[a][4] Located within the greater Sarajevo valley of Bosnia, it is surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of the Balkans, a region of Southeastern Europe.

[14] In 1914, Sarajevo was the site of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a local Young Bosnia activist Gavrilo Princip, a murder that sparked World War I.

Its source (Vrelo Miljacke) is 2 km (1.2 mi) south of the town of Pale[28] at the foothills of Mount Jahorina, several kilometers to the east of Sarajevo center.

The Bosna's source, Vrelo Bosne near Ilidža (west Sarajevo), is another notable natural landmark and a popular destination for Sarajevans and other tourists.

The Metropolitan area was reduced in the 1990s after the war and the Dayton-imposed administrative division of the country, with several municipalities partitioned along the border of the newly recognized Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) and Republika Srpska (RS), creating several new municipalities which together form the city of Istočno Sarajevo in the Republika Srpska: Istočna Ilidža, Istočno Novo Sarajevo, Istočni Stari Grad, Lukavica, Pale (RS-section), and Trnovo (RS-section), along with the municipality of Sokolac (which was not traditionally part of the Sarajevo area and was not partitioned).

It is nestled between Titova, Koševo, Džidžikovac, Tina Ujevića and Trampina Streets and in the lower part there is a monument dedicated to the Children of Sarajevo.

[37] Real-time air quality data in the form of PM10, ozone, NO2, CO and SO2 by the Federal Hydrometeorological Institute Archived 13 September 2018 at the Wayback Machine.

The ancient people, who considered most of the Western Balkans as their homeland, had several key settlements in the region, mostly around the river Miljacka and the Sarajevo valley.

The first Ottoman governor of Bosnia, Isa-Beg Ishaković, transformed the cluster of villages into a city and state capital by building several key structures, including a mosque, a closed marketplace, a hamam, a caravansarai, a bridge, and of course the governor's palace ("Saray"), which gave the city its present name in conjunction with “evo”, a derivative of “ova” meaning lowland.

In 1697, during the Great Turkish War, a raid was led by Prince Eugene of Savoy of the Habsburg monarchy against the Ottoman Empire, which conquered Sarajevo and left it plague-infected and burned to the ground.

The event that triggered World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, along with his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb and self-declared Yugoslav, and member of Young Bosnia.

After World War I and pressure from the Royal Serbian Army, alongside rebelling Slavic nations in Austria-Hungary, Sarajevo became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

Though it held some political significance as the center of first the Bosnian region and then the Drinska Banovina, the city was no longer a national capital and saw a decline in global influence.

Immediately following the occupation, the main Sephardi Jewish synagogue, Il Kal Grande, was looted, burned, and destroyed by the Nazis.

Within a matter of months, the centuries-old Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish communities of Sarajevo, comprising the vast majority of Bosnian Jewry, would be rounded up in the Old Synagogue (Stari hram) and deported to their deaths in Croatian concentration camps.

[52] In August 1941, they arrested about one hundred Serbs suspected of ties to the resistance armies, mostly church officials and members of the intelligentsia, and executed them or deported them to concentration camps.

The Vraca Memorial Park, a monument for victims of World War II, was dedicated on 25 November, the "Statehood Day of Bosnia and Herzegovina" when the ZAVNOBIH held their first meeting in 1943.

When the siege ended, the concrete scars caused by mortar shell explosions left marks that were filled with red resin.

The city has hosted travelers for centuries, because it was an important trading center during the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and because it was a natural stop for many routes between East and West.

It is nestled between Titova, Koševo, Džidžikovac, Tina Ujevića and Trampina Streets and in the lower part, there is a monument dedicated to the Children of Sarajevo.

According to academic Fran Markowitz, there are several "administrative apparatuses and public pressures that push people who might prefer to identify as flexible, multiply constituted hybrids or with one of the now unnamed minority groups into one of the three Bosniac-Croat-Serb constituent nations".

The need for a new airport in Sarajevo, with an asphalt-concrete runway, was acknowledged in the mid-1960s when JAT, the Yugoslav national carrier at that time, began acquiring jet planes.

Most of the communications and media infrastructure was destroyed during the war but reconstruction monitored by the Office of the High Representative has helped to modernize the industry as a whole.

However, this long-running and trusted newspaper has fallen behind Dnevni avaz (Daily Voice), founded in 1995, and Jutarnje Novine (Morning News) in circulation in Sarajevo.

In the time of Ottoman occupation of Bosnia, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Roman Catholics, and Sephardi Jews all shared the city while maintaining distinctive identities.

The Alija Izetbegović Museum was opened on 19 October 2007 and is in the old town fort, more specifically in the Vratnik Kapija towers Ploča and Širokac.

It continued into the 1980s, with bands such as Plavi orkestar, Crvena jabuka, and Divlje jagode, by most accounts, pioneering the regional rock and roll movement.

Songwriters and musicians such as Himzo Polovina, Safet Isović, Zaim Imamović, Zehra Deović, Halid Bešlić, Hanka Paldum, Nada Mamula, Meho Puzić and many more composed and wrote some of their most important pieces in the city.

Sarajevo is now home to an important and eclectic mix of new bands and independent musicians, which continue to thrive with the ever-increasing number of festivals, creative showcases, and concerts around the country.

[122] A talent campus is also held during the duration of the festival, with lecturers speaking on behalf of world cinematography and holding workshops for film students from across Southeast Europe.