Sarajevo

Sarajevo holds an outsized place in 20th-century history for a city its size, and it starts at the Latin Bridge: on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb nationalist, shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie a few steps from it, setting off the alliance system that turned a regional assassination into World War I. The spot today is marked but understated — a small museum on the corner, easy to walk past without registering what happened there.

Less than a century later, Sarajevo endured the longest siege of a capital city in modern warfare: nearly four years, from 1992 to 1996, during the Bosnian War, with the city surrounded and shelled while a UN-protected tunnel under the airport runway remained the main supply line in and out. That tunnel is partially preserved today as the Tunnel of Hope museum, and scattered across the city, mortar shell scars in the pavement — filled with red resin as memorials and known as "Sarajevo Roses" — remain a quiet, ongoing part of the urban landscape rather than a sealed-off historical site.

Baščaršija, the old Ottoman-era bazaar quarter at the city's center, gives Sarajevo its most distinctive visual signature: walking west along Ferhadija street, the architecture visibly shifts from Ottoman mosques and covered markets to Austro-Hungarian facades within a few blocks, a physical line marking where the Ottoman Empire's control gave way to Austro-Hungarian rule in 1878. Mosques, an Orthodox cathedral, a Catholic cathedral, and a synagogue all sit within a short walk of each other, a density of religious coexistence that's given Sarajevo the informal nickname "Jerusalem of Europe."

Above the city, Trebević mountain hosted the bobsled and luge track for the 1984 Winter Olympics — a genuine high point in Sarajevo's 20th century, held less than a decade before the siege began. The track sits abandoned today, reclaimed by graffiti artists, and a cable car (rebuilt after the war) makes the visit an easy half-day trip with panoramic views back over the city.

Sarajevo remains one of the least-visited capitals covered in this guide relative to its historical significance, priced well below most of Central Europe, and its layered Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and 1990s history gives it a depth that a two- or three-day visit only starts to cover.