Bosnia and Herzegovina

A medieval kingdom turned Ottoman, Habsburg and Yugoslav crossroads, scarred by the 1990s war yet remade as a single multi-ethnic state.

Bosnia and Herzegovina occupies the rugged heart of the western Balkans, and its history is the story of a borderland where empires, faiths and peoples have met for a thousand years. A medieval Banate emerged under Ban Kulin around 1180 and rose to a kingdom when Tvrtko I was crowned in 1377; its distinctive Bosnian Church and the monumental stećci tombstones survive as emblems of that age. The Ottoman conquest of 1463 brought centuries of Islamic rule, founding Sarajevo and Mostar and giving Bosnia a uniquely interwoven population of Muslims, Orthodox, Catholics and Jews. Austria-Hungary occupied the land after the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and annexed it in 1908; it was in Sarajevo, on 28 June 1914, that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lit the fuse of the First World War. Absorbed into Yugoslavia, Bosnia became a federal republic after the Second World War, then declared independence in 1992. The Bosnian War that followed brought the longest siege of a capital in modern history at Sarajevo, campaigns of ethnic cleansing, and the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995, judged genocide by both the ICTY and the International Court of Justice. The Dayton Agreement ended the war in late 1995, binding two entities into one state under international oversight; in 2022 Bosnia and Herzegovina was granted European Union candidate status.