Remembering the Past in Sarajevo: Between Empires

Since my arrival in Sarajevo I have spent most of my time focused on learning about and engaging with the current political climate in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The effects that the conflicts of the 1990s had on the region continue to have such an impact on the modern state-of-play in the political and social sphere that anything from before 1992 can seem like ancient history. Even the 1984 Olympic Bobsled Track, now overgrown and abandoned, stands as a ghost of a past that has little to do with the present, a hangover of a story that was violently interrupted by the outbreak of war. But of course, history is not that simple. Conflict does not occur in a vacuum, but is shaped by the social circumstances preceding it. Its legacy is often determined by the status quo that results from it. The story of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one that began long before the fall of Yugoslavia and that will continue long after we are gone. In order to understand where we are at we must know where we came from, and so it is important to take a step back and look at the past if you want to fully understand the present.

The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina is itself a historical landmark, a magnificent building constructed between 1888 and 1913 in the Italian Renaissance Revival style which is in many ways symbolic of the multicultural history of BiH. I visited on a smoggy late-October day in 2017, over 130 years after František Topič took his camera around Bosnia and Herzegovina to capture the photographs that are now displayed in a temporary exhibition at the museum: "Between Two Empires: Bosnia and Herzegovina 1885-1919". As the exhibition makes clear, during this time period BiH was at the very centre of the world, where the interests of colonial powers intersected. After 400 years of Ottoman Rule, the westernmost point of the ailing empire was ceded to Austria-Hungary in 1878 and the influence of the east gave way to the modern domination of the west.

Topič’s photographs document the everyday lives of people during this time of great transition. It was, after all, the farmers, the factory workers, and the merchants that shaped the future of their little patch of land. There was also an image of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife’s bodies as they were being laid to rest, a reminder of the central part this region played in the world at the beginning of the 20^th century. Let us not forget that their assassin, Gavrilo Princip, was the son of poor farmers and a member of the serf classes. Scholars usually focus on the individual powerful people that supposedly shape history, but Topič’s photographs demonstrate the reality of life in the Balkans during a watershed moment in history that would catapult the world into the modern age. And the Balkan people, from the conquerors to the conquered, the emperors to the peasants, were central to this transition.

Transition and a push/pull relationship with the great powers of the world has shaped this region since the earliest days of civilisation. As the archaeological exhibition in the national museum demonstrates, what is now BiH has long been torn between east and west, with the local people co-opting certain parts of both but somehow maintaining a unique local identity. The Kingdom of Illyria, which today makes up much of the Western Balkans, is first mentioned in Greek records dating from the 4^th century BC, with the indigenous Illyrian peoples appearing as a force that battled the Greeks throughout the Hellenistic Period. From the 2^nd century BC, the Illyrian population found themselves in conflict with the Roman Republic, and by 168 BC Roman rule of the region had been established. This period of rule resulted in much of the western influence that can still be seen in the region today. However, when the Roman Empire split into the western Roman Empire and the Byzantium Empire in the East in 395CE, the region once again found itself at the centre of the two new powers, with the River Drina (now on the border between BiH and Serbia) acting as the border between empires. In this context, Serbia turned increasingly towards the east thanks to influence from the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Bosnia, on the other hand, was still on the fringes of Rome’s sphere of influence.

In the 6^th to 9^th Centuries the Balkans saw looter invasions from the Pannonian Avars, a nomad population from Central Asia, and the Slavs, who brought with them the Slavic languages that are spoken today. Between the 9^th and 13^th centuries BiH was caught between the Hungarian and Byzantine Empires, falling under the control of both throughout the 12^th century and picking up influences from each. The local population, becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnic and religious affiliation, campaigned for independence throughout this time and by 1377 BiH became an independent kingdom. Nearly a century later, in 1463, BiH officially fell to the Ottoman Empire, and remained under Ottoman rule until 1878, around the time where Topič’s photography picks up.

