SMArt Talks: Five Photographs for Franz Joseph –⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The Great Fire of 1879 and the Urban Transformation of Sarajevo

We are delighted to invite you to the second SMArt Talks lecture of the autumn semester, which will be delivered by Aida Murtić, joining Brno as a visiting researcher within the Visiting Research Fellowship program organised by the Centre for Modern Art & Theory. The lecture will take place on Tuesday, the 21st of October 2025, at the Hans Belting Library at 18:00.

Just one year after the transfer of power from Ottoman Empire to Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the great fire of 1879 destroyed nearly the entire commercial centre of Sarajevo. No other single event has so profoundly shaped the writing of the city’s urban history. Clearing the way for future regularisation strategies, the fire came to be seen as a rupture that divided time into “before” and “after,” separating studies of the urban form of the late Ottoman Sarajevo from those of its transformed fin-de-siècle condition. It has remained a persistent reference point in discussions of urban change, resurfacing whenever questions about the relationship between materiality and time are raised.

Ignaz Funk, a photographer present in Sarajevo during the fire, captured the collapse of the city’s old centre in a series of five photographs, which he directed to the highest authority in the empire: Emperor Franz Joseph. Likely intended for a limited audience, these photographs conveyed the scale of devastation directly to the imperial court. Yet as written reports of the fire began to circulate, Austria-Hungary’s image as a competent administrator of its new province came under pressure.

Using the fire of 1879 as a point of departure, this talk examines both immediate responses and longer-term reconstruction strategies. It demonstrates how the fire served as a catalyst for change, legitimising the adoption of new planning tools and instruments of administrative control over the city’s development, such as regulation plan and building code, in the aftermath. In contrast to Funk’s little-seen images of ruins, panoramic views showcasing the successful transformation of the former Ottoman cityscape would become recurring symbols of the Austro-Hungarian imperial consciousness.