Sarajevo — Capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, occupies a narrow valley surrounded by mountains — the same mountains that made the city ideal for the 1984 Winter Olympics, and that provided cover for snipers during the siege of the 1990s. The city has been at the crossroads of empires: Ottoman from 1463 to 1878, then Austro-Hungarian until 1918. Those centuries of overlap gave Sarajevo its unique character, where an Ottoman bazaar called Baščaršija sits minutes from Austro-Hungarian-era boulevards.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie were shot dead on the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist. The assassination triggered a chain of ultimatums and declarations that became the First World War. The Latin Bridge remains one of the most historically significant spots on earth. A small museum on the corner marks the exact location of the shots.

Sarajevo earned the grim distinction of enduring the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. From April 1992 to February 1996 — 1,425 days — Serbian forces surrounded the city during the Bosnian War. Snipers fired on civilians in the streets; roughly 13,000 people were killed. The city's lifeline was a tunnel dug under the Sarajevo airport, known as the Tunnel of Hope (the D-B tunnel). Today it is preserved as the War Tunnel Museum.

Yet Sarajevo has always been more than its tragedies. The city claims the first electric tram in Europe, introduced in 1895, before any other European city. The Sarajevo Film Festival was founded in 1995, during the final months of the siege, as an act of cultural defiance, and has grown into one of Europe's major film festivals. Sarajevo is sometimes called the "Jerusalem of Europe" for the historic coexistence of mosques, Orthodox churches, Catholic churches, and synagogues within walking distance of each other — a coexistence that remains its proudest identity.