Bośnia i Hercegowina - dobra kultury w czasie wojny i pokoju

The state of Bosnia and I lerzegovina came into being as a result of the disintegration of Yugoslavia; at the same time, it remained one of the conflict-prone spots on the map of twentieth-century Europe. Up to the early 1990s Yugoslavia was a federation of states (Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina), and thus comprised a cultural, religious and national melting pot. The awakening of national consciousness in Bosnia and Herzegovina led to a referendum, due to which in 1992 the republic proclaimed its independence and turned into an arena of armed conflicts. In 1992-1995 the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina witnessed a war, whose victims included local cultural property. Despite a system of the protection of cultural property, constructed since the end of the Second World War (i.a. international conventions signed in 1954, 1970 and 1973, the establishment of subjects associated with the protection, registration and assessment of the state of the cultural heritage as well as the codification of national law), the war disclosed all its failings. The article analyses the damage suffered by Bosnian immobile monuments of culture (especially sacral architecture) and mobile monuments (archives, institutes, libraries storing old books, manuscripts, documents, etc.), and seeks the reasons for the losses suffered by cultural property and the unsatisfactory functioning of the mechanisms of the protection of cultural property during armed conflicts. Furthermore, the author outlined activity intent on the protection of cultural property in Bosnia and Herzegovina.