Baščaršija: Sarajevo's Old Bazaar

Baščaršija is Sarajevo’s old bazaar - the Ottoman-era warren of cobbled lanes, low-slung shops, mosque courtyards and coffee houses that has been the commercial heart of the city since 1462. The name is Turkish shorthand: baš (head, or main) plus čaršija (market), so literally “the main bazaar.” It’s compact enough to cross in a few minutes and dense enough to lose an afternoon in, and it’s where most people’s Sarajevo begins. This guide covers what’s actually here - the Sebilj fountain, the coppersmith street, the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque, the line where the Ottoman city hands over to the Austro-Hungarian one - plus where to eat and how to see it without wading through coach groups.

Where it came from: 1462 and one caravanserai

Baščaršija and Sarajevo are, more or less, the same founding story. In 1462 the Ottoman governor of Bosnia, Isa-beg Ishaković, endowed a han - a caravanserai, the Ottoman equivalent of a roadside inn where traders slept, stabled horses, changed money and mended carts - and put a run of shops beside it. The town grew outward from that knot of trade, and the bazaar grew with it.

By its peak in the 17th century it was enormous. The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi, passing through, counted something like 1,080 shops working over 80 separate crafts, each trade with its own guild and often its own street: tanners here, saddlers there, coppersmiths clanging away on the next corner. That street-by-craft logic is still legible today - the road names give it away - even though the trades themselves have mostly given way to cafés and souvenir stalls.

It nearly didn’t survive at all. The city burned more than once (a devastating fire came with Prince Eugene of Savoy’s raid in 1697), and after the Second World War a municipal committee actually proposed demolishing the whole bazaar, reasoning that it had no place in a modern socialist city. The plans were shelved and the buildings left standing - which is the only reason you can walk it now.

The Sebilj: the symbol of Sarajevo

Stand in the main square and the thing everyone photographs is the Sebilj - an octagonal wooden kiosk with a fountain at its base and a green cap on top. A sebilj was an Ottoman charitable water house, built so passers-by could drink for free; this is the last one left in the city, and it has become the shorthand image of Sarajevo the way the Old Bridge is for Mostar.

The dates take a little care. The first Sebilj on this spot went up around 1753, endowed by Mehmed-paša Kukavica, and burned down in a fire in 1852. What you see now is an Austro-Hungarian-era rebuild in a pseudo-Moorish style by the architect Alexander Wittek, shifted a few metres from the original site. Sources disagree on the exact year - Wittek’s reconstruction is dated variously to the 1890s (often 1891) and, in a lot of tourist literature, to 1913 - so treat any single year you see printed with a pinch of salt. The legend attached to it is firmer than the chronology: drink from the Sebilj, they say, and you’ll come back to Sarajevo one day.

The square around it is officially Baščaršija Square and universally “Pigeon Square,” for the enormous, unbothered flocks that carpet the cobbles. Kids chase them, old men feed them, and the birds treat the whole thing as theirs. It’s the natural place to get your bearings and the natural place to end up again.

Kazandžiluk: the coppersmiths’ street

The one craft that’s still genuinely working is copper. Kazandžiluk - the coppersmiths’ street - runs off the eastern edge of the square, and it takes its name from the kazandžije, the master metalworkers who set up here in the first half of the 1500s. They started out hammering kettles and cauldrons for the Ottoman army and moved on to the everyday copper of Bosnian life: the little džezva pots coffee is brewed in, ewers, pitchers, trays, engraved tabletops.

Walk it in the morning and you’ll still hear the tapping. Be clear-eyed about what’s on sale, though - a fair bit is imported souvenir stock now, and one Balkan speciality you’ll see everywhere is engraved spent shell casings from the 1990s siege, worked into pens and ornaments. Some travellers find them a striking piece of dark history to take home; others find them uncomfortable. Either way, if you want the real thing, look for the workshops where someone is actually beating metal at the back, and haggling is expected and good-natured. Prices are in convertible marks (KM/BAM) and the small shops want cash.

Gazi Husrev-beg: the mosque that built the bazaar

If one man made this district, it was Gazi Husrev-beg, Ottoman governor of Bosnia through the 1520s and 30s. His mosque, finished in 1531, is the largest and most important Ottoman mosque in the country, and it’s usually attributed to a Persian architect, Adžem Esir Ali of Tabriz. But the mosque is only the centrepiece of a huge charitable endowment - a vakuf - that also paid for a covered market (bezistan), a madrasa, a library, an imaret (soup kitchen), a clock tower, a hammam and dozens of shops. In other words, much of what you’re walking through was funded out of a single 16th-century foundation.

