tore families apart and resulted in genocide and massacres. With continued post-war reconstruction in the aftermath, Sarajevo is the fastest growing city in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The travel guide series Lonely Planet ranked Sarajevo as the 43rd best city in the world. In December 2009, it recommended Sarajevo as one of the top ten cities to visit in 2010. In 2011, Sarajevo was nominated as the 2014 European Capital of Culture. It was selected to host the European Youth Olympic Festival. In addition, in October 2019, Sarajevo was designated as a UNESCO Creative City for having placed culture at the center of its development strategies. It is also ranked as one of the world's eighteen Cities of Film. Etymology The name Sarajevo derives from the Turkish noun , meaning "palace" or "mansion" (from Persian , , of the same meaning). Scholars disagree on the origin of the evo attached to the end. In Slavic languages, the addition of "evo" may indicate a possessive noun, thereby making the name of Sarajevo, 'city of the palace." One theory is that the name may have been derived from the Ottoman Turkish term , first recorded in 1455, meaning "the plains around the palace" or simply "palace plains". However, in his Dictionary of Turkish Loanwords, Abdulah Škaljić maintains that the evo ending is more likely to have come from the widespread Slavic suffix used to indicate place names, than from the Turkish ending . The first mention of the name Sarajevo was in a 1507 letter written by Firuz Bey. The official name during the 400 years of Ottoman rule was Saraybosna ("Palace of Bosnia"), which remains the city's name in Modern Turkish. Sarajevo has had many nicknames. The earliest is , the term Isa-Beg Ishaković used to describe the town he was going to build—which is Turkish for "city" (), in turn coming from the Persian (, meaning "city"). As Sarajevo developed, numerous nicknames came from comparisons to other cities in the Islamic world, i.e. "Damascus of the North" and "European Jerusalem"; the latter being the most popular. Environment Geography Sarajevo is near the geometric center of the triangular-shaped Bosnia and Herzegovina and within the historical region of Bosnia proper. It is situated above sea level and lies in the Sarajevo valley, in the middle of the Dinaric Alps. The valley was once an expansive, fertile and green space, but considerable urban expansion