Oriental Institute in Sarajevo
Encyclopedia
The Oriental Institute in Sarajevo , its premises, research library and complete manuscript collection (more than 2,000 codices and 15,000 other archival material) was deliberately destroyed in shelling on May 18, 1992 by Serb forces around the besieged city of Sarajevo
. The Oriental Institute had clearly been singled out. According to interviews with eyewitnesses, the building had been hit with a barrage of incendiary munitions, fired from positions on the hills overlooking the town center. No other buildings in the densely built neighborhood were hit. The Institute, which occupied the top floors of a large, four-storey office block on the corner of Veljka Cubrilovica Street and Marshal Tito Boulevard (Sarajevo Centar municipality), was completely burned out, its collections destroyed.
The manuscript collection of the Oriental institute was one of the richest collections of Oriental manuscripts in the world. Those manuscripts were written over centuries in the wide areas of the East to serve as life manuals for the people all over the world.
Losses also included 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and local arebica
- (Bosnian in Arabic script), as well as tens of thousands of Ottoman-era documents.
Siege of Sarajevo
The Siege of Sarajevo is the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. Serb forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People's Army besieged Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 during the Bosnian War.After Bosnia...
. The Oriental Institute had clearly been singled out. According to interviews with eyewitnesses, the building had been hit with a barrage of incendiary munitions, fired from positions on the hills overlooking the town center. No other buildings in the densely built neighborhood were hit. The Institute, which occupied the top floors of a large, four-storey office block on the corner of Veljka Cubrilovica Street and Marshal Tito Boulevard (Sarajevo Centar municipality), was completely burned out, its collections destroyed.
The manuscript collection of the Oriental institute was one of the richest collections of Oriental manuscripts in the world. Those manuscripts were written over centuries in the wide areas of the East to serve as life manuals for the people all over the world.
Losses also included 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and local arebica
Arebica
Arebica or arabica was a variant of the Perso-Arabic script used to write the Bosnian language. It was used mainly between the 15th and 19th centuries. Before WWI there were unsuccessful efforts by Muslims to officially adopt Arebica as the third alphabet for Bosnian alongside Latin and Cyrillic...
- (Bosnian in Arabic script), as well as tens of thousands of Ottoman-era documents.