Abdulah Nakaš

Abdulah Nakaš was chief surgeon at the State Hospital in Sarajevo for more than thirty years. Born in 1944, he graduated from the University of Sarajevo Faculty of Medicine. When war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, the hospital, which belonged to the Yugoslav army's network of health facilities, treated soldiers, dignitaries and local residents, and during the Siege of Sarajevo it filled with casualties while the building was repeatedly shelled. Nakaš operated under improvised lighting with little or no standard equipment, anesthesia or analgesia, and is said to have worked fifteen hundred consecutive days. After the war he helped found the Union of Health Workers and was elected to the parliament of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and then of the state for the Party of Democratic Action. Sarajevo gave him its Sixth of April Award. He died in 2005, and a hospital in Sarajevo bears his name.