War Childhood Museum

The War Childhood Museum is a historical museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina that opened in January 2017. The museum presents the experiences of children who lived through the war in Bosnia, told through objects, video testimonies, and excerpts from oral histories. The 2018 Council of Europe Museum Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the museum industry, was awarded to the War Childhood Museum as part of the 2018 European Museum of the Year Award. The project began in 2010 when Jasminko Halilovic, a Sarajevan entrepreneur, activist, and "war child," used an online platform to collect short recollections of young adults who had been children during the Bosnian war. Over 1,000 young adults submitted their memories. Halilovic assembled these recollections into a book which was published in 2013. The book has subsequently been translated into German and Japanese. As Halilovic began corresponding with the young adults who submitted memories, he realized that many of the former "war children" still had specific objects that they connected with their memories.