Sarajevo audiotours

There is a famous spot in Bascarsija, the Ottoman bazaar district, where the cobblestones give way to pavement and the minarets yield to a Catholic bell tower and then an Orthodox dome a block further on. Sarajevo was founded by the Ottomans in 1461 and spent four centuries as the largest Ottoman city in the Balkans after Istanbul, which means its old town smells of roasting coffee and cevapi grilling over charcoal in ways that feel entirely specific. The Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, built in 1531, is the finest Ottoman mosque in the Balkans and still calls five times daily to a city that has earned every one of its layers.

In June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the Latin Bridge, a moment that set the 20th century on its catastrophic course.

Sarajevo also hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, at a moment when it seemed like the city might finally step out of history's shadow. Then the Bosnian War brought a siege that lasted 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, killing 11,541 people. The bullet marks on buildings, the red resin roses set into the pavement where mortar shells fell, and the Tunnel of Hope museum are not decorative heritage: they are the city still processing what happened.