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
Yesterday was “The International Day of Persons with Disabilities”. Soon it’s going to be like the Orthodox Church calendar and there’ll be a long list of “International” days on each and every one of the year’s 365, all commemorating identity till the point where all identity just “melts into air”.
I’ve been unfriendly to Basques in the past, not for any reason particular to Basques but because I’m against the wild reification of any social or cultural group’s self-perception (“identity”) and the pointless violence and other costs that leads to.
These are some of my money quotes:
And then there are the Basques. Do you know how many inhabitants of the Basque regions of Spain who identify as Basque actually speak the language? Some 18%! And yet, this practically identity-less identity has been the motivation for decades of violence and terror. There’s no more twisted example of post-modern identity foolishness than I can think of. A violent political struggle to save a museum culture. When 50% of you have bothered to actually learn the devilishly difficult language you’re so proud of, then go ahead and engage in any kind of separatist resistance — violent or non — that you feel like.
And…
There are more dangerous and toxic manifestations of that kind of localized-identity nationalism as well, most noticeably the Basques. Less than 25% of the people who claim that they are Basques ethnically in Spain can actually speak the language at all — at all. I once caught a hysterical comedy skit on Spanish television where a man in San Sebastian was trying to pull off a bank robbery in Basque — on principle. And it wasn’t working because the teller couldn’t understand him. Then the neighboring teller chimes in about the robber’s grammar and that it’s incorrect according to the teacher at the night-school Basque classes she goes to and the other customers on line start arguing with him and the tellers about noun declensions and whether his use of the subjunctive is correct or not. And the robber starts to scream, frustrated: “I’m in Donostia (San Sebastian in Basque) goddammit! Not Burgos! And I can’t even hold up a bank in my own language!” Finally, the cops arrive and instead of apprehending him, they get caught up in the one-upmanship of the group of barely Basque-speaking Basques’ grammar arguments and the robber, frustrated, makes his escape. It was hilarious and it was on YouTube for a while but I haven’t been able to find it again. But that’s not all a joke. People killed each other in the hundreds for decades for an identity with only the most fragile of real footing and a language that none of them spoke; and in post-Franco Spain, one of the most liberal, progressive on social issues nations in Europe, where you’re free to learn any language you want and maintain any kind of culture you like. So, at the risk of sounding glib, make the effort to learn the language first — BE a Basque first — before you start killing people.
And a quote where I lump Basques and Catalan together with the twentieth century’s most vicious and destructive separatists, Croatians; I’ve often referred to Croats as Balkan Catalans, and referred to Catalans as Iberian Croatians:
I have a serious repellent reflex towards Catalans. This is largely because I love Spain so much, and their anti-Spanishness really gets my goat. I find their Gallic delusions that they’re so much more European and Mediterranean and civilized than the rest of Spain to be insufferable. (And some day I’ll get around to dismantling the cult of “Mediterranean-ness” itself that’s grown since the 1980s and that I find a completely false and fabricated pop-multi-culti identity that grew out of tourist literature, the public relations campaigns of olive oil companies and a popular sprinkling of Braudel, and nothing else. When even Turks start acting and feeling like they’re “Mediterraneans,” you know that a discourse is b.s. and needs to be taken apart; the extremeness of the hype surrounding Barcelona is part of this, and is why I love the gravitas and even crudeness of Madrid and Castille so much more deeply.) I find Catalans’ ‘noli me tangere’ squeamishness about how they shouldn’t have to suffer by being a part of this barbaric country of monarcho-fascists and Catholics and gypsies and bull-torturers to be racist pure and simple. They’re Iberian Croatians, in short. There are plenty out there who will get the analogy, I believe.
