Once Upon a Time in Sarajevo

Abstract

Before its brutal dismemberment at the beginning of the 1990s, Yugoslavia was a complex, multicultural society constituted of six republics and two autonomous provinces. Its capital was Belgrade, the only city in Yugoslavia with more than one million inhabitants. Other administrative urban centres included the cities of Zagreb, Ljubljana, Skopje, Podgorica, Novi Sad, Pristina, and Sarajevo. Centred in the geographical centre of the central republic in the Yugoslav Federation, the city of Sarajevo was, as the cultural anthropologist Fran Markowitz (2011) observes, ‘Yugoslavia’s most Yugoslav city’ (p. 71). It was Sarajevo’s dynamic cultural and metropolitan presence that represented the ethnic and religious diversity of Yugoslavia as a cosmopolitan national entity.