The Sarajevo siege — remembering what happened
On 5 April 1992, a peace march of 50,000 people walked through Sarajevo. Gunmen opened fire from the Holiday Inn Hotel — then occupied by Serbian nationalist paramilitaries — killing two young women at the front of the crowd.
By the following day, the city was encircled.
The siege that began in April 1992 did not end until February 1996. One thousand four hundred and twenty-five days. Longer than the siege of Leningrad. Longer than any siege of a capital city in modern warfare. When it was over, nearly 14,000 people were dead, including more than 5,000 civilians. Roughly 1,000 of the dead were children.
This is not easy material. But for visitors to Sarajevo, understanding it is part of understanding the city.
Why a war was possible here
Yugoslavia dissolved through a combination of nationalist politics, economic collapse, and strategic miscalculation that historians are still unpicking. The short version, for a visitor: Bosnia declared independence in March 1992, following similar declarations by Slovenia and Croatia. The Bosnian Serb political leadership, backed by the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), refused to accept Bosnian sovereignty. The siege was an attempt to force the city and the country into submission.
The Yugoslav wars explained guide provides more context if you want it. What matters for Sarajevo is the geography: the city sits in a valley, surrounded by mountains and hills. Those hills gave the besieging forces an enormous advantage. They could fire down into the city; the defenders in the valley below could not effectively return fire upward.
Daily life under siege
During the siege, the city had no running water for most of the period, intermittent electricity, and almost no heating fuel. Food supplies came through a tunnel — the Tunnel of Hope, hand-dug under the UN-controlled airport runway — at enormous risk. The tunnel was roughly 800 metres long and about one metre high; people crawled through it carrying supplies or fleeing the city.
Snipers positioned in the hills made movement through certain streets extremely dangerous. Sniper Alley — now the main boulevard Zmaja od Bosne — was the most notorious: a wide road exposed to fire from the hills, lined with UN armoured vehicles that provided a minimal psychological barrier. Residents ran across exposed intersections. Children were taught specific routes to school that used buildings as cover.
An estimated 14,000 to 18,000 shells fell on the city on its worst days. The average, across the full siege, was roughly 329 shells per day. Markets, hospitals, mosques, churches, libraries, and apartment blocks were all hit.
The Vijećnica — the National Library — was shelled and burned in August 1992, destroying an estimated 1.5 million books and manuscripts, including irreplaceable historical documents and the Sarajevo Haggadah (which was hidden in a vault and survived).
The Sarajevo roses
Walk through the streets of the old city today and look down at the pavements. You will see star-shaped impact craters, some filled with red resin. These are the Sarajevo roses — mortar shell impact points that were memorialised in the years after the war, the red resin representing blood.
Not all craters were filled. The roses appear at locations where multiple people were killed by a single shell — typically market squares or public gathering points. They are small, easy to overlook, and they are everywhere once you start looking.
The aftermath and what it means for visitors
The war ended in November 1995 with the Dayton Agreement. The siege formally ended in February 1996 when Serbian forces withdrew from the hills.
The physical reconstruction of Sarajevo has been largely completed — the city is functional, modern in its core, repaired. But the people who lived through the siege are in their fifties and sixties now. Their children grew up during it. The grandchildren are being raised in its aftermath.
This means that a significant portion of the people you will meet in Sarajevo — café owners, tour guides, market vendors, hotel staff — have a direct personal relationship with what happened here. This is not ancient history. It is within living memory, often vivid living memory.
Behave accordingly. The siege is not a dark tourism attraction. It is someone’s parents’ survival story. Approach it with the same respect you would bring to speaking about any personal loss.
What to visit
Several sites make the history tangible:
The Tunnel of Hope Museum (Tunel Spasa) is the most visited. A guided Bosnian war and tunnel tour contextualises the whole period and makes the tunnel meaningful rather than just novel.
The War Childhood Museum on Ferhadija collects small objects from people’s experiences during the siege — a toy, a pair of shoes, a letter. It is compact and profoundly moving.
The Sarajevo roses are everywhere, though a guide will show you which ones are most significant.
The Sniper Alley area looks today like an ordinary boulevard. Knowing what happened there changes how you see it.
Kovači Cemetery, on the hillside above Baščaršija, contains thousands of white grave markers dated 1992–1995.
You do not need to visit all of these. But understanding the context of at least some of them will change what Sarajevo means to you.
A word on complexity
Bosnia’s war was not a simple story of victims and perpetrators. The city of Sarajevo included Serbs who defended it alongside Bosniaks and Croats. The besieging forces included people who were manipulated, people who were coerced, and people who committed deliberate atrocities. The international response was slow, inadequate, and shaped by geopolitical calculations that left civilians to die.
None of this complexity reduces the suffering of the people who lived through the siege. But it is worth holding when you visit — the story is not simple, and the city does not pretend that it is.
What Sarajevo does, quietly and remarkably, is get on with being Sarajevo. The cafés are full. The music plays in summer on the old town square. The young people laugh in the same streets where their grandparents ran to avoid snipers.
Pay attention to that too.
