Phil Murphy

What were the characteristics that made Bosnia special?
The tiny, mountainous town of Jajce with its spectacular waterfalls was once implausibly capital of Bosnia. It is typical of the hidden delights of Central and Southern Bosnia

Part 5

What were the characteristics that made Bosnia special?

Wedged between warring Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia’s Muslim President Alija Izetbegović was perhaps overly sanguine, promising his people in 1991 that war would not come to their country.

Like all major Balkan populations, Bosnia had enjoyed its position as an independent state during the Medieval period but all, apart from Croatia, lost this independence with the Ottoman invasion of the 14th and 15th centuries.  

For Bosnia, this was the beginning of 500 years that altered aspects of the way life was lived in the country, without eliminating its people’s traditional behaviours.  The Ottomans introduced Islam to Bosnia but made limited attempts to impose their culture.  It was as if this occupation was an economic transaction, which demanded only taxes and loyalty to the Sultan.

They destroyed or absorbed previous ruling groups, but the Ottomans did not attempt to crush the way their new populations ran their communities.  If the balance in Bosnia was largely of city-dwellers - who could gain financially through tax-concessions - converting to Islam and peasants, who would not, remaining Christian, more significantly the Ottoman period led to a cultural mosaϊc of people and cultures existing side-by-side – a phenomenon that became described as ‘Balkanisation’.

A visitor to the old town in the east of Sarajevo will find to this day mosques, a Jewish synagogue and an Orthodox Christian church within one-tenth of a square mile of one another.  Less than half-a-mile away, handsome Habsburg buildings fringe the Miljacka River from the period after the Austria-Hungary Empire established a protectorate over Bosnia in 1878.

The traumas, the vicissitudes and the delights of the Ottoman occupation are captured most magnificently in the pages of Bosnian Chronicle, by Bosnia’s only Nobel-Prize winning author, Ivo Andrić.

The Ottomans largely tolerated non-Muslim communities being supervised by their own religious authorities but, as Andrew Baruch Wachtel describes in The Balkans in World History the Ottoman approach to Bosnia and the rest of the Balkans “allowed the Balkan people to retain a feeling of separateness and individuality within the fabric of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire”.

The magnificent 11-arched 16th century Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad which spans the Drina.  Many see it as the point at which East meets West but its history, both in the 16th and the 20th century, has at times been bloody

Baruch Wachtel goes on to suggest that Ottoman rule did not disrupt a Balkan character defined by “generous hospitality to strangers, tolerance of difference, and a principled refusal to allow the need to make a living interfere with free and easy patterns of social intercourse”.

If that definition fits Bosnia even more neatly than other Balkan states that were occupied by the Ottomans, the rich cultural mix of people and religions there meant that, when ethnic considerations began to consume Bosnia in 1991-2, this was the Yugoslav state to endure the most turbulent, disruptive, and tragic consequences of the 1991-95 wars.

It is to the credit of the Bosnian people that many wanted this rich cultural mix to be restored, repaired, and reinvigorated, even after the bloodshed and the cartographic realignments of the 1990s.

To this day in Belgrade and elsewhere in Serbia, some still venerate the likes of genocidal killer, Gen Ratko Mladić.  This stencilled headshot of Mladić features in graffiti across Belgrade, this particular example signed by the Senjak branch of Red Star Belgrade Football Club’s supporters.  Senjak is a district in the south of the capital.
These freshly painted statements read, ‘Serb hero – Ratko Mladić’.  Even on my last visit in late 2023, these graffiti were being freshened up or added to across the capital.

Phil Murphy – August 2024

Reading List

  • Tito and His Comrades, Jože Pirjevec, The University of Wisconsin Press
  • Tito’s Secret Empire, How the Maharaja of the Balkans Fooled the World, William Klinger and Denis Kuljiš, C.Hurst and Co (Publishers Ltd)
  • The Fall of Yugoslavia, by Misha Glenny, Penguin Books
  • The War is Dead, Long Live the War - Bosnia: The Reckoning, by Ed Vulliamy, The Bodley Head, London
  • Serpent in the Bosom - The Rise and Fall of Slobadan Milošević, by Lenard J. Cohen, Westview Press, Perseus Books Group
  • Eastern Approaches, Fitzroy Maclean, Penguin World War II Collection
  • They Would Never Hurt a Fly, War Criminals on Trial in The Hague, Slavenka Drakulić, Abacus
  • Bosnian Chronicle, Ivo Andrić, Apollo, Head of Zeus