Terme Gata Kiseljak

Terme Gata Kiseljak is a bicarbonated mineral spring spa in the Kiseljak valley of central Bosnia, close to Sarajevo in a landscape of forested limestone hills that forms the heartland of the Franciscan mission in Bosnia, a Christian presence that survived five centuries of Ottoman rule thanks in large part to the remarkable tolerance guaranteed by the Sultan's Ahdname of 1463. Travnik, forty kilometres to the northwest, was the seat of the Ottoman viziers who governed Bosnia from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, and its Ottoman clock towers, its cobbled bazaar, its sixteenth-century fortress, and its Franciscan monastery make it one of the most architecturally layered Ottoman towns in the western Balkans. The naturally sparkling mineral springs of Kiseljak, long appreciated for digestive comfort and refreshment, emerge in a valley where the Bosnian countryside retains its medieval grain and the cultural depth of the Ottoman inheritance is never far from the surface.