Plateau Skenderija represents an iconic town square that connects all the objects of center Skenderija including the Youth House, Art Museum of Contemporary Art Ars Aevi, Economic city, Mirza Delibasic Hall and the Ice Hall.
In the area of 70,000 square meters there are multipurpose halls where various sports, cultural and trade events are organized throughout the year, as well as a modern shopping center “Privredni grad” with numerous shops, restaurants, coffee confectionery and similar.
Due to a lack of an exhibition and sports-centre within the fast expanding city of Sarajevo of the late 1960s, the city-community planned to build the new Skenderija-centre. It was opened on 29 November 1969 by hosting a première of the film Battle of Neretva.
The name Skenderija, which means “Skender’s place”, comes from the famous Bosnian bey Sandžak-beg Skender-paša, who build the first trading-centre with 11 shops and the first Muslim monastery of Bosnia from 1499. Soon the Skenderija was a well known and widely used centre for several cultural events of the former Yugoslavia. One part of the Skenderija is a youth club called “Dom mladih” (The Youth House). Before the Bosnian War of the 1990s, this was one of the modernist and most western styled clubs of Yugoslavia. It was a very popular place among young people, and big stars of Balkan pop-music, such as Dino Merlin, had started their careers here. Also a big shopping-mall is included in the centre, called “Privredni grad”.
In 1977, when Sarajevo was voted to host the 1984 Winter Olympics, they discovered that they needed more than only the brand-new building Zetra to host every figure skating and ice hockey event. So they started to reconstruct and expand the Skenderija into a real state-of-the-art ice-sports centre. It was also chosen as the centre for the representatives and press-reporters.
In 1992, when the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina started, the Skenderija was set under shell-fire. The main structure of the building survived without major damage, but the youth-centre was burned out and made unusable.
How this part of Sarajevo looks like one can see in the video here.
