What locals think about Sarajevo's siege tours

Three conversations, three different answers

I asked three people in Sarajevo, over three separate weeks, what they thought of siege tours. I got three different answers, and none of them cancelled the others out. That is roughly where I have landed too, after enough time here to stop expecting a single verdict.

The siege lasted 1,425 days, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. Around 11,000 people were killed, close to 1,600 of them children. Every person I spoke with had a version of that fact ready before I finished the question, the way you might recite your own postcode. It is not abstract history to anyone over about forty here. It is the reason a friend’s uncle walks with a limp, the reason a colleague’s family left for Germany and never fully came back, the reason a shop on Ferhadija still has a different owner’s name half-visible under the paint.

The selfie problem

The first conversation was with a woman who runs a small café near Baščaršija. I mentioned I had walked past a Sarajevo rose that morning, one of the resin-filled mortar scars set into the pavement, and asked what she made of tourists stopping there. She was quiet for a moment, then said she did not mind people looking. What bothered her was watching someone crouch down, smile, and take a photograph of themselves on the spot.

“That is where somebody’s father died,” she said, “not a shape in the ground.” She was careful to say she did not think most visitors meant harm. She thought most of them simply did not know what they were standing on until it was too late to react differently. I have written about the roses themselves, what they are and where to find them, in a separate guide to this site; this is not that. This is about how it feels to watch a stranger take a photo there, and that feeling is not something a factual page can carry.

Not everyone agreed with her, even in the same conversation. Her business partner, listening from behind the counter, said he would rather people photograph the roses respectfully than avoid the subject altogether, because avoidance is its own kind of forgetting. Two people, one counter, two positions that did not resolve into one.

The guide who was a child in 1993

The second conversation happened almost by accident, on a Grand Walking Tour I had booked mostly to get my bearings on my first full day. Partway through, near Sniper Alley, the guide mentioned, without being asked, that he had been six years old when the siege began. He did not dwell on it. He pointed at a building, said which floor his family had lived on, and moved on to the next stop.

It changed how I listened for the rest of the tour, and I noticed the same shift in the four other people in the group. Afterwards, over coffee, he told me he thinks tours led by people who lived through the siege carry something a script cannot replicate, not because outside guides do a bad job, but because a first-hand account has a different weight even when the facts are identical. Several other Sarajevans I raised this with agreed, more or less immediately, that they trust locally-run, locally-guided tours more than ones where the history arrives secondhand.

Ninety minutes and a mandatory stop

The third conversation was the least comfortable one, with a man in his fifties who has strong opinions about tour buses stopping outside his building. He described watching groups move through a 90-minute circuit that always, without fail, ends at the Tunnel of Hope, the 800-metre tunnel dug by hand under the airport runway in 1993, now a small museum near Butmir with perhaps twenty surviving metres open to visitors. His objection was not to the tunnel itself, which he thinks deserves the stop.

It was to the pace: fifteen minutes here, ten there, a rehearsed sentence at each point, then back on the bus. “You cannot understand a siege in ninety minutes,” he said, “you can only collect the outline of one.” He did not object to the format existing. He objected to it being treated as sufficient, as though a checklist of stops was the same thing as an explanation. He thought longer tours, or shorter tours with fewer stops covered honestly, served visitors better, even if that meant fewer people fit the schedule.

I have since taken a slower version myself, closer to three hours, that pairs a walk along parts of the old front line with a proper stop at the tunnel museum rather than a drive-by. It felt different in exactly the way he predicted: less like consuming a fact and more like following an explanation to its end. If you want that pace, a Siege Walking Tour run at a similar length is worth booking ahead, and it is worth asking in advance how the tunnel stop is handled, because the answer varies more than the marketing suggests.

book a Sarajevo siege walking tour that spends proper time at each stop

What did not resolve

None of the three conversations ended with agreement, including with each other. The café owner wanted more care around the roses. Her partner wanted less avoidance. The guide trusted first-hand testimony over rehearsed script. The man near the tunnel wanted depth over pace, whoever was leading. I do not think any of them would claim the others were wrong, and I am not going to resolve it for a reader either, because that is not mine to settle from outside it.

What I took from all three, in the end, is smaller than a rule: ask how a tour is structured before booking it, notice what you are standing on before you photograph it, and treat a guide’s own account, when they choose to share one, as something worth more than a recited date. If you would rather cover the same ground on two wheels and at a slower pace, a guided bike tour that includes entry to the Tunnel of Hope is one option that several Sarajevans mentioned without prompting.

try the guided bike tour that includes Tunnel of Hope entry

For the wider arc of the country’s twentieth century, including the years either side of the siege, a tour covering the rise and fall of Yugoslavia puts 1992 to 1996 into a longer context that none of my three conversations had time to cover on its own.

join a tour tracing the rise and fall of Yugoslavia

If any of this is new territory, two pages on this site go further than a single essay can: a guide to visiting Sarajevo’s war history respectfully, and a comparison of the city’s different war museums, including the War Childhood Museum, the Historical Museum, and Gallery 11/07/95, which covers the genocide at Srebrenica separately and is treated with its own care on the Srebrenica memorial guide.

For background before you arrive, a short primer on the wider Bosnian war and a reading and viewing list both helped me more than any single walking tour did on its own. And if the 1984 Winter Olympics and the abandoned bobsleigh track on Trebević are new to you as a pre-siege chapter of the same city, they are worth reading before you go, not after.

Questions about visiting Sarajevo’s siege history

Do Sarajevans mind tourists taking siege tours?

Opinions differ. Most people I spoke with welcome visitors who want to understand what happened between 1992 and 1996, and many prefer guides who lived through it. The discomfort is with rushed, checklist-style tours and with photographs taken at the Sarajevo roses, which mark where people died.

Is it disrespectful to take a siege tour in Sarajevo?

Not in itself. Several people I spoke with said the opposite worries them more: visitors who come to Sarajevo and never ask what happened here. The concern is about how a tour is run, not whether one is taken.

Should I take a photo at the Sarajevo roses?

That is a personal decision, but it is worth knowing what a rose marks before deciding: a point where a mortar shell killed someone. Several residents described discomfort at seeing people pose there. Nobody I spoke with suggested there is one correct answer.

Why do guides born during the siege matter to people here?

Because the account becomes first-hand rather than recited. A guide who was a child in Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996 is describing their own street, their own building, sometimes their own family, not reading from a script.

Is a 90-minute siege tour too short?

Several locals thought so, particularly when the Tunnel of Hope stop feels bolted on rather than explained. Longer tours, or ones with fewer stops covered properly, came up repeatedly as the better option.

What is the difference between this and the Sarajevo roses guide on this site?

The roses guide is a factual, place-by-place reference: what a rose is, where to find them, how to behave near one. This article is a personal account of conversations about how siege tourism itself feels to the people who lived through the siege.

How many people died in the siege of Sarajevo?

The siege lasted 1,425 days, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. Around 11,000 people were killed, including close to 1,600 children.