The Siege of Sarajevo: History & Sites Today

The siege of Sarajevo was the longest blockade of a capital city in modern warfare: for 1,425 days, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, the city was encircled and cut off during the war that followed the break-up of Yugoslavia. That is more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, and roughly three times the length of the Battle of Stalingrad. According to the Research and Documentation Center in Sarajevo, whose “Bosnian Book of the Dead” is the most careful count, the siege left 13,952 people dead, among them 5,434 civilians and 1,601 children. This guide explains, plainly, what happened, and then walks through the places in Sarajevo where you can understand it today - visited not as sights, but as memorials.

What the siege was

When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in the spring of 1992, forces opposed to it took up positions in the hills that ring Sarajevo. From those heights, the Army of Republika Srpska and its Sarajevo-Romanija Corps held the high ground around the city; inside, the Bosnian government forces, the ARBiH, and the roughly 300,000 people trapped with them held the valley floor. The encirclement closed on 5 April 1992 and did not fully lift for almost four years.

Life under it meant living within range. The city was shelled from the hills - by one wartime tally, an average of hundreds of shells struck the city on a normal day - and exposed streets were watched by snipers. There was little running water, electricity or heat for long stretches; people queued at communal taps and chopped furniture for fuel, and crossed open ground at a run. The city was not passive: it kept its newspapers, its hospital, a wartime government and even, famously, a film festival and a beauty pageant running through the shelling. But the toll was immense, and it fell across every community in the city - the RDC’s figures record Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats among the dead. The siege ended only after the Dayton Peace Agreement of late 1995, with the encirclement formally lifted at the end of February 1996.

Responsibility for specific crimes of the siege has been established in court. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague convicted two commanders of the Sarajevo-Romanija Corps, Stanislav Galić and Dragomir Milošević, of crimes against humanity for a campaign of shelling and sniping against the civilian population; Galić was sentenced to life. These are judicial findings against named individuals, not a verdict on any people.

Sniper Alley and the Holiday Inn

The main artery running west out of the centre - Zmaja od Bosne, the wide boulevard toward the airport - earned the wartime nickname “Sniper Alley” because it ran straight beneath the high-rise blocks and the hills where gunmen were positioned. Crossing it, or the junctions off it, could be lethal, and improvised barriers of wrecked cars and shipping containers were set up to block the sightlines. It is an ordinary, busy road today, lined with rebuilt towers and trams; there is nothing to buy or enter, but walking or riding its length, and understanding what an everyday errand along it once cost, is its own quiet lesson.

Halfway along it stands the bright yellow former Holiday Inn (now the Hotel Holiday), built for the 1984 Winter Olympics and designed by the Sarajevo architect Ivan Straus. Through the siege it was the base for the foreign journalists who reported the war to the world, its exposed front facing the boulevard and the hills; it was shelled repeatedly and never closed. It still operates as a hotel, and while it is not a museum, its blunt Olympic-era shape is one of the most recognisable survivors of the siege.

Markale market

Two of the deadliest single incidents of the siege happened at the Markale open-air market, just off the main pedestrian street in the old town. On 5 February 1994, a mortar shell landed among the stalls and killed 68 people, wounding well over a hundred. On 28 August 1995, a second shelling of the market killed 43 people; the ICTY attributed both to the forces besieging the city, and the second attack was among the events that prompted the NATO air campaign that helped bring the war to an end.

The market trades again today, ordinary and busy, and on its wall is a memorial: a plain red backboard listing the names of those killed there. It is easy to walk past if you don’t know it is there. Standing in front of the names for a moment, in a working marketplace where people are buying fruit and vegetables exactly as they were on those two mornings, is one of the more affecting things you can do in the city.

The Sarajevo Roses

Where a mortar shell struck the ground and killed people, the concrete was left scarred in a distinctive scatter pattern. In a number of places around the city, those scars have been filled with red resin - turning the mark of an explosion into something that looks like a red flower pressed into the pavement. These are the Sarajevo Roses, and they are the city’s quietest memorial: no sign, no fence, just a red bloom underfoot that marks a spot where lives were lost.

There is no trail and no ticket; you come across them. There are surviving examples near the market and elsewhere in the centre, though weather and repaving have worn many away over the years. If you find one, it is worth pausing - each marks a specific place where specific people died, and that is exactly what the resin is there to say.

The cemeteries on the hills

Look up from almost anywhere in Sarajevo and you see the war’s clearest mark: fields of white gravestones climbing the surrounding hillsides, most of them dated between 1992 and 1995. When the established cemeteries came under fire or filled, the city buried its dead wherever it safely could - on slopes, in parks, and in the green areas around the Koševo stadium, where an auxiliary football pitch became a graveyard.

The largest of these wartime cemeteries is Kovači, the martyrs’ memorial cemetery above the old town, its ranks of slim white markers rising steeply up the hill. It is also the resting place of Alija Izetbegović, the country’s first president, whose grave sits under an open pavilion at the top. Nearby, the older Lav (Lion) cemetery by the stadium holds graves from the siege among its earlier ones. These are active places of mourning, not viewpoints; if you go, keep to the paths, dress and behave as you would at any cemetery, and let the sheer number of stones from those four years register on its own.

In the city centre, in the green space of Veliki Park, a separate monument remembers the youngest of the dead: the memorial to the children killed during the siege, unveiled in 2009. A glass sculpture rises from a fountain, ringed by a bronze band cast from spent shell casings and imprinted with children’s footprints. The RDC counts 1,601 children among those killed in the siege; the memorial gives that figure a face.

The Tunnel of Hope

The single most important physical relic of the siege sits out by the airport: the Tunnel of Hope, a hand-dug passage under the runway that was, for most of the war, the city’s only link to the outside world - the route by which food, fuel, weapons and people moved in and out of the encirclement. A surviving stretch and the house it began from are now a museum, and it is the best single place to grasp how the city survived. Because it deserves the space, we cover it fully in our guide to the Sarajevo War Tunnel, including how to get there, the opening hours and the cash-only entry.

How to visit, and in what spirit

None of these places is a packaged attraction, and that is exactly why they land. Most are simply parts of the living city - a boulevard, a market, a scar in the pavement, a hillside of graves - that you can walk to for free, at any hour, on your own. There is no set route; the natural way to see them is on foot while you are exploring Sarajevo anyway, threading them into a day that also takes in the old bazaar of Baščaršija and the rest of the city. Our full Sarajevo city guide covers how the pieces fit together and where to base yourself.

A word on how to be here. This is recent history, and the people who lived through the siege - who lost family in it - are your waiters, your guesthouse hosts, your fellow passengers on the tram. Sarajevans are, by and large, remarkably willing to talk about what happened, often with a directness and even humour that can catch you off guard; take your cue from them, listen more than you ask, and don’t treat the scars of the city as a backdrop for photographs of yourself. Go quietly, read the names, and you will leave understanding not just what Sarajevo endured, but the ordinary resilience with which it carries that memory today.