Hello Interested Historian!
I know you may be interested in Visoko's history but this is a quick summary without too much info. I like to simplify things and make it easy to understand, and it ends with a cool story bro.
Visoko (pronounced [ve or we-so-co]) is a city located in the Zenica-Doboj Canton of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. BiH or Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into 2 separate entities Federation, Republic Of Serbia, and neutral Brcko District. We are representing the Federation.
📊 Population (2013)
City: 39,938
Density: 80/km2 (206/sq mi)
Urban: 11,205
The 1991-1995 War
We had a war that happened between 1991-1995 courtesy of Yugoslavia splitting up, now they wanted to take the land from us, the Chetniks did but we said no, we like our land the way it is, and we got this.
When you walk around the city you will see shelling’s, craters or damaged buildings, a lot of lives were lost. Looking at the data there was a total of 422 victims that were documented:
Victims Breakdown:
128 civilians
294 military combatants
Ethnicity:
Bosnians: 326
Serbs: 83
Croats: 11
Others: 2
The war ended courtesy of the Dayton Peace Agreement which was signed in Dayton Ohio in 1995. They divided us up to stop the bloodshed.
First Traces & Medieval State
The Visoko region has evidence of long continuous occupation, with the first traces of life dating back to the 5th millennium BC. Archaeological excavations of Okolište have found one of the biggest Neolithic settlements of the Butmir culture in southeastern Europe. We go back, started from the Neolithic settlement and now we here.
It was an early political and commercial center of the Bosnian medieval state, so just think Game of Thrones without Dragons, and the site where the first Bosnian king Tvrtko I was crowned. The Old town Visoki, located on Visočica hill, was a politically important fortress, and its inner bailey Podvisoki was an early example of a Bosnian medieval urban area. That is close to my 'hood'. After the fall of the Kingdom of Bosnia, medieval Visoko grew as an Ottoman town. A key role in its development was played by the local Bosnian Ajas-pasha.
👑 Ajas-pasha (? - died 1486)
Ajas-pasha (died 1486) was a prominent Ottoman military commander and statesman who served as the Sanjak-bey of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 15th century. He said, "I got this" He is particularly famous for funding public works that laid the urban and economic foundations of modern Visoko. He is a big deal.
The Austro-Hungarian Era & Leather Trade
Ottoman rule ended in 1878 when the Bosnian Vilayet was occupied by Austria-Hungary. On 11 November 1911, in the last years of Austro-Hungarian rule, it was almost completely burned down by an accidental fire. Accident? I doubt it, Before the Bosnian War, Visoko was the largest exporter of textile and leather in socialist Yugoslavia.
💡 Local Hack: Pecenica Sandwich, If you are hungry and strapped for cash, get you some pecenica, at the butcher shop fresh and stop by the bakery for bread, head to the market, put some Kajmak on it, and you will say "Alaihmanet" or bye to hunger.
Read Explanation →
📐 Modern Tourism
As of 2006, Visoko attracts tens of thousands of tourists every year, mainly because of Semir Osmanagić's claims. If you do not believe him go see him.
The official Visoko Coat of Arms badge displayed in the header layer is utilized here strictly under non-commercial, informational, and educational parameters. Source file asset courtesy of Wikimedia Commons contributor Kebun, distributed securely under the public guidelines of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license framework.