These include Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Nazi death camps like Auschwitz in Poland, and Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a former school turned into a torture and extermination center by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

Sarajevo has an abundance of such places, including the spot where a Serb nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in 1914, and set Europe on the road to World War I, and the market where a mortar shell killed nearly 70 weekend shoppers in 1994.

But it was also in Bosnia that an early version of dark tourism took a particularly sinister turn, said Zijad Jusufovic, a survivor of the city’s wartime siege who now leads idiosyncratic tours of Sarajevo’s sites.

“This is attraction number one for dark tourism,” he said, standing amid a cluster of rocks high in the hills overlooking the city.

War tourists with a criminal blood lust, mostly Orthodox Christian fanatics from Russia and Greece, used to go there to take potshots, for a fee, with sniper rifles and even antiaircraft guns at Muslim residents scurrying for cover in the city below.

Another place Mr. Jusufovic likes to take visitors is Yugoslavia’s first private hotel, a mountain getaway for romantic trysts that, now a ruin, was used by Serb forces to pound the city with artillery.

At the war hostel, Mr. Kurbasic said his aim was not to create nostalgia for Europe’s worst bout of bloodletting since World War II but simply to let guests, particularly younger ones, get a small idea of the discomfort and deprivations of wartime.