Tourists and guests from all over the world witness the beauty of Bosnia and Herzegovina every day, which captivates with its natural, cultural-historical, multicultural wealth. In the center of Sarajevo is the Gazi Husrev-bey library, which has been preserving the wealth of 16,907 manuscripts for half a century.
Gazi Husrev-bey’s library has recorded more than three thousand visits in recent months, and the most frequent visitors to the Museum of the Library are foreign tourists and that is through individual visits. The most interesting and most visited is the pavilion of manuscripts .
“Special attention is drawn to the oldest manuscript in the Library, which is the fourth volume of the famous theological-mystical work Ihya ulum ad-din by Abu Hamid Muhammed el-Ghazali (died 1111), which was copied in 1106, so during the author’s lifetime.” said librarian and reference librarian of the Library Adnan Ćurovac and Mustafa Berhamović .
Also, what is very interesting for tourists is a documentary film that can be viewed in the Museum of the Library entitled Love of Books : The Sarajevo Story, which tells about the rescue of the book collection of Gazi Husrev-bey’s library in the period 1992-1995.
“Visitors to our Book Museum leave mostly filled with good emotions, positive impressions , with an expression of gratitude to the Library and its employees for centuries of preservation of the history and cultural heritage of our homeland”, they pointed out.
However, they reminded, Gazi Husrev-bey’s library is visited by a large number of primary and secondary school students from Bosnia and Herzegovina during each school year , and there are other organized group visits, both from BiH and other countries.
In particular, they highlight the project that has been implemented for many years with the Municipality of Novi Grad Sarajevo, when more than 1,000 primary school students from the area of that municipality visit the Library in the course of two weeks.
Gazi Husrev-bey’s library currently has about one hundred thousand library items (manuscripts, printed books, magazines and various documents) in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Bosnian and some other European languages.
Of these, more than 10,500 library units consist of manuscript codices with about 20,000 major and minor works from Islamic sciences , oriental languages, fine literature, philosophy, logic, history, medicine, veterinary medicine, mathematics, astronomy and other sciences.
Source: radiosarajevo.ba
