War Childhood Museum Sarajevo — a visitor guide
Sarajevo: Beyond the Headlines Guided Walking Tour
What is the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo?
The War Childhood Museum (Muzej ratnog djetinjstva) documents the Siege of Sarajevo through personal objects and testimonies donated by people who were children during the 1992–1996 siege. Each object — a toy, a scarf, a jar of jam — comes with a written testimony from its owner. It has been named one of the best museums in the world by several international bodies.
Some museums explain what happened. The War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo shows you what it felt like. There is a difference, and it matters.
When the Siege of Sarajevo began in April 1992, roughly 70,000 children were living in the city. They attended school in basements when shelling allowed, carried water from distribution points when the pipes ran dry, and grew up in a city that was simultaneously their home and a target. By the time the siege ended in 1996, many of them had lost family members, classmates, homes.
Twenty years after the siege, a Sarajevo writer named Jasminko Musić asked people who had been children during those years to complete a sentence: “War childhood is…” He published 1,000 of their responses in a book. In 2017 the project expanded into a museum. In 2018 the War Childhood Museum won the Council of Europe Museum Prize — one of the most prestigious awards in European museology.
What the museum contains
The core of the permanent exhibition is a series of ordinary objects — a pair of roller skates, a small jar of jam, a knitted scarf, a cassette tape — each displayed in its own case with a written testimony from its owner explaining what the object meant to them during the siege.
The power of this approach is in its intimacy. There are no statistics in the main galleries, no maps of front lines, no photographs of destruction. There is only the object and the person — and the specific, precise memory that connects them. One donor kept roller skates because the sound of skating was a sign of normal life continuing. Another kept a jar of jam because it represented everything their mother tried to preserve of peacetime. The testimonies are brief, carefully chosen and devastating in their specificity.
The museum also includes a research archive, a library of testimony, and temporary exhibitions that have extended the project internationally to children who experienced war in Syria, Palestine and elsewhere — asking the same question, receiving the same kind of answer.
Practical visit information
Address: Logavina 32, Sarajevo (upper old town, between Baščaršija and the Academy of Fine Arts)
Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, approximately 10:00–18:00. Closed Mondays. Verify current hours before visiting; they change seasonally.
Admission: Approximately 10 BAM (5 EUR) for adults; reduced rate for students and children.
Duration: Allow 1–1.5 hours for the permanent exhibition. If you engage deeply with the testimonies — and most visitors do — you may find yourself staying longer.
Accessibility: The museum is on a hilly street in the old town. The building has steps at the entrance; check with the museum directly if you have mobility requirements.
Guided tours: The museum offers guided tours for groups; individual visitors can typically move through independently with the written testimonies as their guide.
Sarajevo: Beyond the Headlines guided walking tourHow to reach the museum
From Baščaršija (the old town bazaar), walk northeast along Logavina street, uphill for about 12–15 minutes. The street is steep in places but manageable. The museum occupies a typical old town residential building, slightly set back from the street.
Alternatively, from the main Sarajevo Cathedral on Ferhadija, walk east towards the old town and pick up Logavina from the upper end — a slightly shorter route.
Taxis from the city centre to Logavina are inexpensive (5–8 BAM). Be sure to agree on the price before getting in.
The War Childhood Museum in the context of Sarajevo’s war memory
Sarajevo has chosen to preserve its war memory carefully, maintaining a range of sites and institutions that together present the siege from different angles.
The Tunnel of Hope at Butmir shows the material and military story — the infrastructure of survival. The History Museum’s siege exhibition presents the documentary record. The Sarajevo Roses mark the geography of civilian death on the streets. The War Childhood Museum presents the interior, private, emotional record.
These approaches are complementary rather than competing. Visitors who see the tunnel in the morning and the War Childhood Museum in the afternoon leave with a fuller understanding than either experience alone would give. The contrast between the scale of military engineering required to survive the siege and the small jar of jam that a child’s mother kept fills in something that statistics cannot reach.
For visitors spending only a single day on war history in Sarajevo, a practical combination is:
- Morning: war-history tour with tunnel visit (transport included)
- Afternoon: War Childhood Museum + walk past Sarajevo Roses in the old town
This covers the military geography, the physical evidence, and the personal testimony — the three dimensions of the siege experience.
The original book
War Childhood: Sarajevo, 1992-1995 by Jasminko Musić is available at the museum shop and at bookshops in Sarajevo. It is a slim volume — easily read in an hour — and functions as a perfect companion to the museum visit, extending the number of testimonies you can encounter beyond what the exhibition space accommodates. Copies are available in English.
Beyond the museum: connecting war history and everyday Sarajevo
One of the most striking things about Sarajevo as a city is that its war-history sites and its contemporary, living culture are not separated. The War Childhood Museum is on a residential street where people are living ordinary lives. The Baščaršija bazaar — fifteen minutes downhill — is full of copper workshops, coffee houses and tourists who have never heard of the siege. The city has rebuilt without erasing.
Spending time in both contexts — the memorial and the coffeehouse, the tunnel and the evening market — is the most honest way to understand what Bosnia and Herzegovina is in 2026: a country with a very recent and very heavy history, inhabited by people who have decided, mostly, to move forward without pretending the past didn’t happen.
The Sarajevo destination guide helps you structure a two-to-four-day visit that includes both. The Bosnia war history itinerary suggests how to extend that into five days across Sarajevo, Srebrenica and Konjic.
Frequently asked questions about War Childhood Museum Sarajevo — a visitor
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