And more:
All of us on the periphery, and yes you can include Spain, struggle to define ourselves and maintain an identity against the enormous centripetal power of the center. So when one of us — Catalans, Croatians, Neo-Greeks — latches onto something — usually some totally imaginary construct — that they think puts them a notch above their neighbors on the periphery and will get them a privileged relationship to the center, I find it pandering and irritating and in many cases, “racist pure and simple.” It’s a kind of Uncle-Tom-ism that damages the rest of us: damages our chances to define ourselves independent of the center, and damages a healthy, balanced understanding of our self culturally and historically and ideologically and spiritually…
Spain — in part because it’s felt it had to compensate for the darker elements of its past — has transformed itself in just a few decades, and in a way I find extremely moving and mature, into perhaps one of the most progressive countries in Europe on a whole range of moral and social issues and especially in being open to regional autonomy and regional, cultural rights. There is no way you can’t be happily and solidly Catalan, and maintain your culture and language to the fullest degree, within the Spanish state. Objections are nonsense.
But they had already lost me when they banned bullfighting.
A stain on the Greek conscience, an obscene manipulation of Orthodox identity and brotherhood, an affront to the suicidal bravery of Greek and Serbian resistance against Nazism during WWII (in its German, Hungarian and especially its Croatian variants), and a gross mockery on what for me is the still moving idea of a long, historical Greco-Serbian bromance.
But “bully” is such an apt term for the Turkish Republic and the Turkish body politic (“thug” also comes to mind), that I think anything that puts Turkey in its place is a positive development.
A march in Los Angeles in April commemorated the 104th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. Credit…Mario Tama/Getty Images
Power’s money quotes:
Although Turkish officials may see the vote as retaliation for Turkey’s recent forced displacement of Syrian Kurds, that operation — as well as President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s sweeping human rights crackdown in Turkey and his purchase (over American and NATO protests) of a Russian air defense system — simply reduced the impact of Turkish blackmail.
……..
First, as a baseline rule, for the sake of overall American credibility and for that of our diplomats, Washington officials must be empowered to tell the truth.
Over many years, because of the fear of alienating Turkey, diplomats have been told to avoid mentioning the well-documented genocide. In 2005, when John Evans, the American ambassador to Armenia, said that “the Armenian genocide was the first genocide of the 20th century,” he was recalled and forced into early retirement. Stating the truth was seen as an act of subordination.
When I became ambassador to the United Nations in 2013, I worried that I would be asked about the Armenian genocide and that when I affirmed the historical facts, I could cause a diplomatic rupture.
Second, when bullies feel their tactics are working, they generally bully more — a lesson worth bearing in mind in responding to threats from China and Saudi Arabia. The Turkish government devotes millions of dollars annually to lobbying American officials and lawmakers: more than $12 million during the Obama administration, and almost as much during the first two years of the Trump presidency. Turkish officials have threatened to respond to genocide recognition by suspending lucrative financial ties with American companies, reducing security cooperation and even preventing resupply of our troops in Iraq.
On Friday, the Turkish ambassador warned that passage of the “biased” House resolution would “poison” American-Turkish relations, and implied that it would jeopardize Turkish investment in the United States which provides jobs for a “considerable number of American citizens.”
It is easy to understand why any commander in chief would be leery of damaging ties with Turkey, an important ally in a turbulent neighborhood. But Turkey has far more to lose than the United States in the relationship. The United States helped build up Turkey’s military, brought it into NATO and led the coalition that defeated the Islamic State, which carried out dozens of attacks on Turkish soil. Over the past five years, American companies have invested some $20 billion in Turkey.
If Mr. Erdogan turns further away from a relationship that has been immensely beneficial for Turkey in favor of deepening ties with Russia or China, it will not be because the House voted to recognize the Armenian genocide. It will be because his own repressive tactics are coming to resemble those of the Russian and Chinese leaders. [my emphases]
Someone I know in the Greek foreign service once said to me that he thinks Western policy towards Russia is not even leftover post-Cold War, but that it’s perhaps even an unconscious but very persistent and irrational remnant of Great Game mentality left over in the Anglo-Saxon world/mind that influences the rest of the West. And if you know a bit, that’s a smart analysis.
But even if you start from there you immediately have to turn to the chicken-or-the-egg dynamic that’s happening here and that has obtained in the world’s policy towards Russia and vice-versa for almost forever. You can’t always treat Russia like the big, drunken thug that needs to kept out of the club by the bouncers and not expect them to react with a defensive — and offended — stance.
