Bosnia and Herzegovina P-11 25 dinara 1992 XF | Dževad Hozo

You will receive a banknote of the design indicated in Extra Fine condition. 

Front: guillochet design by renowned Yugoslav and Bosnian designer Dževad Hozo

Back: Crowned Arms

Watermark: repeating diamonds

The Designer: Dževad Hozo (1938–2017)
Bosnian master of line, memory, and quiet resistance.

Born in Mostar when it was still the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Hozo grew up amid Ottoman stone, Austro-Hungarian order, and the layered calligraphy of Balkan history. Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, he became one of the great graphic artists of socialist Yugoslavia, renowned for etching, aquatint, and book illustration of almost surgical precision.

His signature world is monochrome, architectural, and metaphysical: minarets dissolving into light, bridges hovering between centuries, courtyards empty but vibrating with presence. Where others painted heroic workers or partisan epics, Hozo etched time itself — stone worn by prayer, silence shaped by geometry, memory as negative space.

In 1992, as Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence and slid into war, Hozo was entrusted with one of the most symbolic acts a new state can perform: giving form to its money. He designed the first Bosnian banknotes, austere, dignified, and deliberately non-triumphalist. No bombast, no nationalist bomb-throwing in visual form — instead, sober line, restrained ornament, and a humanist sense of continuity. In the middle of siege and fragmentation, his engraver’s hand asserted that Bosnia was not an improvisation but a civilization with depth, literacy, and aesthetic memory.

During the war itself, when Mostar’s Old Bridge was destroyed, his personal work took on a funereal, almost cosmic stillness. He did not depict explosions; he depicted absence. The void where continuity once stood. In this, he became a visual historian of loss without propaganda, a chronicler of civilization’s fragility rendered in copper plate and acid.

He also shaped generations as a professor in Sarajevo, codifying the theory of graphic art in the Balkans. His textbooks on printmaking remain foundational. Technically exacting, spiritually restrained, intellectually severe — yet suffused with a Sufi sense that line itself can pray.

If Mostar’s bridge is a stone sentence across a river,
Hozo’s banknotes were lines of sovereignty in ink,
and his etchings whispers across centuries:
that cultures can be shattered,
that form can survive,
and that black ink on white paper can still carry the full weight of a nation that refuses to vanish.