Travel deep dive
Jajce and Travnik: A Royal Town and a Vizier Town
Central Bosnia holds two small towns that were each, in their time, the place Bosnia was ruled from. Jajce was a royal seat of the medieval Bosnian kingdom; Travnik was the residence of the Ottoman viziers who governed the province for a century and a half. Both lie two to three hours from Sarajevo, and between them they tell the country's story from the Middle Ages to Ivo Andrić, the Travnik-born writer whose novel “The Bridge on the Drina” is named after a bridge far to the east.
Updated 2026-09-19
Jajce: a waterfall in the middle of a medieval town
Jajce stands at the confluence of the Pliva and the Vrbas, and the meeting is the town's signature: the Pliva drops over a waterfall straight into the Vrbas below the old town, close enough to the streets that the falls are part of the townscape rather than an excursion from it. Above them, the old town climbs to a fortress on the hilltop, the core of a royal town that served as a seat of the Bosnian kingdom in the fifteenth century and held out as one of its last strongholds.
UNESCO carries the natural and architectural ensemble of Jajce on Bosnia and Herzegovina's tentative list, describing a town founded in the Middle Ages that took its final form in the Ottoman period. Beneath the old town lie the catacombs, a fifteenth-century underground structure from the royal town, and upstream the Pliva widens into lakes where small wooden watermills still stand on the rapids.
Travnik: the viziers' town
From 1699 to 1850 Travnik was the seat of the Ottoman viziers who governed Bosnia, and the old town still has the look of a small provincial capital: the colourful mosques the town is known for, painted houses and a fortress on the slope above. It is a quieter, more compact place than Sarajevo, which is exactly what makes the Ottoman layer so easy to take in on foot.
Ivo Andrić, from Travnik to the bridge at Višegrad
Ivo Andrić was born in Travnik in 1892 and received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. The town appears in his fiction, but “The Bridge on the Drina” takes its title from a bridge in the east of the country: the Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge at Višegrad.
That bridge was built between 1571 and 1577 for the Grand Vizier Mehmed Pasha Sokolović to a design by Sinan, the architect whose pupil built Mostar's Old Bridge, and its eleven stone arches still span the Drina. UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 2007. It lies well off the route between Jajce and Travnik, so it suits a separate journey east rather than an addition to a central-Bosnia day.