Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo showcases the nation’s history from the Middle Ages to the present, featuring over 400,000 artifacts.

Planning your visit

The Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina occupies a 1963 modernist building that was itself damaged during the siege and has never been fully repaired — a condition the museum has partly embraced, since the state's contested constitutional arrangements leave several national institutions without secure funding.

Its permanent exhibition, "Besieged Sarajevo", is the reason to come. The siege lasted from 1992 to 1996, the longest of a capital city in modern warfare, and the display documents how people survived it: improvised stoves burning books and furniture, water containers carried under sniper fire, homemade generators, a reconstructed apartment, humanitarian ration packaging, and the newspapers, theatre programmes and school exercise books that continued through it. The emphasis is on daily ingenuity rather than military narrative.

The wider collection covers Bosnian history from the medieval period, the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian eras, the Second World War and socialist Yugoslavia.

The Tunnel of Hope museum, at the airport, complements it directly. Allow ninety minutes. The main booking is an entry ticket. Current availability is shown below.