[wzslider autoplay=”true”]On the northern edge of the mountain massif of Trebević, on the far hillside above the stone door of the Miljacka canyon where the Sarajevo field begins to expand towards the river Bosna, is Alifakovac, one of the oldest urban neighborhoods.
The road climbed to the Šejkova Korija, via Podcarina, beneath the turbe, down the steep slope to the Šeherćehaja’s bridge where, in the Middle Ages and earlier, existed a wade across the river Miljacka and a connection to the communication leading to the Pannonian plain in the north.
Along this ancient road a settlement, found by the Ottomans in the 15th century as abandoned, rose again.
Probably on the site of the cemetery of that older settlement, since the end of the 15th century, a vast Muslim cemetery with specific monuments – tombstones decorated like stećaks was created. Because of these ancient monuments, but also the turbe, this cemetery has always had a special place among Sarajevans.
As the Constantinople road was frequent at the time, the passengers-the emigrants whom the death would catch in Sarajevo-were also buried in that cemetery, in addition to the local residents.
“Alifakovac is named after a legal officer and groomer Alija Fakih, one of the witnesses of Isa Bey’s vakufnama from 1462, which conceived the city. Then there were certainly already houses on the stretch from the cemetery to the cave of Megara, and in 1491 the Bosnian sanjakbey Jakub pasha raised his mosque in Alifakovac. That’s when the neighborhoods and the streets emerged: Big and Small Alifakovac, Magoda, Megara and Carina.
In the 16th century, the Gazi Husrev-Bey’s intendant Hajji Mustafa Vekil-Harč also raises a mosque in the bottom of Alifakovac, and some mayor of Sarajevo unknown by name connected the Constantinople road with the Baščaršija square with a stone bridge.
Thus the today’s appearance of Alifakovac is mainly formed which, although in the last twenty years quite disturbed, is still a distinctive townscape of old Sarajevo. The former stepped architecture is somewhat preserved, and with the Spite House and Šeherćehaja bridge the area around the Vekil-Harč mosque is one of the most beautiful ambience units, an essential motive of the postcards of Sarajevo from the Austro-Hungarian period”, says the historian and archivist Velid Jerlagić.
(Source: radiosarajevo.ba)
