Katy Marks, founder of Citizens Design Bureau, on Sarajevo, the ‘Jerusalem of Europe’ where culture is both a survival tool and the city’s life force.
The Bosnian musician Vedran Smailović, known as the ‘Cellist of Sarajevo, played in ruined buildings and often under the threat of snipers during the four-year Siege of Sarajevo on 1992-1996.
I grew up in Liverpool, and have always been fascinated by industrial cities, by ports and trading centres, by places whose cultural life has evolved, catalysed by the unusual and unexpected coming together of people from all over the world and from every background. These places become the nexus through which ideas collide and morph over centuries – often in surprising and beautiful ways, but also through conquest and colonisation, power shifts and influence.
These are cities of surprise, diversity, humour, and resilience manifested in everything from street food to music, art and architecture, collective rituals, and traditions. There’s a strange familiarity when I end up in places like that, wherever they are in the world: Glasgow, Amsterdam, Istanbul – and Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
We visited Sarajevo for our honeymoon in 2009. Founded in 1462 by the Ottoman Empire as a key centre for the silk trade, the city has played a pivotal role in European history – notably in 1914, when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, triggering the outbreak of WWI.
Surprisingly few people seem to be aware of its rich culture. It’s a city that has for centuries been the weathervane of European and global power dynamics. Here, Viennese-style café culture blends with the buzzing atmosphere of Ottoman bazaars. It is one of the few centres of civilisation where mosques sit side-by-side with synagogues, and Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches – earning it the nickname the ‘Jerusalem of Europe’. The architecture is equally diverse – a heady mix of Moorish domes, minarets and intricate patterns, interwoven with the elegant Central European civic squares and grand museum buildings that came courtesy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1878–1918. When the onset of world war brought an end to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the state became affiliated with the Eastern Bloc, the city saw an influx of brutalist Soviet architecture to make the mind boggle.
For me, however, the most compelling thing about the city is not only the melting pot of architectural styles. The images that endure in my mind are the stories of survival against the odds that were written all over the walls of the city during the four-year Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War of 1992–1996. During this period, the city was encircled, blockaded and repeatedly shelled, leaving marks on its physical and cultural fabric that can still be seen and felt.
A little more than a decade after the siege was lifted, I was still astonished to discover a city that was so resonant with optimism, so diverse, and so rich with creativity.”
It was during the siege that the Bosnian musician Vedran Smailović became known around the world as ‘the Cellist of Sarajevo’. As the city crumbled, he played his cello in ruined buildings, and, often under the threat of snipers, he played during funerals. Smailović caught the global imagination when he played in the ruins of the National Library after it was bombed and, most famously, after a mortar round killed 22 people waiting for food in a marketplace, he played Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor for twenty-two days. We have a photograph of him playing the cello during the siege on our wall. It is the most incredible symbol of bravery, hope and humanity.
There is no romance in war. The scars left by the siege were evident everywhere when we visited, but so was the enduring spirit of hope. Everywhere we went, there was a sense of energy, rebirth, openness, excitement, ambition. It was absolutely palpable. A little more than a decade after the siege was lifted, I was still astonished to discover a city that was so resonant with optimism, so diverse, and so rich with creativity. I would love to go back.
It was refreshing to be in a European city whose cultural life was not commodified, but acted more as the tools for survival, the city’s life force. In our work as Citizens Design Bureau, places like Liverpool where I grew up, Glasgow where I studied, and Sarajevo where I loved, inspired me to look beyond the brief for a specific building to understand that the messiness and layers of our personal and collective histories are what make our stories and our buildings rich. So often in media, in design, in architecture, ideas are reduced to soundbites and symbols, without encouraging us to ask questions about ourselves and others. At our Jewish Museum in Manchester, we wanted to tell stories of Jewish people that are seldom heard, for example of Arabic speaking Jewish traders from Syria and Yemen, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula. It’s these stories that embody the unexpected weaving together of political, social and religious values that really resonate across communities.
In Sarajevo, the Jerusalem of Europe, the idea that we have more in common than that which divides us is not a cliché. The city implores us to open our eyes in a way that is as raw and relevant as ever.