You can step into the courtyard and, outside prayer times, non-Muslim visitors are generally welcome inside for a small fee - but hours and the exact charge shift, so check on the day and dress modestly (covered shoulders and knees; head coverings are lent to women at the door). . Keep your voice down, take photos of the architecture rather than people at prayer, and it stays a respectful visit rather than a barging-in.

While you’re near it, duck into one of the two old covered markets - the Gazi Husrev-beg bezistan and the nearby Brusa Bezistan, the latter now a small museum - for a sense of how the bazaar’s trade was housed under cover.

Where East meets West, in one step

One detail sticks with people. Walk west out of the bazaar along the main pedestrian drag and, set into the pavement, there’s a bronze line and an inscription: “Sarajevo - Meeting of Cultures.” Stand astride it and you’ve got a foot in each of two cities. Look east and it’s Baščaršija: cobbles, timber shopfronts, the domes and minarets of the Ottoman town. Turn around and it’s Ferhadija, a formal boulevard of pale, ornamented Austro-Hungarian façades that could belong in Vienna.

The marker was set down fairly recently (around 2014), but the seam it traces is real and centuries old - the point where the Ottoman city stopped and the empire that took over in 1878 started building its own. Few cities in Europe show you a cultural border this literally, and it’s a two-second walk that tells you more about Sarajevo than a museum room could.

What to eat: ćevapi, burek and Bosnian coffee

You do not go hungry in Baščaršija, and three things are non-negotiable.

Ćevapi are the headline: little grilled fingers of minced beef and lamb, served by the five or ten inside a soft, puffy somun flatbread, with raw onion and often a smear of kajmak (a rich clotted-cream cheese). Sarajevo argues fiercely about who does them best; almost any busy ćevabdžinica off the square will do you well.

Burek is the other institution - flaky pastry coiled around spiced minced meat (strictly, only the meat one is burek; the cheese version is sirnica, spinach is zeljanica, and so on). The row to head for is Bravadžiluk, the little street lined with buregdžinice just off the bazaar. It’s fast, cheap and filling, and it’s breakfast, lunch or a 2 a.m. rescue.

And the coffee, which is less a drink than a ritual. Bosnian coffee comes brewed in a copper džezva on a little tray, with a sugar cube and a square of rahat lokum (Turkish delight) on the side. You’re not meant to knock it back - you’re meant to sit, sip, and let half an hour go by; locals call that unhurried contentment merak. Do it at least once properly, and our guide to Bosnian coffee and how to drink it explains the sugar-cube trick and the etiquette. A round of coffee or a plate of ćevapi runs to only a few marks, and again, small places take cash in KM, not cards or euros. For the wider menu beyond the bazaar staples, our guide to Bosnian food and the 15 dishes to try runs through the pastries, stews and sweets in full.

How long to spend, and when to go

Baščaršija is small - you can walk its length in ten minutes - but it rewards slowing down. Give it a half-day at least: the square and the Sebilj, a wander up Kazandžiluk, the mosque courtyard, the Meeting of Cultures line, and a long coffee. It’s pedestrian, free to walk, and open around the clock, though the shops keep daytime hours.

Timing is about crowds and light. The bazaar fills with tour groups and day-trippers from the coast through the middle of the day, so come early morning for empty cobbles and low sun, or early evening, when the lanterns come on and the café tables fill with locals rather than tourists. It’s genuinely lovely after dark. Shoulder seasons - May-June and September-October - hit the sweet spot of warm-but-not-baking weather and thinner crowds.

Baščaršija is also the obvious base for the rest of the city, though it isn’t the only sensible choice, as our guide to where to stay in Sarajevo sets out. It’s a short walk from most of the sights in our Sarajevo city guide, and it’s the natural starting point for the sobering trip out to the Tunnel of Hope, the lifeline dug under the airport during the 1990s siege. When it’s time to move on to Herzegovina, the old town is ten minutes from the station and our guide on getting from Sarajevo to Mostar lays out the train, bus and car options. Stay in or beside the bazaar if you can - everything worth seeing in old Sarajevo is on the doorstep, and waking up to the muezzin and the pigeons is worth the price of the room on its own.