From Medieval Vrhbosna to Ottoman Sarajevo

The territory of Sarajevo has been inhabited since antiquity by Illyrian, Celtic and Slavic populations, with its first settlements dating from Neolithic and Roman times. In the middle ages, the area of Vrhbosna2 (the precursor of modern Sarajevo) developed as a cluster of villages under the authority of the independent Kingdom of Bosnia. The first historically significant transition occurred in the mid-15th century, when Medieval Bosnia was succeeded by the Ottoman Empire’s occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The feudal system was replaced by the oriental monarchy, and a new religion – Islam – was introduced to a population that generally belonged to the Bosnian Church. The scattered medieval settlements and remnants of Roman occupation, including medieval marketplaces such as Tornik (Čengić, 2003), merged into the new oriental urban model of the city.

Context: Sarajevo’s earliest urban contours date from the 15th century, when a medieval cluster of settlements and an embryonic road network evolved into an oriental city at the periphery of the Ottoman Empire. Between 1462 and 1878 the Ottomans defined the original urban structure of the city’s core, instituting a strict separation of private and public domains. Complementing the topography of the city, all public facilities were located in the centre (Bascarsija), within the elongated valley of the Miljacka River, while private life took place in the residential settlements (mahalas) developed laterally on both sides of the city’s amphitheatrical topography.

Figure 1. The zoning plan and urban layout of Bascarsija.

Public activities in 16th-century Sarajevo were mainly work-related: commerce, crafts, administration, education and hospitality. In accordance with oriental functional separation, they were located in Bascarsija. The urban configuration of Ottoman Sarajevo spread organically as a branched network of circulation routes, and several typologies of open public space. These included the bazaar and meydan as the oriental counterparts of squares, and the dzada, sokacic, cikma and budzak, which were kinds of streets (Bejtic, 1973). Bascarsija’s urban grid (Figure 1) was congested, and based on a regular geometrical pattern of streets laid out in the valley, while the urban patterns of the hillside neighbourhoods (mahalas) was dispersed and irregular. The streets of Bascarsija epitomised the “soul and the heart of old Sarajevo” (Grabrijan & Neidhardt, 1957, p. 56). The urban image of Sarajevo’s public areas was that of a labyrinthine network of narrow streets, and a congested threedimensional collage of domes, minarets and shops. One of the few typical public urban elements (which were leitmotifs of the era’s urban design) were the hundreds of drinking fountains3 that appeared throughout the city. Even though the oriental culture gave precedence to the concepts of intimacy and introversion over publicity, the sense of collective spirit was reflected by the fact that the shops were open and unlocked during the five daily prayers, which took place in nearby mosques.

Social interaction generally occurred in open and enclosed commercial areas. The latter category was represented by bezistans,4 the forerunners of commercial centres. Oriental Sarajevo’s two bezistans, which were built during the 16th century, were the city’s hubs of public life. They were a scaled-down echo of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul,5 together making up a tenth of its size. Bazaars were the enclosed, oriental versions of western

4 Bezistans or bedestens, were oriental covered markets or bazaars built during the time of the Ottoman Empire. 5 The centralised composition of Brusa Bezistan, which is covered by 6 domes on a 29 x 25 metre plan, is the indoor counterpart of the square, while Gazi Husrev Bey’s longitudinal bazaar resembles a vaulted 105-metre-long street with shops on both sides.

open public spaces.

The prevailing public architectural typology of Ottoman Sarajevo was that of religious buildings. These were built not only as places of worship, “but also as the cultural, educational and social pivot for the masses, as there was no alternative gathering space capable of accommodating any kind of collective or public activity besides work” (Zagora & Samic, 2014). Along with Orthodox, Catholic and Sephardic places of worship, mosques were Ottoman Sarajevo’s main urban reference points, both in the commercial zones of Bascarsija and in residential areas (mahalas). Their significance as the key public buildings of the time can be seen in their architectural features: “… the dome conveys the idea of mass gatherings” (Grabrijan & Neidhardt, 1957), while minarets “act as medium of communication with the public” (Zagora & Samic, 2014).

