Bosnia and Herzegovina

Within a few hundred metres Sarajevo holds a Catholic cathedral, an Orthodox cathedral, the Gazi Husrev-beg mosque and a Sephardic synagogue. The Sarajevo Haggadah, a fourteenth-century Jewish manuscript from Spain, was saved there twice in the twentieth century.

An independent medieval kingdom from 1377, Bosnia was conquered by the Ottomans in 1463: a large share of the population converted to Islam, a unique case in the Western Balkans.

Austria-Hungary administered it from 1878 and annexed it in 1908, contributing directly to the tensions of 1914. Integrated into Yugoslavia, the republic became under Tito a proclaimed model of coexistence.

The war of 1992-1995, marked by the siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide, killed more than 100,000. The Dayton accords ended the fighting by instituting a highly decentralised two-entity state. A candidate since 2022, Bosnia saw its accession negotiations opened in 2024.