Divanhana

Divanhana is a band from Sarajevo devoted to sevdalinka, the traditional love song of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which they play with touches of jazz, pop and, lately, electronic music. They were formed in 2009 by students of the Music Academy in Sarajevo, and took their name from the divanhana, the central room of an old Bosnian house where people gathered to talk and where sevdalinkas were sung.

Their first album, Dert, was recorded in February 2011 at the Fattoria Musica studio in Osnabrück, Germany, with the producer Walter Quintus, and came out that May with Vanja Muhović as singer and saz player. It mixed well-known sevdalinkas with Balkan traditional songs that had never been recorded before. Bilješke iz Šestice followed at the end of 2013, and Zukva, with ten songs, mostly sevdalinkas, brought in guests such as the violinist Filip Krumes from Belgrade and the trumpeter Džambo Agušev from North Macedonia. Naida Čatić later took over the vocals.

The band has toured widely, with concerts at Lisinski in Zagreb, in castles in Slovenia and Bosnia and as far away as Canada. In 2018 they made a joint album with the Turkish singer Suzan Kardeş, and they have also recorded with Danica Krstić, the guitarist Luis Robisco and Vlado Kreslin, with whom they sang "Voljelo se dvoje mladih".

Zavrzlama was named among Songlines magazine's ten best albums of 2022 and won them Best Group at the Songlines Music Awards in 2023; they also played the magazine's 25th anniversary concert at the Barbican in London, alongside Salif Keita. The line-up is led by the composer and keyboard player Neven Tunjić, with the singer Selma Droce, the violinist Larisa Droce and the accordionist Nedžad Mušović.

Their sixth album, Radio Sevdah, released by CPL-Music in October 2025, is a tribute to Radio Sarajevo and its archive of sevdah recordings. Alongside old songs such as "Sa Igmana pogledat je lijepo" it has "Domovina", about the country's mountains, and "Sevdah Party" and "Primitivo", which poke fun at turbo-folk.