smailović caught the imagination of people around the world by playing his cello, most notably performing albinoni's "adagio in g minor" for twenty-two days, in the ruined square of a downtown sarajevo marketplace after a mortar round had killed twenty-two people waiting for food there. he managed to leave sarajevo 1993, in the second year of the siege that lasted from 5 april 1992 to 29 february 1996 (1,425 days) and is often mistakenly identified as a member of the sarajevo string quartet, which played on throughout the siege.