Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and other Middle East, Iran, Afghanistan, South Asia, occasional forays into southern Italy, Spain or eastern Europe, minorities, the nation-state and nationalism — and whatever other quirks or obsessions lurk inside my head.
Lifted by me without permission — hope she forgives me:
“Les Bosniaques en marche”, 1890A couple from Kreševo, date unknownAt the fountain in Sarajevo, early 20th c.Mostar 1898Bihać, 1908Bosnian Christian left, Bosnian Muslim right, date unkownBosnia: coffee and mangal, date unknownBosnian costumes, date unknown (the beauty, variety and opulence of Balkan female dress always blows me away, especially as the West has traditionally thought of the Balkans as a poor part of the world.)Bosnia, dance, no further information (I love the movement of the colored salvar — the women’s long baggy pants.)House and family in Herzegovina, date and location unknown (along with ethnic/religious affiliation of those pictured; but the women aren’t wearing salvar — see previous photo — which traditionally identified a woman as Muslim in the Balkans; I’m assuming they’re Croats or Serbs)Mostar (date unknown): among other things, an illustration of the ridiculously phallic competition to make church towers higher than minarets — and it’s only gotten worse today.Sarajevo, 1890, guessing, from left to right, Croatian, Serbian and Muslim women.Sarajevo, 1892 (the gorgeous lattice work of the round cumba on house on left.)Serbian woman from Herzegovina, date unkown, one of @BosnianHistory ‘s loveliest photos. Travnik, 1900, love the low divan, coffee and cigarette (staples of civilized Ottoman life) and the partial smirk on the second from left woman that’s the only thing that comes close to a smile. In Dinner with Persephone by Patricia Storace, the best travel book on Greece since the earlier work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, which I give to all friends who are going to Greece for the first time, Storace writes: “The initial glance here is inquisitive, investigative. There are no easy smiles given away in Greece. It hasn’t yet been ascertained that your existence deserves a smile.” The huge, pearl-white teeth smile is, I think, an entirely American invention: the relentless positivity of the American psyche (Like, why are you smiling?) until the crazy smile descends into total psychosis.Tuzla 1902Bosnia urban couple, no further info, but an illustration that urban dress throughout the Balkans was basically a variety of Ottoman urban dress; the wildly imaginative costumes belonged more to the rural population.Bosnia, no further info, but another image of Ottoman coffee “tea ceremony”. People swear, till today, that coffee made in the ashes of a mangal, like in the photo, tastes far superior to coffee made by any other contraption.Bosnian Croats (no further info), hence, I guess, the resemblance to Catholic nuns’ headress.Jajce, 1941Bosnian bride and father-of in more contemporary image. Again, it’s obvious that these costumes cost a fortune for families. Luckily most of the gold is inherited. And I love the male vanity of dad. Montenegrin men (the butchest of Balkan butch) dress in similarly extravagant stuff, and if I’m not wrong every male in Montenegro still has a traditional outfit made for him for ceremonial occasions.The Male in nature?Kolo in Busovača, 1926Busovača, 1926Sarajevo, girl at fountain, 1920sMostar, 1950s (relatively late, but Greek rural women wore traditional clothing until the 50s – 60s as well.)Mostar, 1912Mother and child in Sarajevo, 1947. This may be my absolute favorite: stylish 40s fashion and traditional niqab-like item.Sarajevo, Logavina, 1904Sarajevo, 1938Sarajevo bakery, Eid/Bayram, 1910. Sorry man, but the niqab must be a real pain-in-the-*ss.Latinluk, Sarajevo, 1933, Sephardic women on a stroll (Does anyone know what “Latinluk” means? In Turkish it literally means the “Latin-ness”Sephardic women (or as caption says “Spanish women”) in Sarajevo, early 20th c.Urban garb, Sarajevo, early 20th century. And an image of the much-commented-on height of Bosnians.Tuzla, 1911Woman in traditional dress, Mrkonjić Grad, Bosnia.Muslim women in Sarajevo, 1925Young men smoke nargilé (hookah) and play music, Sarajevo, 1898
Hhmmm… Dunno, does it look as much older to anybody elseas it does to me? My only source is Bosnian History@BosnianHistory and WorldPress site: Bosnian History. So maybe she can help us out.
But before we start feeling all outraged and superior, the fate of Ottoman mosques in the Balkans has not been much better. How the few — like Jiannena’s — that survived did so is a miracle. And even in Jiannena we have two perfectly preserved mosques, thankfully, and one in a bad state, and a fourth that is not even recognizable unless you know it’s there; this out of a total of 18 mosques before the 1920s.
Plus while we’re on phalluses and hard-ons, it’s become the thing for both Serbian Orthodox and Croatian Catholic churches in Bosnia to build ridiculously high bell-towers, under the unspoken order that they be conspicuously higher than any neighboring minarets.
If Germans had never accepted their guilt for their massive, inconceivable, unspeakable crimes during WWII, who would visit Germany or Austria? who wouldn’t be in favor of sanctions and boycotts against German states?
