Banja Luka

Banja Luka sits on the Vrbas where the river leaves the hills for the plain, and its centre is arranged around the Kastel, a fortress on the riverbank whose foundations go back to Roman occupation and whose walls are largely Ottoman, now used as a park and event space. The Ferhat Pasha mosque of 1579, one of the finest of its period in the region, was destroyed in 1993 and rebuilt stone by stone using recovered fragments, reopening in 2016. The city is known for its greenery, with long avenues of chestnuts and limes, the Gospodska pedestrian street, and the Vrbas itself used for rafting and swimming a short way upstream.

History

Stone tools of the late Palaeolithic and the remains of a Baden culture settlement have been found within the Kastel fortress, where the Romans, who took the area under Germanicus early in the 1st century AD, kept a fort called Castra that grew into a town on the Salt Road built around 20 AD from Salona to Servitium. Slavs settled in the region in the 6th century, a castellan of Banja Luka is named in a document of 6 February 1494, and the town fell to the Ottomans in 1528; it became the seat of the Sanjak of Bosnia before 1554, and between 1579 and 1587 Ferhad Pasha Sokolović built a commercial quarter here (Wikipedia, Banja Luka).

What's there

• The Kastel - the riverside fortress and its walls.
• Ferhat Pasha mosque - the rebuilt sixteenth-century mosque.
• Gospodska street - the pedestrian centre and its cafes.
• The Vrbas - the river running through the city.

When to go

May to September for the river and the outdoor life; the city is hot in July and August. Rafting on the Vrbas runs through the summer. Winter is grey and damp.

Before you go

Much of the centre is postwar and later rebuilding rather than historic fabric. Museums are provincial in scale. Summer heat in the valley is heavy. The city is a base for the Vrbas canyon rather than a destination in itself.

Nearby

The Vrbas canyon runs south; Krupa na Vrbasu is upstream.

Key facts