The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare — 1,425 days. Bosnian Serb forces (VRS), supported by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serbia under Slobodan Milošević, encircled the city, cut off food, water, electricity and medicine, and subjected its 400,000 inhabitants (mostly Bosniaks but also Serbs, Croats and others who refused ethnic division) to daily shelling and sniper fire from the surrounding hills.
Approximately 13,952 people were killed in and around Sarajevo during the siege, of whom over 5,400 were civilians. More than 1,500 children died. The city lived under constant terror: people were shot while queuing for water, while attending funerals, while running across streets nicknamed “Sniper Alley.”
Markale Market Massacres
5 February 1994: A mortar shell killed 68 civilians and wounded 144 in the crowded market.
28 August 1995: A second mortar attack killed 43 and wounded 75.These atrocities finally provoked sustained NATO airstrikes that helped end the siege.
Admira Ismić and Boško Brkić – The “Romeo and Juliet” of Sarajevo
This is the story the Slovenian text references. Admira (Bosniak, 25) and Boško (Serb, 24) were childhood sweethearts who refused to let the war separate them. On 18 May 1993 they attempted to cross the Vrbanja bridge from the besieged city into Serb-held territory so they could escape to Belgrade. They were shot by a sniper. Both were hit; Admira crawled to Boško and died with her arm across his chest. They lay in the no-man’s-land for six days while the world watched on television before their bodies could be recovered.
One sad love story from Bosnia and Hercegovina's capital city. Sarajevo's Romeo and Juliet died, Serb Bosko Brkic and Muslim Admira Ismic. Their death serves as an example of nonsense of war destruction ever since in the region. This 25-year-old couple tried to escape from evil and madness on 18 May 1993, which struck their country, and they were murdered on the Vrbanja bridge.
This 25-year-old couple tried to escape from evil and madness on 18 May 1993, which struck their country, and they were murdered on the Vrbanja bridge. Young and in love, of different religions and nationalities at the time with it was almost impossible, they were preparing for the wedding and escape from the unbearable reality. On that fatal May day in the afternoon hours, with the hope they will escape Sarajevo, they were killed by a sniper and they were left to lie on each other's arms for days on Sarajevo asphalt, because no one dared to move them from the line of demarcation.
Their bodies were lying on the street for seven days. Admira's father and mother found out that their daughter has been killed after two days. Seven days after being killed, the army of Serbia dragged their bodies off of the bridge and buried them in Lukavica.
When the war was over, in 1996, on the initiative and the wish of Admira's parents, their remains were transferred to the cemetery Lav in Sarajevo and they were buried together.
Srebrenica Genocide (July 1995)
After the Dutch UN battalion withdrew protection from the “safe area,” more than 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed in days. Women and small children were deported. The ICTY and ICJ both ruled it genocide. The Slovenian text correctly calls it exactly that: not combat, but the mass murder of unarmed civilians. The Dutch state later accepted partial responsibility for its troops’ failure.
A Modern Poet-Survivor of Sarajevo: Semezdin Mehmedinović
One of the most powerful literary voices to survive the entire siege is Semezdin Mehmedinović (b. 1960 in Tuzla, lived in Sarajevo throughout the war). His book Sarajevo Blues (written 1992–1996, later expanded) is a fragmented, unsentimental chronicle of life under siege — part poetry, part prose, part photographic eye. It has been translated into English and remains one of the canonical testimonies.
Here is one of his short, characteristic poems from that cycle (English translation):
“The Blue Notebook” (excerpt from Sarajevo Blues)
Every morning death walks through the city
wearing the face of a postman, a baker, a neighbour.
We have learned its footsteps so well
that we can tell the calibre by the whistle.A shell falls — the street empties,
then fills again with people carrying plastic canisters.
Life is stronger than death,
but only by a margin so thin
it can be measured in the time between two explosions.I write this so that tomorrow, when someone asks
what it was like, I will not have to lie.
The truth is simpler and more terrible:
we lived.
Mehmedinović stayed in the city, worked on humanitarian aid, helped bury the dead, and kept writing by candlelight. His later work (Autopsy of the Soul, Thousand Years of Solitude) continues to wrestle with memory, trauma and the slow erasure of lived history. Other survivor poets such as Abdullah Sidran, Izet Sarajlić and the younger Faruk Šehić also produced enduring work.
Partizanska cesta 1991 @ Cajnica we said "Goodbye": Iskal sem življenje, našel sem smrt
Alojz Krivograd – Futy (1964–1992) was a Slovenian war photographer from Ravne na Koroškem. Self-taught in a home darkroom, he documented the breakup of Yugoslavia from the first fighting in Slovenia through Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia.
He deliberately worked the most dangerous zones, photographing besieged Sarajevo’s civilian suffering — bread queues, sniper alleys, funerals under fire — for international media. Captured by Serb paramilitaries in Foča in 1992, he has been missing ever since; the Red Cross lists him as disappeared. His photographs are collected in the monograph Iskal sem življenje, našel sem smrt (“I Was Looking for Life, I Found Death”) and preserved at the Koroški pokrajinski muzej and Koroška galerija likovnih umetnosti. As he himself noted, these wars had no real front line: “Where the line should have been, there was nothing.”