Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina
Modernist 1963 museum on Zmaja od Bosne, best known for its Besieged Sarajevo exhibition.
The museum was founded in 1945 as the Museum of the National Liberation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and moved in 1963 into a purpose-built home on Zmaja od Bosne, the avenue that became known as Sniper Alley during the 1990s siege. The design, by the Zagreb architects Boris Magas, Edo Smidihen and Radovan Horvat, sets a white rectangular block on slender supports above a glazed, recessed ground floor, with a sunken sculpture court alongside. It won the Viktor Kovacic award in the year it was completed.
Collections run to hundreds of thousands of items covering Bosnian history from the medieval period to the present, with particular depth on the Second World War, the socialist Yugoslav decades and the 1992-1995 war. The long-running exhibition Besieged Sarajevo reconstructs daily life under blockade through improvised stoves, hand-made tools, ration packaging, diaries and photographs. Temporary shows address memory, displacement and post-war reconstruction, and the building itself is a protected national monument widely cited as a landmark of Yugoslav modernism.
Highlights
- Besieged Sarajevo, a documentary display of everyday life under the 1990s blockade
- Protected national monument of Yugoslav modernist architecture
- Sunken sculpture court and raised white block above a glazed ground floor
- Archives and collections covering the medieval period to the 1990s war
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