The Vilayet Printing House (Serbo-Croatian: Вилајетска штампарија/ Vilajetska štamparija), originally named Sopron's Printing House (Сопронова печатња, Sopronova pečatnja), was the official printing house of the Ottoman Vilayet of Bosnia from April 1866 until the occupation of the province by Austria-Hungary in August 1878. It was the second printing house that operated in the territory of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, founded in Sarajevo almost 350 years after the Goražde printing house ceased its activity. Its founder was Ignjat Sopron, a publisher and printer from Zemun, who sold the establishment to the Government of the Vilayet of Bosnia in October 1866. Its foundation happened in the context of modernising and Europeanising Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire. Its principal aim was to issue an official gazette of the vilayet and publish textbooks for the elementary schools of Bosnian Serbs and Croats, thus stopping their import from the Principality of Serbia and the Austrian Empire. The first newspaper to be published in Bosnia and Herzegovina was Bosanski vjestnik, a political-informative and educational weekly edited by Sopron and printed in Serbian Cyrillic. It had a pro-Serb inclination, though it generally promoted a unitary Bosnian nation, in accordance with the Ottoman policy in the province. The official gazette, the weekly Bosna, was primarily concerned with publishing and explaining laws, orders, and proclamations. Another weekly issued by the printing house was Sarajevski cvjetnik, which fiercely defended the Ottoman regime and polemicised with Serbian and Austrian newspapers that criticised it. Bosna and Sarajevski cvjetnik were bilingual, printed half in Ottoman Turkish and half in Serbo-Croatian in the Cyrillic script. The printing house produced a number of elementary school textbooks, including the second Serbian alphabet book using the reformed Serbian Cyrillic, following Vuk Karadžić's book published in Vienna in 1827. Other books include a collection of Bosnian Serb lyric folk poetry, an Ottoman Turkish grammar, and several Jewish religious books. The first printed exemplar of Bosnian Aljamiado literature was also published by the Vilayet Printing House. It produced around 50 books and booklets altogether, most of them being concerned with various Ottoman laws and legislation.
Background The Goražde printing house was one of the earliest among the Serbs and the first in the territory of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was founded by Božidar Ljubavić near the town of Goražde in 1519, in the early period of Ottoman rule over the region. It produced three Orthodox religious books, including the Goražde Psalter, with its last book printed in 1523. The next printing house would not be opened in Bosnia and Herzegovina until the second half of the 19th century. In the first half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire was swept by a wave of reforms meant to centralise and Europeanise the government of the state. Bosnian Muslim feudal lords rejected the reforms and repeatedly revolted against the Sultan. The Ottoman military intervened in the Eyalet of Bosnia in 1831 and 1850, crushing the local feudal lords, and the set of modernising reforms known as the Tanzimat began to be implemented in the province. The Christians were underprivileged in the Ottoman Empire, and this was even more so in Bosnia than in the rest of the empire. An improvement in this respect occurred in 1862, when the Bosnian Christians (Orthodox Serbs and Catholic Croats) were granted more rights, including those to open new churches and to run their own schools. This came after several uprisings by the Christians, especially Serbs, who had the strongest national movement in the province. Ivan Franjo Jukić and other Bosnian Franciscans requested the right to establish a printing house in 1847, 1850, 1853, and 1857, but each time their requests were denied by the Ottoman government. The reforms became firmly rooted in Bosnia during the 1860s, when the Ottoman governor (vali) of the province was Topal Sherif Osman Pasha, though most of the changes proceeded at a slow pace. According to the recently issued Ottoman constitutional law, each vilayet (first-order administrative division) was to have an official printing house and an official gazette. The Constitutional Law for the Vilayet of Bosnia, published in 1865, promoted the province from the rank of eyalet to that of vilayet, and Article 9 of this law stipulated that there be an official printing house in its capital. Osman Pasha also had other motivations to establish a printing house. At that time, the press in the Principality of Serbia and in South Slavic parts of the Austrian Empire sharply criticised the Ottoman regime in Bosnia. Textbooks imported from Serbia for Serb elementary schools in Bosnia also disseminated nationalist sentiment, which Osman Pasha saw as anti-Ottoman. In his view, the national movement of the Serbs in Bosnia presented a danger for Ottoman state interests. To protect their hold on Bosnia, the Ottomans sought to promote the idea of a unitary Bosnian nation, thus counteracting the particular national identities and political aspirations of Bosnia's Serbs, Croats, and Muslims.
History and publications
Under Sopron
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