Sarajevo is the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the mountains of southeast Europe. Two famous, terrible things happened there, and students sometimes pour them into one story. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot in the street; that murder helped start the First World War. About eighty years later, in the 1990s, during the Bosnian War, Bosnian Serb forces surrounded the city and held it under siege: people could not leave, and food and goods could not easily get in. Much of the city was smashed by shells. The fighting then was between groups who had lived in the same country — including Serbs and Bosnian Muslims — and Sarajevo, a mixed city, sat in the middle of that pain. Though actually, the city is far older than those two wars: it grew as an Ottoman town, and the name still remembers a palace on a plain. Today it is a living capital again, not only a war story, but those years are why many people outside the region first heard the name.