Old Jewish Cemetery Sarajevo: Sunset, Stone and a Lovebite.

Old Jewish Cemetery Sarajevo.

We were into our final week in Sarajevo, at a loose end one afternoon with about an hour until sundown. On a whim we decided to walk up to the Old Jewish Cemetery, a site that had so far escaped being crossed off our list.

We’d seen no shortage of cemeteries during our month in the Bosnian capital, several of which I’ve already written about. See my pieces on Kovači Cemetery and the Bakr-Baba Mosque complex on our Miljacka River walk. 

From what we’d read, this one was particularly unique. As historically significant sites go, article after article singled out the Old Jewish Cemetery as one of the most affecting places to visit in all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not to be missed, we read. So off we went to check out Europe’s second-largest Jewish Cemetery after Prague.

The entrance gates met us at the top of the climb. Three stone arches strung with black wrought iron, a menorah worked into the centre panel and a Hebrew date cut into the keystone. It gives the Hebrew calendar year of 5682, which corresponds to 1921-1922 in the Gregorian calendar.

We couldn’t have timed our arrival better: the sun was already dropping into the hills at the edge of the city behind us. In fact, the whole road had turned to amber, with spears of light cutting down the lane between the wall and the trees.

Old Jewish Cemetery Sarajevo.

I’m aware that often I bang on about peace and quiet on this blog, and here I go again. But inside the gates it was so still that the crunch of leaves underfoot felt magnified, every footstep loud in all that quiet. With not a soul in sight, we paused for a moment to savour it before grabbing a photo.

To the left of the main staircase stands the Chapel, or Ceremonial Hall as it was once known. Closed up the day we visited, this is where the pre-burial rites and prayers were performed. It was designed by the architect Franz Scheiding, a cruciform stone structure topped by a low octagonal dome.

The chapel, and indeed much of the cemetery, took a battering from shelling during the siege of the 1990s. With the help of US government funding, a restoration project has brought it back to something reminiscent of its former glory. For a while the cemetery’s custodian lived inside, in a converted basement apartment, though whether that’s still the case I couldn’t say.

And so we moved up the staircase and into the cemetery, which plays out across a steep green shoulder of Trebević Mountain. Row upon row of pale, weathered stones tumbled down the hillside, beyond which lies Sarajevo.

Europe’s Second Largest Jewish Cemetery.

Above us, crooked streets overlook the grounds, the houses stacked up the hillside in a jumble of terracotta roofs and smoky chimneys.

It didn’t take long for the scale of the place to hit home. More than 3,850 tombstones cover a site of roughly 31,000 square metres. Rather than standing upright in neat lines, many of them sit low and heavy on the slope.

The community buried on this hillside owes its presence here to one of history’s great uprootings. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottoman Empire threw open its doors. Thus, over the course of the 16th century, Sephardic families made the long journey east, putting down roots in Sarajevo.

The cemetery itself dates to 1630, the year historians reckon Rabbi Samuel Baruch rented the land, making it the oldest intact burial ground of any faith in the city. Burials continued right up until 1966, when the site formally closed after more than three centuries of use.

Old Jewish Cemetery Sarajevo.

Rabbi Baruch himself lies here, in the company of some of the city’s most remarkable Jewish figures. Among them is Zeki Effendi, a 19th-century scholar, journalist and historian. And Laura Papo Bohoreta, a pioneering writer widely regarded as Bosnia’s first feminist.

Whenever we go exploring around cemeteries, we always find some curiosities and this one was no different. First, we came upon a large marble headstone lying flat on its back on a bed of fallen poplar and birch leaves. Seemingly independent of any marked plot, it could have passed as a still life composition. The stone belongs to a man called Juda Levi, who died in 1927.

Next, was an inscription that at first glance could pass for standard Spanish. However, it is actually Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish that Sephardim people carried out of Iberia in 1492 and kept alive in Sarajevo for centuries. The inscription reads: In this small grave / a man lies at rest! / A man of virtue, / a beloved father, / kind beyond measure / to the living and the dead. / Babu

A short while later, in great contrast to all the humble block-stones, we stopped to admire something much grander. This one is a miniature classical temple with fluted pillars on a stepped plinth, holding up a heavy entablature and a scrolled pediment. With no inscription whatsoever (which was odd), I can only assume it was for a wealthy Austro-Hungarian family. Whatever the truth, it definitely stood out, a fragment of ancient Greece marooned on a Bosnian hill.

A Mark of Status.

And then there was the cat. We spotted her sprawled across a granite grave as if it held the deeds to the  place. Far from aloof, it turned out to be the friendliest of hosts, winding around our legs, purring like a small engine and blissfully lapping up every stroke.

Pleased with such a pleasant encounter, we moved on. However, kitty decided it would like to come with us and promptly appointed itself our official guide, trotting ahead from stone to stone and pausing at each one as though presenting the occupants by name.

One of the stones turned out to be a significant one. This dark granite slab remembers the victims of the Ustaša-fascist terror of World War II. The Ustaša were the Croatian fascist movement that ran the so-called Independent State of Croatia, a Nazi and Italian puppet state set up in 1941 after the Axis Invasion of Yugoslavia. This included Bosnia, and their terror against Jews, Serbs and Roma ran from 1941 until the state collapsed in May 1945.

We’d lost all track of time. Wrapped up in the stones and the company of our whiskered guide, we hadn’t noticed the night coming down fast over the hillside. Below us the city was already switching itself on, a haze of blue settling into the valley as the last of the daylight drained from the sky.

Bidding Farewell.

The views were excellent. The graves fell away down the slope, pale shapes in the gathering gloom, and beyond them Sarajevo glittered through the mist. We could even pick out the old TV tower blinking on its distant peak. Then we headed down the main path toward the gates, the cat, inevitably, trailing along behind.

We were in the middle of saying our goodbyes to kitty when, in one sudden and inexplicable movement, our lovely evening at the cemetery soured. There was no malice in it, more a flash of overexcited play, but the cat sank its teeth into Sladja’s arm.

The shock of it was one thing. Then came the realisation of just how big the mark was, and Sladja was soon casting her mind back, trying to work out exactly how long it had been since her last tetanus jab.

Old Jewish Cemetery Sarajevo.

The only answer she could land on was “a long time ago.” So reluctantly, we made straight for a local hospital, where Sladja was given a dose of antibiotics to drink and then the jab in question. The staff who saw us could not have been friendlier, and by the next morning we were already laughing about the whole thing. All’s well that ends well, I suppose, and a good story to tell on the blog in lieu of the grandchildren we’ll never have.

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