Geschichte von Travnik

A fortress first

Travnik begins with the castle on the ridge. The fortress is medieval and Bosnian, built before the Ottomans arrived, on a spur that controls the valley of the Lašva — which is the whole reason a town grew here rather than a few kilometres either side.

The vizier's town

From 1699 to 1850 Travnik was the seat of the Ottoman governors of Bosnia. For a century and a half the province was run from this small valley town, and everything that makes the old town worth walking dates from that stretch: the mosques, the covered bazaar, the clock towers, the tombs of the viziers who died in office.

It is an odd thing to stand in. The scale is domestic — you can cross the historic core in ten minutes — and the ambition written into it is not.

Consuls and chronicles

During the Napoleonic wars the great powers sent consuls to Travnik, and a provincial Ottoman town found itself hosting French and Austrian diplomats who did not want to be there. Ivo Andrić, born here in 1892, made that collision the subject of Bosnian Chronicle. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961.

Reading fifty pages of it before you visit is the single best preparation for the place. The town he describes is recognisably the town that is still here.

After the Ottomans

The vizier's seat moved to Sarajevo in 1850, and Austro-Hungarian administration followed in 1878. Travnik became a provincial town again, which is largely what preserved it — nobody had a reason to knock it down and start over.

The town now

Travnik today is a working town of schools, shops and offices with an extraordinary amount of history inside a very small area, and a mountain behind it that brings its own visitors for entirely different reasons.