Jewish Cemetery
Description
The Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo is one of the most important memorial complexes in Europe and the second-largest early modern Jewish sacred complex on the continent, after Prague. It is located in the southwestern part of Sarajevo, in the Kovačići and Debelo Brdo area, covering 30,000 m². It was established next to an older necropolis of stećci, and 1630 is considered the reliable year of its founding.
Beneath 3,850 gravestones lie generations of Sephardic families who built and shaped Sarajevo over the centuries. Its special value lies in the unique Sephardic gravestones — unmatched in shape and symbolic motifs by any other Jewish cemetery in the world. The complex also includes the cemetery chapel, memorial ossuaries, and a monument to the victims. It was declared a national monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004.
Sephardic heritage
What makes the Jewish Cemetery in Sarajevo unique on a global scale are the gravestones of Sarajevo’s Sephardim. This branch of the Jewish people, which found a home in Ottoman Sarajevo after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century, developed a special type of gravestone — with house-like forms and symbolic motifs unknown at any other Jewish cemetery in the world. The oldest preserved gravestone in the cemetery marks Samuel Baruh, the first rabbi of Sarajevo, with an inscription dating from 1630.
The complex and its memory
Alongside the burial plots, the complex includes the cemetery chapel, a memorial ossuary from 1952, an Ashkenazi ossuary from 1962, a memorial to the victims of Ustaša crimes, a fountain, and a fence. The cemetery was established on the site of an older necropolis of stećci, next to the Šatorija quarry, from which stone was extracted for both Bosnian stećci and Jewish gravestones — a small area that encapsulates the centuries-long coexistence of Sarajevo’s different communities.
