Mediterranean, western European, and Turkish determines are all felt in the cultural life of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there are considerable variations between orthodox and modern and between rural and urban culture as well. Family ties are strong and friendship and neighbourhood networks well-developed. Great value is placed on hospitality, spontaneity, and the gifts of storytelling and wit. Summer activities include strolling on town korza, and throughout the year popular meeting places are kafane and kafici. Bosnian cuisine is a matter of pride and displays its Turkish determine in stuffed vegetables, coffee, and sweet cakes of the baklava type. Folk songs remain popular and well-known.

Bosnia’s various population has made the nation’s cultural life valuable. Epic stories, a form of orthodox oral literature, were still sung throughout the nation well into the 1950s. Bosnian urban love songs, largely Muslim in origin, were popular throughout the former Yugoslavia. Ivo Andric, a Serb who was raised Catholic in Bosnia, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961. His novels include Na Drini cuprija, in which a bridge from the Ottoman time symbolically united the peoples of Bosnia. The novelist Meša Selimovic was of Muslim origin but said that he wrote Serbian literature.

In comparison with much of eastern Europe, the news media in Yugoslavia were comparatively independent, censorship being achieved more through implicit threat than through direct intervention. Of the many newspapers, magazines, and journals circulating in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most widely distributed were the dailies Oslobodenje and Vecernje Novine. The republic had almost 50 radio stations and one television station.