun that Princip used for the assassination, and the uniform and firearm of a policeman who was one of the first responders.

Museum of Sarajevo 1878–1918.

Away from the assassination, there are some fascinating relics. Of these, I particularly enjoyed seeing the Proclamation of the annexation of Bosnia (1908) and one of the city’s first magazines, The Bosnian Fairy (Bosanska vila). First published in Serbian Cyrillic 1885, it ran stories on education, literature and entertainment for three decades until the Austro-Hungarian administration eventually shut it down.

In terms of Sarajevo’s big-hitters, one should definitely try to set aside an hour or two for the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The local government founded it in November 1945 as the Museum of National Liberation, to preserve the memory of the peoples’ struggle against fascism.

It has since cycled through several titles, including the Museum of the Revolution, before settling on its present name in 1993. The building itself is a real showstopper. Chosen through a competition held in 1957 and designed by a trio of Zagreb-based architects, it is a titan of the Yugoslav modernist movement.

Effectively a giant stone-clad box, it is nicknamed Kocka (the Cube) and appears to float above a glass-walled entrance pavilion, carried on little more than a row of slender steel columns.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

Many of the museum’s exhibits deal squarely with war, and we soon found ourselves lost in (and more than a touch terrified by) the Besieged Sarajevo exhibition. A permanent display since 2003, it confronts the city’s darkest modern chapter: the siege of 1992 to 1995. Lasting 1,425 days, it was the longest siege endured by a capital city in modern warfare.

Rather than dwelling on front lines, generals or political manoeuvring, the exhibition fixes its gaze on the everyday experience of living under siege. It is a story of resilience and resourcefulness; of how Sarajevans endured years without electricity, running water or heating.

Some of the stories and images are incredibly harrowing. The most upsetting have been put aside in a section called the Black Room. A sign informs visitors before entering that they should consider whether they are ready to face what lies within.

One of the stories that stayed with me the most was that of a seven-year-old boy called Nermin Divović. A familiar presence on the streets of Sarajevo during the siege, he struck up a friendship with the Spanish war photographer Enric Martí.

History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Nermin died on the 18th of November 1994, shot by a sniper as he walked home with his family. The same bullet first struck his mother, Dženana, who was pregnant at the time. She survived but lost her unborn child, while Nermin’s sister Dženita escaped unharmed. It was Martí himself who captured the aftermath in a series of photographs that would travel the world. The museum displays a number of these images, along with the small sweater that Nermin wore almost every day.

Following our visit to the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we leaned even heavier into the darkness of the wider Bosnian War. A short walk from The Old Bazaar, the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide 1992–1995 approaches its subject directly through the civilians who lived it.

Its displays are built around personal testimony and everyday objects. An improvised stove… a survivor’s worn clothing… a family keepsake… each placed beside a first-person account of the life it belonged to.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

The museum asks you to meet the people behind the numbers one at a time. What’s more, it presents details of the international courts’ rulings, including their finding that the mass killings at Srebrenica constituted genocide. Serbia, for its part, has never officially recognised that classification.

In truth, Sladja and I were left a little frazzled by the stories we read and the images we saw. We could have been forgiven, then, for passing on the chance to visit another of the city’s memorial spaces, the Srebrenica Exhibition at Gallery 11/07/95. Somehow, though, we felt compelled to see it.

Unfortunately for our nerves, this proved to be the hardest-hitting exhibition of all. Opened in the summer of 2012, the gallery focuses entirely on the grisly events that took place in and around the town of Srebrenica in July 1995.

Founded by the Bosnian photographer Tarik Samarah, the space features hundreds of black-and-white photographs taken by Samarah himself in the aftermath of the mass killings.

Gallery 11/07/95.

He photographed the emptied landscapes where the crimes took place. He also captured the exhumation of mass graves and the survivors, mostly women and children, in the years that followed.

Elsewhere, there are discarded objects, chilling graffiti, maps, audio testimonies and a memorial wall commemorating the 8,372 people whose lives ended in Srebrenica that long-ago summer.

After everything else, the War Childhood Museum felt quite hopeful. Tucked along Logavina street in the old town, this small but remarkable place grew out of a project by Jasminko Halilović, himself a child of the siege.

In 2010 he began asking his own generation a single question: what was a war childhood for you? The flood of answers became a successful book, and then, in early 2017, a museum. A year later it won the coveted Council of Europe Museum Prize.

Memory and Resilience: The Museums of Sarajevo.

The museum’s method is disarmingly simple. Each exhibit is a single object, set alone in a clean glass case or mounted on a plain white wall, beside a short printed story written by the person who donated it. That is the whole design, and it’s exactly what makes it work.

For the most part you are looking at an ordinary thing accompanied by a bittersweet story of what it was like to grow up in wartime. Gradually moving from case to case, we leaned in, read, and lost ourselves in the stories of people rebuilding their childhoods from a single keepsake.

Take Amira, who recalls the days she and her toddler sister spent cooped up at home without electricity. And how she used her toy duck to perform puppet shows from behind an armchair to keep the little one entertained.

Lejla, meanwhile, writes about a humanitarian aid package that reached the children of Cazin in 1994. She opened it to find a decorated shoebox holding toiletries, stationery, sweets, a photo and a letter from a British girl named Astrid. Lejla kept the comb and mirror in her makeup bag, but never used the coloured pencils, afraid of running them down before the war ended.

War Childhood Museum.

This feels like a good place to wrap up my post on Sarajevo’s museums. I’ll leave you with a selection of some of my favourite collected war childhood memories.

Like this? Don’t miss my detailed travel guide to Sarajevo, with reports from all over the city.

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