Despite playing host to the triggering event of the First World War, Bosnia and Herzegovina remained largely unscathed throughout the conflict and in the aftermath was incorporated into the South Slav Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which would later become Yugoslavia. Attempts at drawing political boundaries that avoided ethnic and historic lines proved difficult to realise in the increasingly nationalistic fervour of the 1930s, and, following the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, much of Bosnia came under the rule of the Independent State of Croatia, a fascist puppet state that began to target Serbs, Roma and Jews, in addition to dissident Croats and Slovenes, throughout the conflict. The Serb ‘Chetniks’ emerged as a fighting force in response to the persecution of Serbs by the Croat Ustaša death squads. However, in their attempt to form an ethnically homogenous Greater Serbian state, the Chetniks were themselves responsible for much persecution and violence against the Bosnian Muslim population, and many others. It was in this context that Josip Tito’s multi-ethnic, communist resistance group, the Partisans, emerged. Although they too were responsible for atrocities against political opponents of all ethnicities, their military success prompted allied support for their cause and by the end of the conflict the Partisans controlled Sarajevo. This laid the groundwork for the emergence of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which would survive until 1992, when its violent collapse would result in the conflicts with which we are all familiar.

Throughout this entire history remains one constant; the ordinary people of the region. With a culture steeped in several different histories, the population of the Western Balkans boasts some of the most diverse ethnic and religious identities of anywhere in the world. A lot of the history of this area has been defined by violence, and that obviously remains true today, but the legacy of cultural exchange between these different peoples is the most enduring facet of the region. The Roman conquest of two thousand years ago gave way to the gelato stands and European-style cafes of the west-side of downtown today, the Ottoman rule of 500 years ago brought Islam and Orthodox Christianity, Bosnian coffee and Old Town’s markets and bazaars. Austria-Hungarian architecture can be seen throughout Sarajevo. Most people here speak several languages; they learn English or German, sometimes they learn Russian. A lot of the panels and conferences we have visited have touched on the thorny issue of Bosnia’s desire to join the EU. In Ilidža there are neighbourhoods being built with road and shop signs written in Arabic in order to accommodate the increasing number of expats from Saudi Arabia, UAE and Kuwait moving to Bosnia for the economic opportunities and beautiful scenery. If you want to go anywhere in Old Town you have to fight your way through hundreds and hundreds of tourists from all over the world, seemingly regardless of the time of day. It really feels here like you are at the centre of the earth. 

What all this demonstrates, and what Topič’s photography captures beautifully, is that whilst it is easy to get lost in examining the big events of history, of focusing on the conqueror and conquered, one must remember the day-to-day lives of ordinary people and at least attempt to understand their experience in order to fully explain history. Those ordinary people might one day become Gavrilo Princip, or Josep Tito, who also came from a farmers’ background and became interested in politics after joining a labour union whilst working as an apprentice locksmith. But even those that do not go down in history shaped the circumstances and contexts in which these people operate, influence them and steer them in ways that might never be recorded in history books but are nevertheless hugely important.

I took a detour on the way home from the museum to go and stand on the Latin Bridge, where Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28^th June 1914. Being one of the oldest bridges still standing in the city, with its wooden predecessor standing from at least 1541, it was already a historical landmark at the time of the assassination that would change the world forever. In Topič’s photographs of Sarajevo’s skyline circa 1908 it can be seen, looking exactly as it does now. In his picture you can just about make out the shapes of people going about their lives in the city, and it makes you wonder. What were their thoughts on the Austria-Hungarian occupation of their country? Were they engaged politically in what was going on? Would they agree or disagree with what would happen there in just a few years time? Maybe 100 years from now someone will look at a picture of me standing on that bridge, or of anybody else, and wonder the same things.

And that is the thing about history. It was not just something we should learn about, or that we remember. It is something we are living. And, regardless of whether we go down in the history books or not, we are shaping it in our own little way. This region in particular has got to where it is today through the actions of the local population in response to the influence of outside factors from all sides. It is multicultural and multiethnic as a result, and this has proven to cause tension and conflict, but also a unique environment of growth and a meeting of peoples that I would argue is not seen to this extent anywhere else in the world. At the root of it all are the people that make up not just this region but the whole of our globalised world. If history is still being written, what we need to ask ourselves is how do we want our chapter to end?