The Siege Museum to be Built in Sarajevo

At a press conference on Thursday, the “Virtual FAMA collection – The Siege of Sarajevo” and “The Sarajevo Siege Museum – The Art of Living” projects were presented, and the construction of the Sarajevo Siege Museum announced.

“This virtual collection consists of 27 projects that were created on the theme of the Sarajevo siege between 1992 and 1996. All content is put together into a thematic design and presented in a virtual form”, said Miran Norderland, team leader of the virtual FAMA collection.

Virtual FAMA is the largest collection of projects about the siege of Sarajevo presented in state-of-the-art technology.

The collection, gathered over the past 20 years, contains over 1,000 interviews with around 450 people from Sarajevo, a survey about the survival in Sarajevo, over 10,000 text messages related to the period between 1991 and 1995, when Sarajevo was under siege by Bosnian Serb forces.

This collection also includes video material related to the siege of Sarajevo, as well as over three thousand pieces of visual information.

Dino Mustafic, director of the Consortium of the FAMA project, said that the Sarajevo Siege Museum should be built in the next two years, and that so far the first phase of the project has been finalised.

Suada Kapic, author of the FAMA project, emphasised that the Sarajevo Siege Museum is a “living organism“, and that people who survived four years of war in Sarajevo are the creators of a new civilisation.

“It is important that we tell the world that we survived in a situation where we were stripped of everything,” said Kapic.

The project is supported by the City of Sarajevo, as well as the Center Sarajevo municipality, which provided the land on which the Sarajevo Siege Museum will be built.

Miroslav Zivanovic, deputy mayor of Sarajevo, said that the Sarajevo Siege Museum would be a “new symbol of Sarajevo”.