Banja Luka

Banja Luka, city, northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. It lies along the Vrbas River at its confluence with the Vrbanja. It serves as the capital of the Republika Srpska (Bosnian Serb Republic), one of the two largely autonomous entities that make up the country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Under the Ottoman Turks, Banja Luka (“Baths of St. Luke”) was an important military centre and the original location (1583–1639) of the seat of the Bosnian paşalik (territory governed by a pasha). Its commercial prosperity declined following fires and plagues in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 19th century Banja Luka played an important part in the uprisings of the Bosnians against Turkey, as well as in the revolts of the Serbs. The city’s economy revived under the rule of Austria-Hungary (1878–1918). During World War II, the city and surrounding area were a centre of Partisan resistance while part of the Axis-created state of Croatia. After 1945 a new industrial section of the city was developed. Banja Luka was seriously damaged by an earthquake in 1969 and subsequently underwent extensive rebuilding.

During the Bosnian conflict, the civil war that followed Bosnia’s secession from Yugoslavia in 1992, Banja Luka became the main Bosnian Serb centre in the northern part of the country. Serbs employed violence and other methods of persecution to drive thousands of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croats, Roma, and others out of the city and surrounding areas. As part of their effort to expel Bosniaks from the city, Bosnian Serbs destroyed the mosques there, including two large ones dating from the Ottoman period: the Ferhadija, or Ferhad-Pasha (1579–83), and the Arnaudija (1587).

Banja Luka’s industries include fruit and vegetable canning, tobacco processing, brewing, and the manufacture of machine tools, electrical appliances, clothing, pulp and paper, and synthetic fibres. The city has road connections with Zagreb and with Jajce and Sarajevo. Pop. (2013) 150,997.