Sarajevo - Etymology

Etymology

The earliest known name for the region of today's Sarajevo is Vrhbosna.

Sarajevo is a slavicized word based on saray, the Turkish word for the governor's palace. The letter Y does not exist in the Bosnian version of the Latin alphabet. The "evo" portion may come from the term Saray Ovası first recorded in 1455, meaning "the plains around the palace". However, in his Dictionary of Turkish loanwords in the former Serbo-Croat language (spoken by Bosnians, Croatians and Serbians), "Turcizmi u srpskohrvatskom jeziku", Abdulah Škaljić maintains that the "evo" ending is more likely to have come from Slavic ending "evo", found in many other Slavic place names, such as Smederevo, Kraljevo, Mirijevo, etc., than from the Turkish ending "ova", as proposed by some.

Sarajevo has had many nicknames. The earliest is Šeher, which is the term Isa-Beg Ishaković used to describe the town he was going to build. It is a Turkish word meaning an advanced city of key importance (şehir) which in turn comes from Persian شهر shahr (city). As Sarajevo developed, numerous nicknames came from comparisons to other cities in the Islamic world, i.e. "Damascus of the North". The most popular of these was "European Jerusalem".

Some argue that a more correct translation of saray is government office or house. Saray is a common word in Turkish for a palace or mansion; a fortified government office, or house, would still be called a saray, if it maintained the general look of an office. Otherwise it would be called kale (castle).