Why Travnik was the capital of Bosnia

Travnik was the capital of Bosnia because the Ottoman viziers who governed the province chose to rule from here, and they did so for roughly a century and a half, from 1699 until 1850. That is the whole reason a town of about 15,000 people, squeezed into the narrow valley of the Lašva river, has a fortress on the hill, a street of old tombs, and a place in a Nobel Prize-winning novel.

Why the viziers came here

At the end of the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire was losing ground in the Great Turkish War. Before that war, the Eyalet of Bosnia had stretched well into what is now Croatia, taking in most of Slavonia, Lika and Dalmatia. After it, the province was pushed back towards the borders that roughly match today's Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Habsburg armies had shown they could reach deep into the country. Sarajevo had been burned in 1697.

Travnik made sense as a seat of government. It sits in central Bosnia, about 90 kilometres west of Sarajevo, in a valley that is easy to defend, with Vlašić mountain rising behind it and an existing fortress already watching over the road. For a governor running a frontier province of more than 50,000 square kilometres, that combination of a central position and protection counted for a lot.

What being a capital left behind

The most obvious trace is the Stari Grad fortress, a medieval town-fortress complex that locals still simply call the old town. It predates the viziers, but their long stay is part of why it remained important.

Then there are the vizier tombs. Governors who died in office were buried here, and the domed turbe (mausoleums) in the centre of town are a quiet reminder that this was where the empire's men in Bosnia lived, worked and sometimes ended. You find the same tradition in the wider area. The village of Turbe, a short way up the valley, takes its name from just such a tomb, and Ismail dedino turbe there is still visited today.

The third trace is less visible but just as important: the consulates. Because the vizier sat in Travnik, foreign powers who wanted to deal with Bosnia had to send their representatives here. During the Napoleonic period, French and Austrian consuls lived in this small town, watching each other and trying to read a court they barely understood.

Andrić and Consular Times

That world of rival consuls is the subject of Bosnian Chronicle (Travnička hronika) by Ivo Andrić. The novel is set between 1807 and 1814, and its subtitle is Consular Times. Andrić was born in Travnik, and his writing dealt mainly with life in Bosnia under Ottoman rule. In 1961 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

For a visitor, the book is the best possible preparation. It is not a guidebook, and Andrić was writing fiction, but it captures something you can still feel in the town: the sense of a provincial place where far bigger powers kept bumping into each other. If you live here, it is worth rereading to notice how many of the places he describes are still recognisable.

The end of the capital years

By 1850 the seat of government had moved back to Sarajevo, and Travnik's time as the capital was over. The town did not disappear. It remains the administrative centre of the Central Bosnia Canton, with a municipality of over 50,000 people, so it still has a governing role, just a regional one.

Seeing it for yourself

The natural starting point is the Zavičajni muzej Travnik, the local history museum on Mehmed-paše Kukavice street, which puts the town's Ottoman centuries into context. From there, walk up to the fortress for the view down the valley that explains, better than any paragraph, why governors felt safe here.

The capital years were not only an Ottoman story. A short drive away, Franjevački samostan Guča Gora, the Franciscan monastery, reflects the Catholic communities who lived in the same province under the same viziers.

Afterwards, do what people in Travnik have always done. Sit down for a Bosnian coffee, and try the white cheese in brine that villagers from Vlašić used to carry down to sell in the town market. Elsewhere it is called Vlašić cheese, but because it was sold here, it is also known simply as Travnik cheese. It is a small, edible reminder that for a long time, if you wanted to do business in Bosnia, this is where you came.