Although I’ve been referring to it as Bosnia, the country’s official name is Bosnia and Herzegovina (usually abbreviated here as BiH). I wondered why the country has such an awkwardly long name, and discovered that it’s not a recent invention. The name actually goes back to pre-Ottoman times. The Herzegovina region occupies about a quarter of the country; it’s located on the southern tip. Back in 1448, the duke Stjepan Vukčić Kosača ruled the region and he gave himself the German title of Herzog. When the Ottomans conquered the territory in the early 1450s, it became Herzegovina, which really just means “the land of the duke”.
The name Bosnia comes from the Bosna River.
BiH became part of Yugoslavia after WWII, but reclaimed its name after they broke away from Yugoslavia (and then suffered through a brutal civil war and genocide in the 1990s, but we’ll get to that later).
It’s a country occupied by Bosnians who are mostly Muslim, Croats who are mostly Catholic, and Serbians who are mostly Orthodox. The country actually has three presidents, one to represent each of these three groups. Religiously unaffiliated people are essentially unrepresented. It’s awkward and unwieldy, much like the country’s name, but, hey, many of us live under awkward government systems, do we not?
September 19, 2025