Few institutions tell so much of Bosnia as its Historical Museum. It is a story of neglect, resilience, creativity and Bosnian inat.

The new wooden stairs are painted black. „Now we can allow people safe access to our museum“, Elma Hašimbegović says. The historian is the director of the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina.

Just a few weeks ago, visitors had to use crumbling stone stairs that had not been replaced or renovated since Yugoslav times. Local and national governments had not thought it worthwhile, in spite of decade long pleas by the museum staff and the public to repair them.

When the situation became unbearable, Elma and her coworkers took matters into their own hands. “We removed the old stone stairs and replaced them with this structure. It may be a temporary fix, but it gets the job done.” The heating system is another temporary fix: After the pre-war system broke down, the new system just manages to keep the administrative tracts warm. There was no money for anything else.

According to a UNDP survey from 2022, restoring the crumbling facade, installing a functioning heating system, and replacing the staircase will cost around 8 million Bosnian Marks. As of today, the museum staff works on securing these funds.

Eleven Years Of Temporariness

In front of the impressive concrete architecture of the building, the new stairs stand out, much like an other installation on the wall of the museum’s gallery facing Sarajevo’s main street. It is called Rukovice, Gloves.

It features gloves cast in concrete and was put up in 2013 by a collective around local artists Nardina Zubanović. “We called on citizens to donate these items, and they did so in huge numbers. It stands for the connection between the people and not only this museum but culture and education in general, and how politics have ignored the need of the population for culture for decades.”

This public protest also urged Bosnian politics to live up to its responsibilities and preserve the Historical Museum, whose structure has been crumbling like the recently replaced stairs – a call so far unheeded. No one thought the installation would have to be on the building’s gallery eleven years later, including Nardina.

The Bosnian Condition

The Dayton Peace Accords of 1995 made Bosnia and Hercegovina a confederation of two largely autonomous states called entities, based on the ethnicity or rather religion of the majority of their respective inhabitants: Federacija with a Bošnjak or Muslim majority and a sizeable Catholic or Croat minority, and Republika Srpska with an Orthodox or Serb majority. This supports nationalist egotisms and has crippled the country for 30 years. This includes culture and education. Republika Srpska refuses to recognize several central national cultural institutions.

This bars Bosnia’s national government from funding them. This includes the National Museum, the National Library and the Historical Museum. None of these institutions has any regular budget. They somehow manage to survive by securing financing from local and regional governments for projects, donations and cooperating with international cultural institutions and NGOs. The self exploitation of these institutions’ staff and public solidarity are crucial in keeping them running.

They don’t always succeed. Around the time Nardina and her colleagues put up the installation at the Historical Museum, the National Museum (Zemaljski Muzej) right next to the Historical Museum, couldn’t even pay its employees and had to close for several years. The employees and volunteers kept the museum’s collection safe.

Only after the local citizens’ group Ja sam muzej (I am the Museum) around the NGO Akcija launched concerted PR campaigns on behalf of the museum did the US Embassy and other international institutions decide to contribute financially, allowing Zemaljski Muzej to reopen. (Read more about this remarkable story here.)

Not Giving In To Pressure

The Historical Museum isn’t as lucky in regards to US generosity – in spite of being directly across the street from the Embassy. In Yugoslavia, it had been the Museum of Revolution. In the eyes of the US, it has never shaken off its reputation as “Red Museum”. The Embassy isn’t enthusiastic about providing funding.

Around 35.000 Bosnian Marks are necessary to pay for the staff’s salary and other fixed costs to keep the museum open. Elma and her co-workers have been extraordinarily creative in securing those means and even more in the recent past.

International cooperation with institutions and NGOs has allowed them to offer he Bosnian public an array of new and exciting exhibitions confronting them with unexplored or neglected aspects of the recent past. This is largely a result of the uncompromising scientific and educational work Elma and her staff do. Not yielding to pressure, they research and present Bosnia’s history in objective terms, gaining the museum an international reputation far beyond its size.

Successes Against All Odds

“The Labyrinth of the 90’s is a result of discussions, working meetings, and exchange of regional historians and researchers”, Elma says of the latest exhibition at her museum. “It explores the violent breakup of Yugoslavia from different perspectives, offering insights beyond our respective national perspectives”.

In this, the exhibition, which was first shown in Belgrade and will travel to Podgorica and possibly to Pula, also contributes to an honest reckoning with the war in the 1990s. It also was a surprising popular success so far. “We’ve had visitors come in extra for this exhibition”, Elma says. “This doesn’t happen that often”. This is the latest example of many interesting exhibitions the museum featured in the recent past, from a presentation of Brian Eno’s works to a show dedicated to Jovan Divjak, defender of Sarajevo and respected humanitarian.

This summer, cooperation with four international partners and support from the EVZ Foundation in Germany allowed the Historical Museum to open a second permanent exhibition in the museum’s garden. ““Wer ist Walter?” explores the Yugoslav Partizan movement through an international perspective, highlighting hitherto neglected aspects and antifascist resistance all over Europe during WW II”, Elma explains.

Honoring Tito’s Partizans as the largest armed antifascist movement in Europe, it also breaks with their mythologisation in Yugoslav times. This, and cooperation with art students from Sarajevo, Zagreb, Berlin and Paris make “Wer ist Walter” one of the most interesting takes on antifascist resistance this reporter has come across.

The museum even expanded its original permanent exhibition about the Siege of Sarajevo. “We added a section about Put života, the Path of Life. It deals with strategies of people of this city to develop alternative routes when the so called Sniper Alley, i.e, the main tram and car street of Sarajevo, became too dangerous.” This will give visitors a better insight into Sarajevo’s darkest times.

One Can Just Hope

One can just hope that some day soon someone – anyone – in charge of cultural or educational politics recognizes this and supports the museum in at least taking care of the most pressing external matters neither staff nor public can be reasonably expected to deal with.

The facade is crumbling all over – not just on the stairs the museum’s employees just replaced with a temporary fix. The way things stand, like Nardina’s installation the wooden stairs will likely become another example of the Permanence of Temporariness in modern day Bosnia. Neither the people of Bosnia and Hercegovina nor the staff of the Historical Museum deserve this.

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Photos: balkanstories.net, Historical Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina

_{This piece has also been published in translation on Lupiga and was originally commissioned by Punkura*.}