Interpreting post-conflict values: conservation decision-making for Bosnian war-damaged manuscripts from the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract

Abstract The destruction of libraries and archives is not an original tactic in warfare, but the result remains the same: the crippling of enemy morale by sabotaging their cultural achievements. After the Bosnian War (1992–1995), the Sarajevo Oriental Institute’s collection of 200,000+ Ottoman-era manuscripts was reduced to just 105 volumes. In November 2022, conservators at the Gazi Husrev-begova Library began a campaign to conserve the remaining manuscripts. Establishing these objects’ historical and current social, artistic, academic and economic values allows conservators and stakeholders to make ethically based treatment decisions that underpin a collaborative and mutually agreeable reconstruction effort. This article presents the preliminary findings of research into the usefulness of value assessments as a basis for conservation decision-making for war-damaged and war-affected objects. It will focus on the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency’s system for collection valuation in determining the values associated with one of the 105 surviving volumes from the Oriental Institute.