Sarajevo fire may have destroyed state’s Ottoman archives - UK News | Online Newspaper | The Irish Times - Mon, Feb 10, 2014

Sarajevo fire may have destroyed state’s Ottoman archives - UK News | Online Newspaper | The Irish Times - Mon, Feb 10, 2014: "Sarajevo fire may have destroyed state’s Ottoman archives"

Director blames vandalism following protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Smoke billows from a burning government building in Sarajevo last Friday. Protesters across Bosnia set fire to government buildings and fought with riot police as long-simmering anger over lack of jobs and political inertia fuelled the country’s worst civil unrest since the 1992-1995 war. Photograph: Reuters/Antonio Bronic

Philip Oltermann

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Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 01:00

First published:Mon, Feb 10, 2014, 01:00

   

Some of the most important historical documents charting the history of central Europe in the 20th century are feared lost, after a fire at the state archives of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo.

The archive, which contains mostly documents from 1878 to 1918, when the Austro-Hungarian ministry of finance was in charge of Bosnia, but also older material from the Ottoman period and documents from the war crimes commission after the second World War, was targeted by protesters on Friday.

While staff have not been allowed to enter the building to assess the damage, historians are concerned that key documents have been lost in what archive director Adamir Jerkovic condemned as an act of vandalism.

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