Jajce (pronounced 'yaitse') is a medieval walled city of cobbled streets and old houses in hilly country on the main highway from Sarajevo to Zagreb, Croatia. Prior to the 15th-century Turkish conquest, Jajce was the seat of the Christian kings of Bosnia.
Often at the centre of conflict, Jajce was the short-lived capital of liberated Yugoslavia in 1943 and in October 1992, Serbian separatists brutally expelled 35,000 Muslims from this historic city, where they had previously been the largest ethnic group.
For hundreds of years, Sarajevo had been a place where Muslims, Serbs, Croats, Turks, Jews and others could peacefully coexist. Sadly this tradition of tolerance was pounded into rubble by Serbian artillery during the mid-1990s war; today, the city has heroically rebuilt itself.
)While over 10,000 people were killed and 50,000 wounded during the ferocious three-year siege, normal life has reasserted itself in Sarajevo. A small city with a global reputation, it's attracting ever more tourists, keen to explore a multicultural city where East and West merge.