Srebrenik Fortress

No surviving source gives the year Srebrenik was built or names the man who built it. The earliest record that mentions the place is a charter issued by Ban Stephen II Kotromanić to Ragusa in 1333. The fortress occupies a steep, almost inaccessible rock on the north-eastern slopes of Majevica, in the village of Gornji Srebrenik about five kilometres from the town centre, above the valley of the Tinja; a deep trench was cut beneath its most approachable side, leaving a small bridge as the only way in. It is known locally as Gradina.

The rock stands some fifty to seventy metres above the ground around it, and there is about thirteen metres of height between the lowest point, at the third tower, and the highest, on the palace. The whole of it went up in a single build — four towers, a bailey, a cistern and a residential block with a cellar packed onto a platform of roughly 60 by 30 metres. The ramparts and the outer walls of the towers and the bailey, which together made the defensive shell, are about a metre and a half thick; every wall inside them is thinner. Seventeen metres out from the entrance, beyond the trench and south-east of the gate-tower, stands the ruin of a detached square tower seven metres to a side.

The rock sat on what were then important military roads, and that position made it a strategic stronghold. In 1363 Louis I of Hungary sent an army into Bosnia under his palatine Nicholas Kont; it took heavy losses beneath Srebrenik.

Srebrenik fell to Hungary in 1393 during the campaign of King Sigismund of Luxembourg, and Hungarian expeditions into Bosnia grew frequent afterwards. The fortress changed rulers several times over the following decades, the Hungarians taking it again in 1405, 1408 and 1410. It was then granted as a gift to the Serbian despot Stefan Lazarević, while continuing to serve as a Hungarian garrison.

Bosnian rule was restored briefly in 1433 under King Stephen Thomas. By 1452 Đurađ Branković, Stefan Lazarević's nephew, had seized it and handed it back to the Hungarians.

In 1462 the Ottomans took Srebrenik along with the rest of the župa of Usora, and the following year the Bosnian kingdom itself was brought down. Failures of logistics and an epidemic forced the Ottoman army to withdraw, and Matthias Corvinus retook the fortress.

To improve the defence against further Ottoman attacks, Matthias created the Banate of Srebrenik in 1464 and granted it to Nicholas of Ilok, later titular king of Bosnia. When the Ottomans returned is not recorded; somewhere between 1510 and 1519 they took the banate and installed their own garrison in the fortress.

With the Ottoman frontier pushed outward after Mohács, Srebrenik saw very little military activity down to the Treaty of Karlowitz, and was either abandoned outright or left with only a small garrison; its damage went unrepaired. The castle belonged to the nahiya of Smoluća, whose prince was Vlatko, son of Vladimir, a man with eight sons of whom three converted to Islam. The Vlachs of the principality belonged to the settlements of Gnojica, Miričina, Kruševica, Gornja Smoluća, Puračić, Gornja Lukavica, Srednja Smoluća, Donja Smoluća, Devetak, Dobošnica and Čitluk; across the whole principality there were 153 Christian households and 63 Muslim ones.

As Ottoman borders shrank in the 18th century the fortress regained its strategic importance. Austrian spies reported only that Srebrenik was an old fortress, offering no description; by then it was in dire need of repair. Work was done more than once, the first as early as 1756, though its circumstances and results went unrecorded. The last soldier walked out in 1835 and the place was left largely empty thereafter; only the mosque the Ottomans had built in the early 16th century was still kept up in the years that followed.

Srebrenik was thoroughly conserved between 1975 and 1978, and a solid new bridge to the entrance was built in 2003; the fortress today carries no major damage. On 2 November 2004 Bosnia and Herzegovina's KONS commission designated it a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina, under session number 05.2-2-246/04-2.