Four days in Sarajevo: the street where the Ottoman city turns Austrian

Start in the middle of the bazaar, at the wooden fountain on the pigeon square. It was put up in 1753 and moved to this spot in 1891 by an Austrian architect who liked it enough to keep it, which is the entire history of the city in one object. The water is drinkable and the local line is that anyone who drinks it comes back.

The streets around it are still organised by trade, as they have been since the fifteenth century: coppersmiths in one lane hammering shell casings into coffee pots, gold in another, leather in a third. It takes twenty minutes to walk and half a day to potter.

The great mosque is a minute west. Gazi Husrev-beg was the Ottoman governor who effectively built this city, and his mosque of 1531 is the finest classical Ottoman building outside Turkey, with a domed prayer hall, a courtyard fountain and a graveyard containing his tomb. It was deliberately shelled in the 1990s and reopened in 2002. Non-Muslims are welcome outside prayer times; cover shoulders and knees, and there are scarves at the door.

Then a small museum in a domed sixteenth century silk market, which lays out the whole story of the city from the Romans to the present in one room with a model of the old town in the middle, and afterwards, coffee. The courtyard of the caravanserai north of the bazaar has been serving travellers since 1551 and still does, under a wooden gallery where the rooms were.

Dinner is cevapi. There is no alternative on your first night here and you would not want one.

Walk west along Ferhadija until the cobbles stop and the paving starts. That junction is the line where the Ottoman city was left to stand and the Habsburgs began building their own, and the four buildings this morning are all within a few minutes of it.

The Old Orthodox Church is the oldest of them, first mentioned in Ottoman records in 1539 and built low and half-sunken because non-Muslim buildings were not permitted to rise above their surroundings. The interior is a dark box of carved wood and gilt icons, and the treasury upstairs is one of the richest Orthodox collections in the region.

Five minutes away, the Old Temple of 1581 was built for the Sephardic Jews who came here after the expulsion from Spain and made this one of the great Sephardic cities of Europe. It is now the Jewish museum, and it tells four centuries of a mostly good story before the floor that deals with 1941 to 1945.

Then the Catholic cathedral, neo-Gothic, begun in 1884 and modelled on the cathedral at Dijon, with the statue of Pope John Paul II outside and a pockmarked square in front where several of the shells that fell on the city have been filled with red resin. Sarajevo has hundreds of these roses in its pavements, and once you have seen one you cannot stop seeing them.

In the evening, go up. The twisted glass tower west of the centre has a bar on the thirty fifth floor and an open walkway two floors above it, and from up there the shape of the valley and the ring of hills around it makes immediate, uncomfortable sense.

This is the hard day, and it is best done in one go rather than dripped through the trip.

Start at the tunnel. By 1993 the city was completely encircled; the airport was in United Nations hands and could not be crossed, so over four months two teams dug towards each other from a house on either side of the runway and met in the middle. What they made was 800 metres long, about 1.5 metres high, unlit and often flooded, and for the rest of the siege it was the only way in or out of Sarajevo. Food, weapons, fuel, wounded people and the president all went through it, bent double. Twenty five metres of it survive under the house at the far end, along with the trolleys and the wooden props.

Coming back, the road you travel is the one that was called Sniper Alley: a long straight boulevard overlooked from the hills, which people crossed at a sprint for four years while the international press watched from a hotel halfway along it.

In town, two small museums finish the picture, and they are both better than the state-run one. The gallery on Ferhadija covers Srebrenica in July 1995, when 8,372 men and boys were killed, through the work of the journalists who uncovered it; allow an hour and a half and take the audio guide, because there are no captions on the walls. The other collects ordinary objects that belonged to children who grew up under the siege, a shoe, a diary, a violin, each with a few lines from the person who kept it. It sounds slight. It is the most powerful room in the city.

Then go and have a drink somewhere loud. Everybody here does exactly that.

Two buildings at the eastern end of the river, ten minutes apart, and then a bus.

The city hall is the striped, arcaded, unmistakably Moorish building at the mouth of the gorge, built by the Austrians between 1892 and 1894 in a style they thought suited their new Muslim subjects. It later became the national library. On the night of 25 August 1992 it was hit with incendiary shells and burned for three days, and something like two million books and manuscripts went with it; people formed a human chain under fire to carry out what they could. It reopened in 2014 after two decades of restoration, and the atrium under the stained glass is worth the ticket on its own.

Downstream is the Latin Bridge. On the corner beside it, on 28 June 1914, a nineteen year old shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and the small museum in the building on that corner covers the forty years of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo that ended in that moment. It is one room and it takes half an hour, and standing on the pavement outside it afterwards is the point.

Then a last coffee in the bazaar, slowly, in a copper pot, the way it should be.