Professor Holm Sundhaussen's Sarajevo is a masterful, eminently readable survey history of the city from its founding in the fifteenth century to the early 2010s. The reader quickly senses that this is a labor of love, the work of an author long familiar with and fascinated by the city but committed to a rigorously objective account of its controversial past. His account dwells primarily on the city's culture, religious organization, architecture, economy, and everyday life. Political history is limited to a concise summary of the governing system established by each new regime, an appropriate allocation of attention given that the labyrinthine progression of mayors, monarchs, viziers, bans, and presidencies has been amply described by other authors.

Although it has no overarching thesis, the book is held together by the author's special attention in each chapter to the evolution of the religious and national life of the Bosnian Muslims (the group known since 1993 as the Bosniaks). In these sections of each chapter, Sundhaussen carefully distinguishes between the religious community of Muslims and their cultural and national life, enabling him to trace the group's gradual evolution from a religious community in Ottoman times to a fully recognized political nation in the late twentieth century. He provides a running account of the various factions that formed among the Bosnian Muslims, most of them characterized by greater or lesser acceptance of secularization and Western cultural influences.

In the first chapter, the author considers at length the city's four centuries under Ottoman administration. Sarajevo was founded in the fifteenth century by high Ottoman officials driven by a combination of religious devotion, fealty to the empire's urbanization policies, the Ottoman army's need for goods and services, and the exigencies of everyday life in the growing town. Although the faith mandated Muslims to pursue wars of conquest in non-Muslim lands, Islamic principles also required that those of other faiths be treated well once an area was conquered. Paradoxically, religious separation facilitated an all-pervasive tolerance in the city's first centuries, as different religious communities occupied niches of life in the city in accord with prescribed Ottoman practices. The chapter describes architectural achievements, demographic changes, religiously inspired practices, as well as obscure oddities—we learn, for instance, of a certain Sarajevo water closet, “the first of its kind in Europe” (36) damaged during the Bosnian war of the 1990s but now restored and identified by a modest historical marker.

Chapters two, three, and four are briefer than chapter one and consist mainly of summaries of the dramatic and rapid changes of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. One could wish for more, but brevity also brings out the author's impressive ability to synthesize material and capture major trends in concise summary statements. In each of the last three chapters, the author remains true to his commitment to provide a running account of factional alignments among the Bosnian Muslims and their rising group cohesiveness on the road from a nationally indifferent religious community to a secular political nation.

The author gives a glowing account of the Winter Olympic Games hosted by the city in 1984, but he also notes it was a high point from which began the gradual descent that culminated in the war and siege of the early 1990s. In the final chapter, “Post Yugoslav Sarajevo” (309), Sundhaussen's account turns melancholy as he chronicles the death and destruction wrought by the Bosnian war and the only partially successful efforts to reconstruct and revive the city in the years after the conflict.

Sundhaussen is judicious in drawing conclusions from the mountain of empirical evidence he cites, and he left many historical debates well-summarized but unresolved. He was not an historical polemicist, but preferred to synthesize, highlight, condense, and summarize in order to make Sarajevo's history readily accessible to the broad reading public. Relevant footnotes and an impressive bibliography attest to the author's familiarity with the vast secondary literature. In addition to standing firmly on scholarship cited in footnotes, the work is the culmination of the author's decades of research and personal experiences in dogged pursuit of a fuller understanding of the city's past.

Holm Sundhaussen passed away in February 2015. He left behind a lifetime of fine scholarship, dedicated teaching, and warm collegiality. This work on Sarajevo is a fitting valedictory contribution to the field and a worthy tribute to the man and his lifetime commitment to better understanding the Western Balkans.