Jewish Cemetery
- 
The Old Jewish Cemetery on a hillside above the city served the sizeable Jewish community of Sarajevo since the early 17th century until the 1960s. In the Balkan war of the 1990s it was used by Bosnian Serb artillery and was severely damaged. Few visitors today come here independently, most get to see it as part of guided tours on either a Jewish or war-related theme (as it fits both).
More background info: The cemetery was founded in 1630 on one of the hills surrounding Sarajevo at a time when a Jewish community had established itself in the city, mostly Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from Spain, but some Ashkenazi Jews later also settled in Sarajevo during the Habsburg period. This strong Jewish presence gave Sarajevo the epithet “the Jerusalem of the Balkans”.
The Old Jewish Cemetery was in use until well into the Yugoslav era (probably up to 1966). Sarajevo’s first rabbi is buried here, and a few notables from more modern times too, e.g. the writer Isak Samokovlija.
With the outbreak of the Bosnian war in 1992 and the beginning of the Siege of Sarajevo, the cemetery was seized by Bosnian Serb troops who used it as a vantage point from which to fire their artillery on to the city below. The infamous Sniper Alley lay just at the foot of the hill.
Many tombstones suffered damage during that time and you can still see lots of monuments scarred by shell and bullet holes.
The cemetery is no longer in use for burials, and these days most people visiting are tourists on guided tours. I’ve visited it three times, first in August 2009 as part of a general guided tour of Sarajevo war sites, and on my return visit in April 2025 I saw it twice, on two different tours – first another Siege-themed tour, and then again on a “Jewish Sarajevo” tour, both organized by Funky Tours. The stop at the cemetery on the Siege tour was only brief, but on the “Jewish Sarajevo” tour we spent a lot longer here and the guide pointed out several particular aspects of interest and a few notable individuals’ graves.
Both guides routinely made the claim that Sarajevo’s Jewish Cemetery is the world’s second largest “after the one in Prague”. The info panel by the entrance to the cemetery makes the same claim, and so does the cemetery’s entry on Wikipedia, as well as even the entry on the website for the UNESCO World Heritage Convention’s “tentative list”.
Having been to Prague’s famous Jewish Cemetery, as well as to numerous other ones, I found this claim rather doubtful, however. The website for the Jewish Cemetery in Prague does not make any such claims, and states that the cemetery contains some 12,000 tombstones. These are densely packed together, because for reasons of limited space the dead were buried in the ground in layers – up to ten.
That small area space of Prague’s Jewish Cemetery actually makes it seem quite a bit smaller than Sarajevo’s, though by number of graves (12,000 vis-a-vis just under 4000) the cemetery in Sarajevo is definitely smaller.
Anyway, the Jewish Cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw, for example, is significantly bigger than either Prague’s or Sarajevo’s with some 250,000 graves. Budapest’s Kozma Street Jewish Cemetery is even larger with an estimated 300,000 people having been buried there.
How the untenable claim came about that Sarajevo’s Jewish Cemetery is the second biggest after Prague’s is a mystery to me. But it seems to be a self-perpetuating one.
What there is to see: The first thing to take note of is the elaborate stone-and-wrought-iron gate. The inscription states the year 5682 – that’s in the Jewish Hebrew calendar. According to online conversion tools, this means the year 1922 in the Gregorian calendar. Why that year is inscribed here, I don’t know, but I guess that’s when this gate was installed, perhaps. The cemetery as such is of course much older than that (see above).
To the right of the main gate stands a small “chapel” (so the panel says), though with this being a Jewish Cemetery it’s rather a ‘temple’ or ‘synagogue’. Note the Star-of-David stained-glass windows. The building is not accessible for tourists and one of my guides even claimed that a family lives on the lower floor of this edifice.
From the main gate a long flight of steps leads up at a low angle to about a third of the hillside area that the cemetery occupies in total. This is mostly grassy terrain but interspersed with a good number of trees. The gravestones are dotted unevenly around, denser in some parts, hardly any in other parts.
You can see many stones showing the impact of shells and bullets from the 1990s Bosnian war, so a few look quite dramatic, others are only slightly chipped. One tomb of black marble grabbed my attention, not so much because it too had bullet holes but because of the main name on it: Glückselig. That’s German and as an adjective it means something like “blissful”. Quite a contrast to the real setting here, then.
The guide I was with was also keen to locate and point out a couple of specific graves with famous names, especially those of Avram Baruh and Isak Samokovlija, both of whom were writers. Both of them died in 1955 and are buried next to each other … though I have to admit that neither name had meant anything to me until then.
At the top of the path with the steps stand a couple of monuments/memorial stones. One simple slab lists some names of Holocaust victims from 1941. The other is a large block of black and white marble with inscriptions in both Cyrillic and Latin script. The rear states the years 1941-1945 (so the years of WWII in Yugoslavia) and bears a large shell hole. On the eastern side some names of locations of the Holocaust are engraved, including the Croatian Ustaše concentration camp of Jasenovac, some of its sub-camps (like Stara Gradiška) but also “Aušvic” (Auschwitz) and “Bergen Belzen”.
Higher up the hill there are no paths, just grass, so we gave pursuing further up (to where the oldest graves are located) a miss, as recent rain would have made the area wet and potentially slippery.
All in all, I found especially the second visit on this 2025 trip a worthwhile component of my guided tour. As so often with Jewish cemeteries, there’s a certain sad atmosphere to the place, amplified by all the war damage you can see. Certainly a dark site worth going to visit.
Location: on a hillside south of the Miljacka River and overlooking the parliament, ca. 1.3 miles (2 km) to the south-west of Sarajevo's city centre (as the crow flies, by road it’s a lot more).
Google Maps locator: [43.8510, 18.4075]
Access and costs: easiest to get to as part of a guided tour, otherwise difficult; no admission fee, but tours obviously cost.
Details: While it’s not impossible to get to the Jewish Cemetery independently, it’s much more convenient to do it as part of a guided tour. If you don’t want to go on a tour, you could theoretically walk it all (nominally about half an hour from the western end of Sarajevo's city centre), but it’s steeply uphill in parts and partially along roads that are not really meant for pedestrians, especially the main M5 trunk road, which the short access drive to the cemetery gate branches off from. Better would be to organize a taxi for an independent visit.
As such the cemetery is freely accessible at all times. (Or so I presume … unless it gets locked at night – that could be, but you wouldn’t want to come here after dark in any case, so it doesn’t matter.)
As part of a guided tour, transport to the site is included. The “Jewish Sarajevo” tour that I went on, offered by the operator Funky Tours as either a private or a group tour, is the best option that I know of. The starting price for this tour is 45 EUR per person; when I went with my wife in April 2025 as a private tour just for the us two, the total price was 120 EUR.
Time required: depends, from between just a short glimpse of a few minutes to about half an hour on the guided tours I was on; but if you want to come here independently and explore the cemetery in its entirety, you’ll need much longer than that.
Combinations with other dark destinations: in general see under Sarajevo.
As noted above, I visited this cemetery twice as part of guided tours on my latest trip to Bosnia in April 2025. The first tour was a combined Tito’s Bunker and Sarajevo Siege tour by “Funky Tours” (see their sponsored page here), which finished with a short stop at the cemetery. Then I visited it again as part of a half-day “Jewish Sarajevo” tour, also out of the portfolio of Funky Tours. This tour first took in various Jewish sites in the city, such as the Jewish Museum in the Old Town (housed in a former synagogue) as well as a working Ashkenazi synagogue, and then proceeded with a drive to and a longer stop at the Jewish Cemetery of Sarajevo, before finishing at the Vraca memorial complex.
