Foča Old Town & Historic Centre

ABOUT THIS ATTRACTION

The old centre of Foča sits beside the Drina at the confluence with the Čeotina, on the ground where the town has stood since the Ottoman period. It was a riverside čaršija — a market quarter of mosques, traders’ workshops and stores arranged along the riverfront and the streets running back from it — and for centuries it was the commercial and religious heart of the town. The old centre is most defined by its mosques: the Aladža, the most celebrated, and a number of others that together made Foča one of the notable Ottoman towns of Eastern Bosnia. Most of that religious heritage was destroyed in the 1990s war, and the old centre today is a place where the long Ottoman history of the town and the difficult recent history of its destruction and rebuilding are visible together — in the reconstructed Aladža, in the sites of lost mosques, and in the surviving fabric of the riverside streets. For a visitor, the old centre is the heritage layer of Foča, read alongside the rivers that defined the town and the outdoor country that now draws most travellers to the region.