A Balkan state of three peoples on a twenty-kilometre coast
Bosnia and Herzegovina sits on the Balkan Peninsula between Serbia, Montenegro and Croatia, touching the Adriatic along just 20 kilometres of shore. About 3.4 million people live there, chiefly Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, and a three-member presidency gives each of those peoples one seat at the top.
Most of the country is mountainous, especially the Dinaric Alps of the centre and east, with hot summers and snowy winters, while Herzegovina, the smaller southern region, is milder. Bosniaks make up about half the population, Serbs a third and Croats a sixth, and 17 national minorities are recognised, among them Jews, Roma and Albanians. Power is heavily decentralised, and the country has sought NATO membership as a candidate since 2010 and EU membership since 2022.
The name probably comes from the river Bosna, which one philologist traced to an Illyrian word linked to running water. Constantine VII's handbook De Administrando Imperio, written between 948 and 952, gives the earliest widely accepted mention of the land, as Bosona. Herzegovina means the duke's land, after the fifteenth-century magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača, who took the title Herceg of Hum and the Coast in 1448.
Badanj Cave near Stolac holds an engraving of what seems to be a horse, made around 13,000 to 12,000 BC, and the Butmir culture along the Bosna produced fine pottery and figurines between about 5100 and 4500 BC. The Illyrian Daors tribe ringed its capital Daorson with five-metre megalithic walls in the fourth century BCE. Rome's struggle with the Illyrians began in 229 BCE, and the Batonian revolt of AD 6 to 9 was among its hardest wars since the Punic conflicts.
Ostrogoths, Huns and Byzantines passed through before Slavs overran the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries. In the early twelfth century, caught between Hungary and Byzantium, Bosnia emerged as a banate under local bans, and Ban Kulin's reign opened the dispute over the Bosnian Church, which Rome branded heretical. Independence was proclaimed in 1992 as the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina; the 1995 Dayton Agreement and its constitution shortened the name.
Source: Bosnia and Herzegovina
