Josip Vancaš (22 March 1859 – 15 December 1932) was an Austro-Hungarian and Yugoslav architect who spent most of his career in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo, where he designed over two hundred buildings.

[1] For one year Vancaš worked in the offices of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer, then graduated in 1883 at the Art Academy in Vienna under the supervision of Friedrich von Schmidt, expert in medieval architecture, from whom he adopted an eclectic historical style.

On 29 June 1914, Vancaš was one of the speakers addressing the crowd that later vandalized and looted Serb-owned property in Sarajevo during the unrest after Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria.

Working on various projects financed mostly by the Croatian Government, Vancaš became known alongside Herman Bollé as the most important designer of sacred buildings in Croatia in the last decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

[5] He also achieved great work in the area of the then Carniola province (central part of present-day Slovenia), where he built churches in Bled, Prečna and Mirna Peč, and a number of buildings in Ljubljana.