On 17 May 1992, the Oriental Institute in besieged city of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, was targeted by JNA and Serb nationalists artillery, and repeatedly hit with a barrages of incendiary ammunition fired from positions on the hills overlooking the city center. The Institute occupied the top floors of a large, four-storey office block squeezed between other buildings in a densely built neighborhood, with no other buildings being hit. After catching the fire, the Institute was completely burned out and most of its collections destroyed by blaze. The collections of the institute were among the richest of its kind, containing Oriental manuscripts centuries old and written about the subjects in wide varieties of fields, in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and local "arebica" (native Bosnian language written in Arabic script), other languages and many different scripts and in many different geographical location around the world. The losses included 5,263 bound manuscripts, as well as tens of thousands of Ottoman-era documents of various kind. Only about 1% of Institute materials was saved.