Founded in the 1450s under Ottoman rule and always reborn after its many cycles of destruction, Sarajevo is best remembered as the site where Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in 1914 at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist agitator. The assassination triggered the First World War, the broader causes of which are still hotly debated by historians.  

 

During the wars that led to the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1992-1996, Sarajevo endured a siege of 1,425 days, surpassing the 872-day siege of Leningrad (modern-day St. Petersburg) in 1941-1944, laid by the German forces. During the siege, 11,541 people died, including more than 1,500 children (although shorter, Leningrad’s siege may have been the deadliest in history, causing an estimated 1.5 million deaths). 

 

Since then, Sarajevo has mostly faded from the news. Peace has reigned since the end of the war in 1996. And, in the relatively uneventful decades since, Turkey has built an enormous foothold in Sarajevo and, more generally, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By all appearances, the city has become the European capital of Turkey’s Neo Ottoman project. Turkish flags are a conspicuous presence, and the impression is reinforced by the green flag with the crescent moon and the star that represents the Islamic community of Bosnia, an exact calque of the Turkish flag in green, as opposed to red. 

 

This is the visible side of Neo-Ottomanism, the guiding principle of Turkey’s foreign policy under the regime of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. As articulated by Ahmet Davutoğlu, who served as Erdoğan’s foreign minister from 2009 to 2014, Turkey is a ‘central state’ (merkez ülke) as opposed to being a mere ‘bridge’ between East and West or a country whose relevance is limited to its role as a mere geographical crossroads. In Davutoğlu’s Neo-Ottoman perspective, the peoples and territories that were once part of the Ottoman Empire share in a core, Ottoman identity, which gives Turkey a pre-eminent role in this geography. He has even coined a word to describe this imaginary Neo-Ottoman community: tarihdaş, a compound word that can roughly be translated into English as a ‘friend, or companion, bound by history’ (from the Turkish word tarih, ‘history’ and the suffix -daş, which indicates fellowship or commonality, as in yoldaş, fellow traveller, from the stem yol: road). 

 

It is not a stretch to say that Turkey has largely managed to turn that vision into reality. Its armies and soft power extend all the way from Azerbaijan to Somalia and, as we discuss here, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In July 2025, Turkey created a new vehicle for pursuing Neo-Ottoman policies by setting up the Balkan Peace Platform. Under Turkey’s leadership, it is an informal consultative initiative, with the participation of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia. Remarkably, Serbia and Montenegro, both majority Orthodox Christian countries, have historically had inimical relations with Turkey and have been more closely aligned with Russia.

 

Interestingly, this Neo-Ottoman vision in Bosnia and Herzegovina does not have the economy as its main anchor. Turkey is not even among Bosnia’s top five trading partners, yet a visitor to Sarajevo, Mostar, or any other city with a Muslim majority could not be faulted for thinking that it is, and maybe that it has restored its status as an overlord. In addition to the ubiquitous flags, Turkish can be heard and read everywhere.

 

In other words, Neo-Ottomanism is a form of ideological, rather than economic imperialism. Simurg Media, a local group with ties to Mehmet Cengiz—a Turkish businessman close to Erdoğan—runs news outlets in Bosnia and Herzegovina that are close to the pro-Turkish ruling party, the Party for Democratic Action or SDA, by its Bosnian initials, a nationalist-islamist organisation which Turkish sociologist Dirim Özkan says ‘can be considered Neo-Ottomanist.’ The SDA’s leader, Bakir Izetbegović (the son of the late wartime Bosnian leader Alija Izetbegović) has called Erdoğan ‘my brother and friend.’

 

Yet tarihdaş or not, some Bosnians have begun to resent the Turkish ascendancy. Fahrudin Radoncić, a media magnate and presidential candidate who lost to Bakir İzetbegović, said, ‘I fought not only against Izetbegović, but also against Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in this election.’

 

Turkey’s Neo-Ottoman push is only natural. Modern Turkey was born as an empire with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Its very genesis is imperial. By desecrating St. Sophia again in July 2020 and reconverting it into a mosque, Erdoğan not only stressed Turkey’s Islamist identity (thus doing away with the long-enduring fiction that the country reconfigured by Mustafa Kemal was a ‘secular’ Muslim-majority country), but reaffirmed its conqueror character. After more than 600 years in these lands, the Turkish state treats the legacy of its mostly exterminated native nations—Greeks, Armenians, and Assyirians—with the prerogatives of recent conquerors, thus, curiously, re-alienating themselves from the very land they have occupied for six centuries. The Turkish rulers still behave like conquerors, not locals. 

 

For all this, there may be an element of truth in the idea that Muslims in the former Yugoslavia can be deemed Turkey’s tarihdaş, the proverbial ‘companions bound by history.’ Twentieth century literature corroborates this affinity too. In Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Rebecca West remarked on the excitement that a visit by then Turkish Prime Minister İsmet İnönü had aroused among Muslims, who had all worn their to welcome the Turkish official (and had been sorely disappointed by the cool reception they got from İnönü, in the ‘modern’ Turkey where fezzes had been banned). In his novel Bridge over the Drina, Bosnian-born Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić also memorably portrayed Muslims naturally siding with the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, their spirits rising and falling with the fortunes of its army in the battlefields. 

 

Yet surveys and polls can be misleading. Andrić (who was a friend of Princip and a revolutionary himself, who was arrested as a suspect over the assassination of the Archduke but eventually released in 1917 after no incriminating evidence was found against him) had written his PhD thesis at the University of Graz in 1924 on ‘The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Rule’ (‘Die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der türkischen Herrschaft’). “The effect of Turkish rule was absolutely negative,” he wrote. “The Turks could bring no cultural content or sense of higher mission, even to those South Slavs who accepted Islam.” 

 

As with everything else, only time will tell how the Neo-Ottoman project in Bosnia and Herzegovina will evolve. While writing may create the illusion of bringing clarity to the tumult of everyday life and decisions, that is how history, too, moves forward—in fits and starts, always ruled by the law of unintended consequences. That was, almost literally, the Serbian response to the ultimatum presented to Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 following the Archduke’s assassination: it followed a heated debate into the wee hours, with the Serbian response full of crossed out words, as the Serbs—caught between a rock and a hard place—debated how to respond within the 48 hours given by the imperial government in Vienna. That they were mostly conciliatory in their response did not prevent what was to come. History decided for them, and for as many as 22 million people who died in the First World War. 

 

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