It seems impossible to get out of the West’s mind the sense that Russia is an inherent enemy that needs to constantly and aggressively be watched and contained instead of accepted, and expect it to not be actively aggressive in return. What “accepting” Russia would mean exactly is tricky and needs to be thought out — but needs to be given a chance in terms of policy. We might get our rocks off by saying that Putin is a bad, strong-man who’s unacceptable in x amount of ways, undemocratic blah blah. But some thoughtful expressions of good will towards Russians might eventually be the precisely the “soft power” that prods Russians on to getting rid of Putin themselves — and all the other huge flood of positive changes that might, and will, come in his eventual disappearance from the scene.
“First and foremost and again: let Russia in. ENGAGE RUSSIA. We all have everything to gain and nothing to lose if we stop treating Russia like a pariah nation. Russian power is not a threat and can instead prove massively useful to the world if we bring Russia into the fold instead of trying to desperately keep her out of everywhere and even foolishly try and fence her in. It may be a little more complicated than a simplistic “more flies with honey” theory but whatever it is we choose to describe as Russian aggression, Russia sees as defensive and that may not be an irrational response from a powerful nation that sees itself treated as an amoral being that is constantly excluded from all the West’s major moves.
“And I’m talking about radical engagement: not just lifting sanctions and trade blocks and visa requirements. I’m talking about making Russia a part of the European family of nations, as laughably dysfunctional as that family may be looking right now. Why are Montenegro or Georgia on the list of candidates for NATO membership — Montenegro probably as some sleazy old promise offered to it if it seceded from Serbia; and Georgia, one of the oldest polities in the Russians’ sphere of influence (for better or worse and partly of its own initiative at the start) and with a complicated love-hate relationship between them – while Russia itself is not? Too big to absorb. Well, yes, but my point is to stop thinking of her as an entity to control and absorb and start thinking of her as a political and especially military power that’s just too enormous to not have as an ally in the current struggle we’re engaged in.
“ISIS (and Turkey to some degree) ticked off the Russians bad and they have already done more to weaken the “caliphate” in the past few weeks than all other Western actions combined. Is it escalating the conflict? There is no escalating this conflict: when your enemy is sworn to escalate it to the maximum, and there’s no reason to think they’re bluffing, you’re already there. Yes, there’s reason to fear that Russia – which uses Powell-Doctrine-type “overwhelming force” more than the United States ever has – will go too far and turn central Syria and Raqqa into a Chechnya and Grozny, but the best way to limit those kinds of excesses are to enter into some coordinated action with Russia and not just allow her to act alone. Because we’re going to need Russia when the air campaign needs to stop, when at some point it will. And that’s when I predict that Russia will also be willing to send in men on the ground and I don’t mean just a few special operations groups. While they’re certainly not eager to send their young men off to die in another Afghanistan or Chechnya, this has already – again, for better or worse – become a sort of Holy War for Russians and they will be far less squeamish about sending in troops than any other European society or even the United States at this point. And working with them on such an operation will not only increase its efficacy but limit the risks and excesses.
“In the end bringing Russia in from the outside will also change it from the inside; as the nation itself feels less like it has to be on the constant defensive, then so will the Russian government adopt a more open and progressive attitude to its own internal political life. This is what we saw happening in Turkey in the early 2000s when European Union accession was still a negotiable reality; much of what Turkey and Erdoğan have turned into since are a result of those cards being taken off the table. Do it for everyone then, for us and for them. Engage Russia; it’s a win-win proposition.
“So treating Russia like a pariah will only play into Putin’s hand. That’s, in fact, what has happened; the whole country has fallen in line behind him and anything like the РОССИЯ БЕЗ ПУТИНА — “Russia without Putin” — protests of two years ago would be considered, in a spontaneous act of socially unanimous censoring, pure treason these days with no one even daring to publicly air such opinions in the current heady climate of nationalist excitement.”
…
“History, climate, geography have always conspired to isolate Russia. And, in a sense, the pathos that drives Russian history and is the force behind her brilliant civilizational achievements (and, yes, her imperialism too), is that of a constant, heroic struggle to break out of that isolation and find her place in the larger world. Yacking on, like Snyder, about how Ukraine is somehow “essential” and central to the very idea of Europe (when, ironically, it’s very name means “the edge”…the edge of what? of Russia/Poland…the EDGE of Europe…what an elevation of status Snyder grants Podunk…), while treating Russia as dispensable or as a dangerous threat that needs to be hemmed around and contained — isolated again — is criminally unfair to Russians (if not to Putin and his cronies) and will end up backfiring on the West in ways it hasn’t even begun to anticipate. Russia is not dispensable. Nor is she to be ignored or patronized. We think of her in those terms and the results will just get uglier and messier.”
