The apartment on Sniper Alley held onto its windows for 1,425 days.

The longest siege of a capital city in modern history

For 1,425 days, from April 5, 1992, to February 29, 1996, Sarajevo was under siege. Bosnian Serb forces occupied the hills surrounding the city, raining an average of 329 shells down every day. Along Zmaja od Bosne street, the main east west boulevard, snipers took aim at anyone who dared to cross. The street earned the grim nickname Sniper Alley.

By the time it ended, an estimated 11,541 people had died in the siege, including 1,601 children.

Apartment 6C

On the sixth floor of an apartment building fronting Sniper Alley, a music teacher in her sixties chose to stay. Her name is recorded in a Sarajevo oral history archive, but her family asked that it not be shared here. To protect her windows from shrapnel, she draped heavy Persian rugs over them. For heat, she tore up the parquet flooring from her own hallway to feed a small wood stove. Each Sunday, she would take the flour provided by U.N. peacekeepers and bake a single round loaf of bread. She left it on the landing outside her door, a silent offering for the hungriest neighbor.

When the siege ended

She remained in her apartment through March 1996. That month, the first tram, the same yellow tram that had run through the city before the war, rattled back to life along Zmaja od Bosne. Her windows, against all odds, were unbroken. She claimed it was because she had told the sniper on the hill, muffled by the rugs, that she wasn't leaving. She died in that same apartment in 2011.