But WWII fascist Croatia, the NDH, was so brutal and vicious in its treatment of the peoples who came under their rule, that even Berlin — the Nazis themselves — had to tell them to chill out!!! And yet not only has near no one pressured Croats to come to terms with or face their past “even as they except Serbs to recite their assigned mea culpa till the end of time [N.B.]”, they were granted immediate independence in the 90s based on their supposed “Westerness”, and were accepted into the European “family of nations” with almost none of the reforms or changes expected of other now European Union member-states or that are still being used to keep Serbia and Bosnia and Macedonia out.
How much longer?
Oh, and the Catholic Church needs to make some statement of repentance for their shameless support of the Ustaše during the war and their equally shameless facilitating of Ustaše leaders’ escape to Spain and Latin America after the war to avoid being prosecuted for war crimes. We all gloat over the Bosnian Serb leaders taken to the Hague to be (rightfully) judged for their murders, but no one cared or cares that Ante Pavelić died quietly in his bed in Madrid thanks to the Vatican and Franco.
Oh, and there’re no clues in the Odyssey that would lead us to assume that Odysseus made it as far up the Adriatic as Mljet in southern Dalmatia.
OH….! And this month Croatia revealed a memorial to war (Yugoslav wars) leaderFranjo Tudman — without even the slightest ashamed editorializing from Croatian media — or Western media for that fact. But when some municipalities in Serbia and even a movement in Belgrade tried to erect a Milošević memorial in recent years, the attempt was (rightfully) condemned all around. Balkan Insight write Anja Vladisavljevic only sheepishly ended her piece on the new memorial with this lame observation:
“Admired by nationalists for achieving Croatian independence, he [Tudjman] has also been criticised for Croatia’s role in the war in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as for his attitudes to the Croatian opposition, human rights and press freedoms.”
It’s all infuriating.
The unveiling ceremony for the monument in Zagreb. Photo: Croatian Government/Twitter.
Here I’m posting just a few photos I’ve collected that illustrate the staggering beauty and variety of Balkan female dress, but there are lots more fascinating photos at Bosnian History@BosnianHistory. Check them out.
Marko Attila Hoare @markoah: “There’s that joke about the Bosnian woman whose sweetheart is coming round, but she doesn’t know how to make pita for him to eat, so she gets her mother to make it for her. After he has eaten, the young man says, ‘This is very good pita, but your mother is already married’.”
At one point in the above posts I comment on how Montenegro is the only place where the Greek word pita is used for burek. But it turns out that pita is used in Bosnia too and that in Belgrade shops serve both something called burek and something called pita and I honestly couldn’t tell the difference.
Can anyone solve this burning taxonomic issue for us?
It shows the extreme lengths that the Yugoslav government went to throughout the 1920s and 1930s to hold the country together, under Crown Prince and then King Aleksandar — also known as Aleksandar the Unifier. At some point during his reign, I think after it became clear that Croatian separatism was determined to obstruct the functioning of the Skupština and the Yugoslav government in any way possible, Aleksandar redrew the constituent regions of Yugoslavia which corresponded to various ethnic groups, and introduced new administrative banovine which were given the ethnically neutral names of the main rivers that ran through each region.
And yet even despite those reforms Serbs still tried to placate Croatian separatists by allowing them — and only them — to retain an ethnic name for its historical region: what’s shown as the “Hrvatska Banovina” on your stamp.
There is, I think, in much of Serbian pride, or even in Serbian arrogance, a certain sense of what in Greek we call φιλότιμο, “love of honor” crudely put; perhaps a better term would be “noblesse oblige”. Since Serbs and Serbian blood pretty much created Yugoslavia singlehandedly, by fighting off the Austrians and defeating the Ottomans (along with guaranteeing us possession of Salonica ’cause they kept the Bulgarians busy while Greek Crown Prince Constantine strolled into the city like the conquering hero), you might have expected that they would work to keep a Serbian kingdom ,under the Карађорђевић (Karađorđević) dynasty, where all other ethnic groups — who did nothing to fight for south Slav independence, except tangentially the Macedonians — would simply be subject peoples to the Serbian crown. Instead, they made a sincere and honest attempt to make the noble experiment of south Slav unity actually work, democratically and harmoniously. There was even an ideological current running through Serbian intellectual circles of a plan for unification with Bulgaria and even Greece into one greater Balkan state, which would have made it harder for the West to push us around and fuck us up like they did and do; maybe even made us more valuable to the West than Turkey, the tail which wags the Western/US/NATO dog.
And I think King Aleksandar, for all his theoretical faults, was a genuine personification of that sense of Serbian noblesse oblige and ἀρχοντιὰ.
And for his efforts he was assassinated in Marseille in 1934 by a Macedonian separatist in cahoots with the nasty-piece-of-work, Vatican-supported,Croatian Über-Nazi Ustaše.
And that’s what your cool stamp is all about, Charlie Brown.
Balkans, Anatolia, Caucasus, Levant and rest of ME, Iran, South Asia
Me, I'm Nicholas Bakos, a.k.a. "NikoBako." I'm Greek (Roman really, but when I say that in English some five people in the world today understand what I'm talking about, so I use "Greek" for shorthand). I'm from New York. I live all over the place these days. The rest should become obvious from the blog.
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 