Bosnian National Theatre Zenica
Zenica's repertory theatre, in a 1978 building by Finci and Ugljen, with main, studio and children's stages.
The Bosnian National Theatre was founded in Zenica in 1950 and has since staged more than ten thousand performances, among them some six hundred and fifty premieres. It began in modest quarters in a town then dominated by its ironworks, and built a reputation for new writing in Bosnian and for productions that toured widely in the former Yugoslavia. The company kept working through the 1990s war and remains one of the busiest producing theatres outside Sarajevo.
In 1978 the company moved into a purpose-built house on Trg Bosne i Hercegovine designed by the architects Jahiel Finci and Zlatko Ugljen, whose late-modernist concrete forms gave the theatre a well-equipped main auditorium. Alongside the Velika scena there is a studio space, the Mala scena named after the actor Žarko Mijatović, and a separate children's, youth and puppet stage. The theatre organises the Festival of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Drama, which brings companies from across the country to Zenica each year.
Highlights
- Late-modernist theatre building of 1978 by Finci and Ugljen
- Main stage, studio Mala scena and a children's and puppet stage
- Host of the Festival of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Drama
- Founded in 1950; about 650 premieres to date