The urban and architectural design of Ottoman Sarajevo’s open and enclosed public spaces was strongly affected by the city’s topographical and physical constraints, its hierarchical status in the empire, and anthropometry – the human scale. For example, the dome of the largest mosque in Sarajevo (Bey’s Mosque) is 13 metres in diameter, and its minaret is 47 metres tall; Sultan Ahmed Mosque in Istanbul has a 23.5 metre dome and a 64-metre minaret. Even the nomenclature of streets

(dzada, sokacic, cikma and budzak, which all come from the Turkish language) was adapted to the diminutive linguistic form in the Bosnian language, evoking their modest size.

In accordance with the oriental institution of vakuf6 the majority of public spaces was owned and constructed by private investment, to be subsequently entrusted to the larger community. This endowment trust economically ensured the construction and maintenance of spaces for public activities and socialising, not only within religious buildings, but also in indoor and outdoor commercial areas (bezistans and bazars), hotels (hans), public baths (hamams), restaurants and schools (medressas and mektebs). These indoor and outdoor public spaces, regardless of their precise function, are primarily characterised by introversion and intimacy, and the close relationship between interior and exterior spaces. The gradual transition from the outdoor public spaces of the street to intimate indoor spaces is perceivable virtually everywhere, in profane, sacral and residential architecture. In Gazi Husrev Bey’s Mosque, the first level of spatial transition is its solid courtyard wall, which serves as a physical, visual and acoustic divide between the everyday public life of the street, and spiritual retreat. The second spatial sequence is the mosque’s interior courtyard, a semi-open intermediate space, with fountains and trees that atmospherically and symbolically evoke the Garden of Eden. The third transitory level is the semi-enclosed space of the mosque’s portico, whose vaulted domes lead progressively towards the architectural culmination of the domed interior. This introverted

architectural composition and spatial gradation of outdoor to indoor spaces is characterised in some of Sarajevo’s other religious buildings, such as the Old Orthodox Church (The Church of the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel) and the Old Jewish Temple (The Old Synagogue and the Great Temple - Il Kal Grandi), both built in the 16th century (Figure 2).

The dialogue between exterior and interior is a ubiquitous attribute of Bosnian architecture from the Ottoman period. Architects Juraj Neidhardt and Dušan Grabrijan introduced the term meander and atrium (Grabrijan

6 Vakuf comes from the arabic word waqf: “an Islamic endowment of property to be held in trust and used for a charitable or religious purpose” (Merriam Webster Dictionary ).

Figure 2. The courtyard as transition space in the 16th century religious buildings in Sarajevo: Great Temple (Il Kal Grandi), Old Orthodox church and Gazi Husref Bey’s mosque in Sarajevo (from top to bottom).

& Neidhardt, 1957) to describe the architectural composition of volumes intertwining with their surroundings in the form of a meander. Interior spaces within the meander and atrium composition typically face interior courtyards or atriums, particularly in residential architecture. Traditional Ottoman houses in Sarajevo were shaped in harmony with their natural surroundings. They were typically structured with public and private areas that intertwined with their matching interior courtyards in the form of a meander, and enabled a gradual transition from the exterior (the street) to the interior – the heart of the house. This architectural principle was translated to larger scales and other typologies: e.g. Sarajevo’s two remaining hans7 give the impression of introverted buildings from the outside, almost disguised by the dense formation of shops in Bascarsija. Like the layout of traditional houses, the spatial organization of hans converged in their interior courtyards, which served as gathering plazas for travellers and visitors to Sarajevo. The common characteristics of building typologies from the Ottoman period, from traditional houses to religious buildings and other profane public architecture, are therefore interiority and introversion. The true, hidden qualities of traditional interiors and exteriors can be discovered through the delicate gradation of spatial sequences from public exterior to private interior realms.