Sarajevo's City Hall Was Built Around a Bag of Gold
An old man named Benderija refused to let the empire knock down his house. They moved it across the river instead, brick by brick.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Sarajevo after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, it set about turning a tangle of Ottoman streets into something that looked like the empire. The centerpiece was a new City Hall, the Vijecnica, on the south bank of the Miljacka river. Surveyors marked out the lot in the early 1890s. One of the houses on it belonged to an elderly man known in the records only as Benderija, and Benderija would not sell.
The negotiations dragged. The empire could have condemned the property; it didn't. Instead it accepted the old man's terms. He wanted a bag of gold coins, and he wanted his house — every wall, beam, and tile — moved to the opposite bank of the river and put back together. In 1895 the workers did exactly that, numbering each stone before it was lifted. The Vijecnica opened the next year on the cleared site, with the relocated house visible from its windows.
The Bosnian word inat doesn't translate cleanly. It's a defiance with no useful goal — saying no for the sake of saying no, holding a position past the point of advantage. The house has been called Inat Kuca, the Spite House, ever since. It's been a restaurant since 1997, serving traditional Bosnian food on the bank Benderija negotiated his way to. The Vijecnica burned in 1992 during the siege and has since been rebuilt. The Spite House did not need rebuilding. It had already been moved once.
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