1.

You don't go far in Sarajevo without running into the name Gazi Husrev-Beg (sometimes written Husrev-Bey). He lived from 1480 to 1541, and for several stretches of time, he was the governor of the Ottoman province of Bosnia.

We weren't really looking for him, but we kept stumbling across him.

There's the bezistan (covered market) he set up in the 16th century:



There's the extraordinarily beautiful mosque that formed part of his rich endowment:











But above and beyond all that, you gradually start to realize that this governor was a lover of books and learning.

Of course, he was also a military man, and when you watch the video about his life (in the Gazi Husrev-Beg Museum, located in the madrasah he founded), you hear about his conquering this and conquering that, and you wonder how all the conquered felt about him... But the fact remains that he did an enormous amount for Sarajevo. He not only financed the construction of many important buildings (as well as less prestigious bits of infrastructure, such as water pipes), but also set up an endowment that gave long-term support to religious and educational facilities:





Tom Verde gives us this description:

"In the autumn of the year 1521, Gazi Husrev-beg, the newly appointed governor of the Ottoman province of Bosnia, rode at the head of a detachment, fresh from Istanbul, bound for the provincial town of Sarajevo, on the banks of the Miljacka River...

"The new governor likely entered Sarajevo across a stone bridge over the Miljacka, just east of the Careva Dzamija or Sultan’s Mosque... Creaking along behind, packed among his wagonloads of possessions, were Husrev-beg’s many books and manuscripts, some of which he ultimately bequeathed to posterity. In time, his bequest would grow into the largest library of Islamic manuscripts and documents in the Balkans, the most extensive collection of Ottoman manuscripts outside of Turkey and one of the largest libraries of its kind in all of Europe."

The Gazi Husref-Beg Library Museum illustrates some of these riches:




This Museum also tells the story of the operation to rescue the contents of the library during the wars of the early 1990s. Cultural and religious artefacts were coming under sustained attack, and -- as Verde reminds us -- two of Sarajevo's top libraries had been destroyed by August 1992. A team of determined and extraordinarily courageous people therefore set about moving the Gazi Husref-Beg Library's treasures to safer places:

"From 1992 to 1994, [library director Mustafa] Jahic and his faithful, dedicated colleagues -- including a volunteer from the library’s cleaning staff and a night watchman -- moved the collection a total of eight times, changing locations every five to six months. For the duration of the conflict, Jahic placed the most valuable items, such as the al-Ghazali and other rare manuscripts, in the vault of the Privredna bank near the center of town. But the bulk of the collection he and his colleagues carried by hand, from place to place, usually in cardboard banana boxes, like college students moving in and out of a dorm."

Amazing...



2.

The reverence for books is still very evident in Sarajevo, and there are a number of statues of famous writers dotted about the city. Most are still unknown to me, but there were a couple of names that we knew from Banja Luka and Travnik:




I've looked in my usual range of sources for material by these latter two authors, but haven't yet found any in a language I can understand. Which kind of underlines how much knowledge we never have a chance to access in our lives...

3.

Bookshops thrive here:






It's nice to see local authors appearing in translation, but -- not surprisingly, I suppose, given the inevitably small print-runs -- these books are quite expensive.

Still, in the context of a very book-oriented trip, Sarajevo has turned up lots of treasures.