The first newspaper to be published in Bosnia and Herzegovina was Bosanski vjestnik, a political-informative and educational weekly edited by Sopron and printed in Serbian Cyrillic.

Another weekly issued by the printing house was Sarajevski cvjetnik, which fiercely defended the Ottoman regime and polemicised with Serbian and Austrian newspapers that criticised it.

The Ottoman military intervened in the Eyalet of Bosnia in 1831 and 1850, crushing the local feudal lords, and the set of modernising reforms known as the Tanzimat began to be implemented in the province.

An improvement in this respect occurred in 1862, when the Bosnian Christians (Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats) were granted more rights, including those to open new churches and to run their own schools.

[4] The reforms became firmly rooted in Bosnia during the 1860s, when the Ottoman governor (vali) of the province was Topal Sherif Osman Pasha, though most of the changes proceeded at a slow pace.

At that time, the press in the Principality of Serbia and in South Slavic parts of the Austrian Empire sharply criticised the Ottoman regime in Bosnia.

Textbooks imported from Serbia for Serb elementary schools in Bosnia also disseminated nationalist sentiment,[5] which Osman Pasha saw as anti-Ottoman.

[3][6] Shortly after the Constitutional Law for the Vilayet of Bosnia was issued, Osman Pasha invited publishing magnate Ignjat Sopron to Sarajevo.

Sopron was the owner and manager of a publishing and printing house in Zemun (then part of the Austrian Empire, today one of the municipalities of Belgrade, Serbia).

Tomić was in charge of the Cyrillic and Latin letters, and he engaged three graduated students of the Serb secondary school in Sarajevo to be his trainees.

[8] The principal aim of the printing house was to issue an official gazette and to publish elementary school textbooks, thus stopping their import from Serbia and Austria.

[7] The Cyrillic orthography that was used in it was consistently in accordance with the linguistic reform of Serbian philologist Vuk Karadžić, which was at that time relatively new and still not universally accepted.

[9][10] The first issue of a political-informative and educational weekly newspaper named Bosanski vjestnik (Serbian Cyrillic: Босански вјестник, "Bosnian Herald") appeared on the same day.

The gazette was primarily concerned with publishing and explaining laws, orders, and proclamations, but it also provided news from the political, economic, cultural, and social life of the vilayet.

A constant in the gazette was its translator from Turkish, Miloš Mandić,[12] a polyglot who had previously worked as a teacher in a Serb elementary school in Prijepolje.

[7] In August 1866, the printing house published its first book, Lesson on Man and His Duties (Наравоученије о човеку и његовим дужностима), translated from Greek by Georgije Jovanović.

Four days later, General Josip Filipović, the Austro-Hungarian commander in Sarajevo, transferred the management of the printing house from Kadri-effendi to an Austrian official.

[12] Apart from the newspapers Bosanski vjestnik, Bosna, and Sarajevski cvjetnik, the Vilayet Printing House published around fifty books and booklets in Serbo-Croatian, Ottoman Turkish, and Hebrew.

[20] Bogoljub Petranović collected Bosnian Serb lyric folk poems and published them in 1867 in a separate book (Српске народне пјесме из Босне (Женске)).

[7][13] The First Bosnian-Serb Calendar for the Common Year 1869 (Први босанско-српски календар за просту годину 1869), consisting of 58 pages, was edited by Jovan R.

[22] It also included a collection of advice that was traditionally presented to journeymen during the testir ceremony of the guild of tailors in Sarajevo, in which a journeyman was promoted to a master craftsman.