National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina to reopen

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo is set to reopen in September.

The announcement was made by the Minister of Culture and Sport of the Canton of Sarajevo, Samer Rešidat, who added that the authorities had reached an agreement regarding the way that cultural institutions are financed.

The museum has been closed to the public since October 2012, saved from disrepair only by volunteer museum guards working to conserve the exhibits.

“The institutions will be financed from all the levels of government, or the state, federal, cantonal, municipal and the city level. The Ministry of Culture and Sports of CS will take over most of the obligations when it comes to the payment of the accumulated debt as well as the financing in the future period,” said Mr Rešidat.

Following the inter-ethnic violent conflict of the 1990s, the National Museum struggled to gain funding as Bosnia and Herzegovina’s two semi-autonomous regions, the Republika Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation, diverted funding to promote their own culture and history.

Mr Rešidat lamented that this problem resulted from poor relations between branches of the government.

“The positive and encouraging thing is that the agreement was reached. We are still waiting for an answer from the Federal Ministry of Culture and Sports, but we hope that the human relationship towards these institutions will outweigh political goals,” concluded Mr Rešidat. He also added that the new agreement would solve the financial problems of six other cultural institutions.