The bodies of Admira Ismic and Bosko Brkic were exhumed from an untended grave in a Serb military cemetery and shipped back to the reunified city whose wartime horrors they tried to flee.
They will be buried side by side today in Sarajevo's Lion cemetery in graves within sight of the cafe where they courted.
Lowering of the coffins into their final resting place will mark the end of a journey that began in hope in May 1993.
Confident they had guarantees of safety, Admira and Bosko walked from Bosnian government frontlines in the heart of the city, between buildings bristling with guns, towards Serb-held Grbavica. They planned to go to Belgrade and on to a life abroad.
A volley of gunfire cut them down in no-man's-land. Admira crawled towards Bosko, put her arm around him and together they died.
For eight days their corpses lay in the sun as the two sides disputed who had killed the lovers, and who should risk death to gather them for burial.
"Some people don't realize the greatness of their death," said Admira's father, Zijah Ismic. "He stayed in Sarajevo because of her and she wanted to reward him by leaving with him to the Serb side."
Just as blame for their death is obscured by deceit and treachery, so too is the way the bodies were recovered.
Serb militiamen say they staged a night-time dash to pick them up. Muslim prisoners of the Serbs say they were tethered by ropes and despatched to fetch the decomposing corpses.
Zijah and his wife Nera found Serb friends to exhume their beloved daughter and the boy they treasured as a son from territory that the war's end has not yet made safe to visit.
"At first I didn't want to disturb them in their peace but my wife and mother insisted we get them so that people can come to their graves and visit them," said Zijah.
The couple, dubbed Sarajevo's "Romeo and Juliet" by the media, were sweethearts for eight years before their deaths at the age of 25. They grew up in a city where inter-ethnic marriage was common until nationalist hatred blossomed.
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