Few cities stack their centuries this tightly: a medieval Bosnian fortress, Ottoman waqf mosques, Habsburg boulevards, Tito-era brutalism and the scars of a 1,425-day siege sit within a 40-minute walk. This route follows them in order.
The White Bastion crowns the Vratnik walls above the old town. Its lower courses belong to the 15th-century fortress of Hodidjed, held by the Bosnian kingdom before 1435 and rebuilt by the Ottomans after the 1697 raid.
Sarajevo's oldest mosque, founded in 1457 for Sultan Mehmed II and rebuilt in stone under Süleyman in 1566. The city grew outward from this bend in the Miljacka; Ottoman governors lie in the walled turbe beside it.
The 1888 Habsburg-built national museum holds the Sarajevo Haggadah, a 14th-century Jewish codex smuggled through two wars, plus a garden of stećci — the carved medieval Bosnian tombstones. Tue–Sun 10:00–19:00.
Opened in 1630 and the second-largest Jewish burial ground in Europe after Prague: roughly 3,850 Sephardic stones shaped like stylised boulders, terraced up the hillside. The site was a front line in 1992–95.
The 800 m tunnel dug by hand under the airport runway in 1993 was besieged Sarajevo's only link to free territory. Twenty metres are walkable, alongside the trolleys, wartime footage and the Kolar family house it began in.
A brutalist 1981 memorial built into an Austro-Hungarian fort, engraved with the names of 9,091 Sarajevans killed by fascism in 1941–45. Shelled and looted during the siege, it now stands half-ruined — two wars on one hillside.
The 1963 modernist slab houses the permanent 'Besieged Sarajevo' exhibition: ration tins, homemade stoves, a reconstructed siege flat and improvised weapons from 1992–95. The building's own shrapnel damage was left unrepaired.
Bosnia's first memorial gallery documents the 8,372 men and boys killed at Srebrenica in July 1995, through Tarik Samarah's photographs, ICTY testimony and film footage from Potočari. Open daily until 19:00; entry 16 KM.
A walled Ottoman merchant compound frozen at about 1832: separate men's and women's courtyards, a cushioned divanhana, hand-carved cupboards. The Svrzo family lived here for six generations until the city took it over in 1952.
The Austro-Hungarians rebuilt this neo-Gothic brewery in 1881 above a natural spring. During the siege its wells supplied drinking water to much of the city, and people queued under sniper fire in the courtyard to fill canisters.
The 1984 Winter Olympic bob and luge run curls 1,300 m down Trebević. From 1992 the besieging forces used its concrete banks as artillery and sniper positions; today it is graffiti-covered and walkable end to end.
Terraced white marble headstones climb the slope above the old town — graves of Sarajevans killed between 1992 and 1995, including first president Alija Izetbegović, buried here in 2003 under a plain stone he chose himself.