Travnik

The Travnik area was settled in the Bronze Age and has links with the Roman colony at today's Zenica, 30 kilometres away. In the Middle Ages it was the župa of Lašva, a province of the Bosnian Kingdom, and the castle above the town was built in the late 14th or early 15th century, probably under the kings Tvrtko II or Ostoja, as one of several fortresses meant to stop the Ottoman advance. It was built too late. After the conquest much of the local population converted to Islam, and the Ottomans expanded the castle into a fortress with watchtowers.

Travnik's great period began in 1699, after Prince Eugene of Savoy's soldiers set Sarajevo on fire. The town became the capital of the Ottoman province of Bosnia and the residence of its viziers until 1850, an important centre of government for the empire's whole western frontier, where France and Austria opened consulates. That world of viziers and consuls in the Napoleonic era is the setting of Ivo Andrić's novel Travnik Chronicle, also known as Bosnian Chronicle.

Under Austria-Hungary the town gained industry but lost importance, and a fire started by a spark from a locomotive in September 1903 destroyed most of its buildings. Travnik grew slowly while Sarajevo and Zenica expanded: in 1991 it had about 30,000 people. During the 1990s war it largely escaped fighting with Serb forces and took in refugees from Jajce, but local Bosniak and Croat forces fought each other in the area until the Washington Agreement of 1994. After the war it became the capital of the Central Bosnia Canton.

Travnik's heritage comes from its century and a half as the viziers' capital, and the town museum, built in 1950, is one of the most prominent cultural institutions in the region. The Šarena Mosque, painted inside and out after its reconstruction in 1816, is the central mosque of the Travnik muftiship, and Franciscan monasteries such as Guča Gora, founded in 1859, stand in the villages around.

Ivo Andrić, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961, was born in Travnik in 1892, and his birth house is now a small museum. His Travnik Chronicle made the town known to readers around the world, and a café by the Plava Voda spring appears in its pages.

Mount Vlašić shapes local identity as much as the old town. The Bosnian Tornjak, one of the country's two major dog breeds and a national symbol, originated in this area and can still be found around the mountain, and the brined sheep's cheese of its pastures carries the mountain's name.

About 15,000 people lived in the town at the 2013 census, and about 53,000 in the wider municipality, fewer than the 70,000 counted in the municipality in 1991. Travnik lies at about 514 metres in the long Lašva valley, which links the Bosna valley in the east with the Vrbas in the west, and the town stretches along the valley floor beneath its two mountains, Vilenica and Vlašić.

As capital of the Central Bosnia Canton, the town is the seat of the canton's government. The local economy suffered greatly in the war of the early 1990s. Tourism, like that of many Bosnian towns, rests largely on history and geography: the old town below the castle, and Vlašić, a popular spot for skiing, hiking and sledding.

The day revolves around coffee, the market and the evening walk through the centre, and weekends around the mountain, where skiing, sledding and hiking are popular.

Travnik is best known for Vlašić cheese, also called Travnik cheese: a brined, mostly low-fat white cheese made from sheep's milk on the mountain above the town, its texture and taste varying with the amount of brine it is kept in. It is sold with local smoked beef in specialist shops and at the town market.

Ćevapi are the everyday meal. The Bosnian version is made from minced beef, mixed by hand and shaped with a funnel, and served five to ten at a time in somun flatbread with chopped onion and kajmak, a creamy dairy product similar to clotted cream. Pies of thin, flaky dough — burek, sirnica with cheese and zeljanica with spinach — are sold across the town, and home cooking runs to stuffed peppers, sarma, grah, a bean soup, and goulash.

Sweets come from the Ottoman tradition: baklava, ružica, a baklava-like roll with raisins, and tufahija, a whole stewed apple stuffed with walnuts. Bosnian coffee, made from very finely ground beans and served unfiltered, is drunk throughout the day, often in the cafés by Plava Voda, and rakija, made from plums or apples, is the spirit.