“The consensual view of the war of the 1990s, which Croatians call the homeland war, is that the Serbian clique around Slobodan Miloševic was overwhelmingly to blame but that there were also Croatian atrocities (the best short account I know is in Tony Judt’s 2005 masterwork, Postwar). Not all of these are yet fully accounted for, mainly because the Croats – as both victims and victors – have not had the reckoning that comes with defeat.
“Yet that is not the only war in living memory. In what Britain still calls “the last war”, Croatia was under direct Nazi rule from the local variant, the Ustaše, led by Ante Pavelic, who may have been second only to Hitler as a genocidal maniac.[my emphases] Again the reckoning was incomplete: even Pavelic died in bed, in Franco-era Spain. Croatia is a place where there are secrets and lies, a sense of unfinished business, of an unconfronted past. A loud country, where some subjects have to be discussed in whispers.”
I’m starting to verge on the manic with this, I know. But they’ve gotten away with it every single time. And while you can find Serbs who know and admit what they did or what was done in their name and are horrified and wouldn’t even think of justifying any of it to you, I’ve never met a Croat who doesn’t bow up on you the second you mention their questionable political past. And that takes how unlikable they otherwise already are to the second power.
Below is the pic from the article, an illustration, as the piece mentions, of the Mediterranean and Viennese masquerade Croatia ceaselessly tries to draw cultural capital from. A leader “who may have been second only to Hitler as a genocidal maniac.” couldn’t possibly come from such a civilized country. In fact, “second only” to the Nazis is not quite accurate, since Berlin told the Ustaše to chill out, that the degree of its atrocities was so extreme it was giving impetus to a Serbian resistance movement that was becoming a greater challenge to control than the Nazis could deal with at the time. So Pavelić and his crew might have been “second” to the Nazis, but that’s only cause Adolf himself got on the phone and told them to cool it.
Nor is it ever mentioned that the only peoples in eastern Europe who did have a real resistance to the Nazis and didn’t collaborate are us, Poles…and Serbs.
I think the key word is “antifascists.” Clearly Horthy couldn’t find any Croatians that qualified.
“The untold story of the massacre named “Razzia” (Raid) which took place in January 1942, committed by the Hungarian Nazi forces in an occupied part of northern Serbia – Backa. This book unveils the most important details of the massacre, implicating the Hungarian regent (governor) Miklos Horthy. Besides murdering Serbs, Jews and Roma, Horthy had also committed numerous crimes over Ukrainians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Russians and Hungarianantifascists. The book primarily deals with the genocide committed in January 1942, where at least 12,763 civillians had been tossed into icy rivers Tisa and Danube. One of the main perpetrators, Sandor Kepiro, was released in Budapest court on July 18, 2011. He died in Budapest in September 3 of the same year.”
What happened in Bosnia in the 90s was “a posthumous triumph” for the vicious fascism of the Croatian Ustaše, and Bosnians’ gleeful collaboration with them on both occasions.
Honestly…if anybody can explain to me because I find it baffling. What was in it for Bosnians to collaborate with Croats during both WWII and the wars of the 90s? What could possibly have been of more benefit for them to work together with the Ustaše instead of joining Serbian partisan resistance or just sitting out the conflict? Wasn’t the virulent Catholicism of the Ustaše enough to put them off? Did they just figure that Serbs were the previously and potentially again most hegemonic people in the state so they sought help from another little brother? Did they really think that after accomplishing their stated aims of cleansing the NDH of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies, that Croat fascists wouldn’t come after Bosnian Muslims next? Like Martin Niemöller’s poem: “Then they came for me.” And Bosnian’s chumming up with them in the 90s: how’s that worked out for you, guys?
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.
Credit…Mario Tama/Getty Images
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 