The town was known as Hvoča (Хвоча) during medieval times. It was then known as a trading centre on route between Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) and Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey). The Ottomans left Foča a marvel of architecture, the Aladža Mosque, claimedly one of Europe's most beautiful.

The Monument commemorating the Battle of Sutjeska in Tjentište, Bosnia and Herzegovina

During the Second World War some 8,000 people were killed in a number of massacres by the Chetniks. The municipality is also the site of the legendary Battle of Sutjeska between Yugoslav Partisans and the German army. A monument to the Partizans killed in the battle was erected in the village of Tjentište.

Bosnian War and After

In 1992, the city came under the control of the JNA and Serbian paramilitaries. All of the Bosniaks were expelled form the area. 2,704 people from Foča are missing or were killed during the war, the majority of whom are Bosniaks. Foča was also the site of a rape camp which was set up by the Serb authorities in which hundreds of women were raped.

Initially the Serb forces attacked non-Serb civilian population in Eastern Bosnia. Once towns and villages were securely in their hands, the Serb forces - the military, the police, the paramilitaries and, sometimes, even Serb villagers – applied the same pattern: Bosniak houses and apartments were systematically ransacked or burnt down, Bosniak civilians were rounded up or captured, and sometimes beaten or killed in the process. Men and women were separated, with many of the men detained in the camps. The women were kept in various detention centres where they had to live in intolerably unhygienic conditions, where they were mistreated in many ways including being raped repeatedly. Serb soldiers or policemen would come to these detention centres, select one or more women, take them out and rape them.

On 22 April 1992, the Serb Army blew up the Aladža Mosque. Eight more mosques, from the 16th and 17th centuries, were also damaged or fully destroyed. The city was renamed Srbinje (Serbian: Србиње), literally "place of the Serbs" (from Srbi Serbs and -nje which is a Slavic locative suffix). In 2004, the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina declared the name change unconstitutional, and reverted it to Foča, until the National Assembly of Republika Srpska passes an appropriate law.