There is a street corner in Sarajevo where you can stand and see, in a single turning of the head, an Ottoman mosque, an Austro-Hungarian cathedral, an Eastern Orthodox church, and a Sephardic synagogue — four faiths, four centuries, four architectural traditions, all within a few hundred metres of each other in the heart of a city that has been called, with some justification, the Jerusalem of Europe. Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a country the size of West Virginia in the western Balkans, and it is a city of accumulated history in a way that almost nowhere else in Europe manages — not accumulated in the museum sense, where the history is sorted and labelled and kept at a safe interpretive distance, but accumulated in the living sense, where the Ottoman bazaar and the Austro-Hungarian boulevard and the Socialist apartment blocks and the scars of the 1990s siege all exist simultaneously, layered on top of each other, part of the same continuous city that has been through more in the last five centuries than most European capitals have experienced in their entire existence. And somehow, through all of it, Sarajevo has produced a culture of hospitality and warmth and dark humour and coffee-drinking that makes it one of the most genuinely pleasurable cities to be in anywhere in the Balkans. Come expecting difficulty and weight. The weight is real. But so is the pleasure, and the two are inseparable here in a way that makes Sarajevo unlike anywhere else you will go.

Baščaršija: The Ottoman Heart of the City

Baščaršija — the old Ottoman bazaar district of Sarajevo, founded in the 15th century when the Ottoman general Isa-Beg Isaković established the city as a trading post — is the oldest and most atmospheric part of Sarajevo, and the part that feels most completely itself at any hour of the day or night. The cobblestone streets are arranged, in the Ottoman fashion, by trade: the Kazandžiluk (coppersmiths’ street) where craftsmen still hammer copper into the traditional džezve (small long-handled coffee pots) and decorative dishes that have been made here for five centuries; the leather workers; the jewellers; the textile merchants whose shops overflow with kilims and embroidered cloth and the Bosnian needlework tradition that is one of the most underappreciated textile arts in Europe. The Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque, built in 1531 and the largest Ottoman mosque in the Balkans, anchors the neighbourhood with its dome and twin minarets above the roofline, the call to prayer sounding five times daily over the bazaar. The Sebilj — the ornate wooden Ottoman fountain in the central square of Baščaršija — is the city’s most recognisable landmark and the gathering point where Sarajevans and visitors alike sit, drink Bosnian coffee from small džezvas at the surrounding café tables, and watch the pigeons that have been occupying this square since the fountain was built in 1891. The Baščaršija at night, when the shops close and the restaurants fill and the strings of lights come on above the cobblestones, is the city at its most atmospheric — warm and close and smelling of grilled meat and coffee and the woodsmoke from the bakeries that start their morning preparation before midnight.

The Austro-Hungarian City and the Street Where History Pivoted

Walk west from Baščaršija along the Miljacka River and the city changes completely within a few hundred metres: the cobblestones give way to the broad, ordered boulevards and ornate public buildings of the Austro-Hungarian administration that governed Bosnia from 1878 to 1918 and built an entirely new city adjacent to the Ottoman one. The City Hall — the Vijećnica — is the most spectacular of these buildings: a grand Moorish Revival structure in cream and red stone built in 1896 on the riverbank, burned during the 1992-95 siege and painstakingly restored since, now functioning again as both a library and a concert hall. The Latin Bridge, a few minutes’ walk along the Miljacka, is the small stone bridge where, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, an act that set in motion the chain of events that produced the First World War, the collapse of four empires, and the reconfiguration of the entire 20th century. The small museum at the corner marks the spot with a restraint and a seriousness that is entirely appropriate — this is not a place that dramatises itself. It simply is the place where a very significant thing happened, and standing at it, looking at the ordinary stone bridge over the ordinary river in the middle of an ordinary city street, produces a quality of historical vertigo that few places in the world can match. The Franz Josef Strasse — now Ferhadija, the main pedestrian street of the Austro-Hungarian quarter — is lined with the cafés and shops and department store buildings of the late 19th century, and the transition point between the Ottoman Baščaršija and the Austro-Hungarian boulevard — marked by a line in the pavement — is called, with characteristic Sarajevan humour, the Meeting of Cultures.

Bosnian Food and Coffee: The Two Things You Eat Every Day

Bosnian food is Ottoman food that has been cooking in a mountain country for five hundred years, adapted to the ingredients available in the Dinaric highlands and the river valleys of Bosnia, and it is considerably better than its international profile suggests. Ćevapi are the dish everyone knows: small, skinless grilled sausages of minced beef and lamb, served in a flatbread called somun with raw onion, sour cream, and the red pepper-and-eggplant relish called ajvar, eaten at any hour at the ćevabdžinica restaurants that are scattered throughout Baščaršija. The Sarajevo somun — softer, more pillowy than the flatbreads of the surrounding region — is made fresh throughout the day at the bakeries of Baščaršija and is one of those breads that is worth eating warm from the bakery without anything on it at all. Burek is the other essential: a phyllo pastry filled with minced meat (burek proper), or cheese (sirnica), or potato (krompirusa), coiled into a large round tray and baked until the pastry is golden and the filling is steaming, sold by weight and eaten with a glass of cold yoghurt. Begova čorba — the Bey’s soup, a thick chicken and vegetable soup with cream and dried vegetables that was historically the food of the Ottoman governing class — is the most refined dish in the Bosnian repertoire and the most revealing of the cuisine’s Ottoman origins. Bosnian coffee is not Turkish coffee, and Sarajevans will correct you on this with a patience that suggests they have done it many times before: it is served in a small copper džezva on a tray with a sugar cube and a piece of Turkish delight, poured into a small cup, and drunk slowly, because the coffee is the occasion rather than the accompaniment to one.

The Tunnel, the Yellow Fortress, and What the City Carries

The Siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996 — 1,425 days, the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare, during which the city was surrounded and snipers fired on civilians crossing the street and the population survived on humanitarian aid and the ingenuity produced by extreme necessity. The Tunnel of Hope — a 800-metre tunnel dug beneath the airport runway in 1993, through which food, weapons, and people moved to sustain a besieged city — is now a museum in the house where the tunnel entrance was concealed, and visiting it is one of the most important things to do in Sarajevo: not for the historical horror, which is real and present, but for the human resilience that the tunnel represents and that the museum documents with a directness and a lack of sentimentality that is entirely consistent with the way Sarajevans talk about the siege in general — matter-of-factly, with the dark humour of people who have decided that what happened to them is part of their story rather than the whole of it. The Yellow Fortress — Žuta tabija — is the Ottoman fortification on the hill above Baščaršija where the best view of the city is found, and where on summer evenings the entire city seems to congregate at sunset to watch the light go over the minarets and the hills. The view from the Yellow Fortress at that hour, with the city spread below and the call to prayer rising from the mosques as the light fades, is one of those travel moments that requires no filter and no explanation and stays with you for a long time after you have left.

Sarajevo does not hide what it has been through. The bullet holes are still in some of the walls. The Sarajevo roses — the red resin poured into the shell-crater scars in the pavement as a memorial — are still in the streets of the city centre. The weight of the history is real and present and available to anyone who looks for it. But so is the life: the ćevabdžinicas full at lunch, the coffee shops full all afternoon, the Baščaršija alive at night, the people of a city that has been through the 15th century and the 19th century and the 20th century and the siege and is still, demonstrably, here. That combination — of historical weight and genuine vitality — is what makes Sarajevo unlike anywhere else in Europe, and what makes it worth every kilometre of the journey to reach it.