Bosnia and Herzegovina

Bosnia and Herzegovina lies at the rugged center of the western Balkans, a country of forested mountains, emerald rivers, and the Ottoman bridges that have come to symbolize it. Heir to a deeply layered past where Catholic, Orthodox, and Muslim worlds meet, it is home to roughly 3.4 million people of three constituent nations, Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats. Sarajevo, its capital, famously hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics and just as famously endured the longest siege of any city in modern warfare, a tension between beauty and tragedy that defines the country.

The Dinaric Alps dominate the landscape, rising to Maglić at 2,386 meters on the Montenegrin border, and they are riven by spectacular karst rivers like the Neretva, whose green waters flow beneath the rebuilt Old Bridge of Mostar. A narrow Adriatic outlet at Neum gives the country its only stretch of coast. Dense forests cover much of the interior, sheltering bears and wolves, while the limestone terrain shapes dramatic gorges and the rafting rivers of Herzegovina. The climate shifts from Mediterranean in the south to continental in the highlands.

The medieval Kingdom of Bosnia fell to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, and four centuries of Ottoman rule left mosques, bazaars, and a substantial Muslim population. Austria-Hungary took control in 1878, and it was in Sarajevo in 1914 that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered the First World War. The breakup of Yugoslavia brought a devastating war from 1992 to 1995, ended by the Dayton Agreement, which created the complex federal structure that still governs the country today.

• Europe
  A small, intricate continent of outsized influence located in
• Croatia
  A crescent of Adriatic coastline, a thousand islands, and walled stone cities neighboring country
• Montenegro
  A small Adriatic land of black mountains and a fjord-like bay neighboring country
• Serbia
  A landlocked Balkan crossroads on the Danube, between empires and eras neighboring country