The 1992 Sarajevo library burning destroyed over a million books and manuscripts.
Evidence
On August 25, 1992, the Serb army began shelling the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo from positions on the mountainside directly in front of it. In the next few days, in the largest book-burning in modern human history, over a million books, more than a hundred thousand manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of historical records of Bosnia-Herzegovina went up in flames. Volunteers formed a human chain to rescue what they could. One of them, a graduate student at the University of Sarajevo, never made it home. — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 54
Categorization
- ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’ only in the broadest sense of cultural destruction; more relevant to the broader theme of cultural eradication — actually, no tree connection. Closer fit: this evidence of deliberate erasure of a multiconfessional culture complements the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s theme of extremists reshaping history through destruction.
- XREF: Connects to general knowledge of memory-keeping institutions as targets in ethnic cleansing; parallels Nazi book burnings and the destruction of the Library of Alexandria.