Across the River
Before the war you actually had to ask people’s names to know who they were. Now you can just observe what side of the river they live on. On the east side are the Bosniaks […]
Articles
Between East and West: Three Bosnian Writer-Rebels: Kočić, Andrić, Selimović
Bordered by rivers and the Dinaric range, mountainous Bosnia, which once was an independent kingdom, has always been difficult for outsiders to conquer and control. The Ottoman Empire, which entered the country at the invitation […]
Unveiling Bosnia-Herzegovina in British Travel Literature (1844-1912)
The first evidence of an English travel interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina emerged at the end of the 16th century, an interest, however, that was short-term in the extreme and came to a quick end in the […]
Separating History from Myth: An Interview (II)
LIFSCHULTZ: While we are on the subject of multinational states, would you elaborate a little on your argument in The National Question in Yugoslavia that democracy and Yugoslav “unitarism” were incompatible phenomena. In other multinational […]
Solipsism Narrated Magnanimously: Reflections on Death and the Dervish
“Malodušnost” is the Serbo-Croatian word that Henry Cooper uses to describe the subject of Meša Selimović’s novel, Death and the Dervish in his preface to the novel. Faintheartedness and moral cowardice translate the Serbo-Croatian word […]
Vertical and Horizontal
How shall we bury the screams deeply in the ground of oblivion So they do not reach us on these arduous paths How shall we place every cherished word and smile in these tight bags […]
Separating History from Myth: An Interview
Rabia Ali: The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina has been generally perceived in the West as a civil war or a tribal blood feud ––the product of centuries-old enmities between the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. In the […]
No Balkan Mosaic Can Be Complete Without Bosnia
The Srebrenica genocide is and will remain an enduring trauma for all generations in Serbia, both present and future. Each new judgment passed by the Hague tribunal reveals new details and lays bare the enormity […]
An American in Bosnia
Oct. 6, 1969, Monday. Across Serbia southwest of Beograd. From this flat country we got into hillier & hillier terrain, and by the time we crossed the beautiful Drina at Zvornik we were definitely in […]
Day of Rest Seventh Day
The Book of Genesis Chapter One In the beginning thou didst create the heaven and the earth And the earth was without form and void And there was darkness over the abyss And thou saidest […]
Snow Has Fallen
Snow has fallen on the springtime fruit trees, Time to love whoever you may please. If she won’t hear, there’s no way to push her, Love is no use if she cannot choose. If my […]
Remembering the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide
At the Bosniak Institute in Sarajevo on July 8, 2010, BZK “Preporod” (“Renaissance”) organized a lecture on remembering the Srebrenica genocide 1995-2010. The speakers that evening were the president of BZK “Preporod” Senadin Lavić and […]
Arresting Ratko Mladić Is Serbia’s Moral Obligation
Fifteen years have passed since the genocide in Srebrenica and the major culprit of that crime, Ratko Mladić, is still at large. This is a moral mortgage that prevents us from moving forwards. New generations […]
Nikola Šop’s Bosnian Jesus
Ascending the stairs of poetry, Nikola Šop (1904 – 1982) went from the utterly material verses, via an elementary confessional poetry, the poetry of Christian and mystic symbolism, intimate meditations, to an extremely dematerialized poetry […]
With My Jesus
An Invitation to Dear Jesus I’d be so happy if, oh Jesus, you would enter my dwelling deign. Where things quite common hang on the walls. Where day drops off early on the window pane. […]
A Garden the Color of Mallow
Men are, typically, bad at telling colors apart. Still, it would have been hard to find someone as clueless in the matter of colors as my grandfather. His spectrum boiled down to four basic colors, […]
A Buddy Is a Buddy
Jim Timony, my social worker, left for Nebraska to finish his doctorate, and so the whole of next week I did not have to do my obligatory script of contrition and blabbing such lies that […]
The Bosnian Bogomils or “Krstjani”
The story of the Bosnian bogomils, called “krstjani” (“christians”), has been oversimplified by those who see the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century as a glorious time in which the dualist church and […]
Bosnia
She is here and she stands firmly You think: silently once she fell but she waits for you around the corner Like trout in the Vrbas like the Vrbas in its gorge like that gorge […]
Belgrade and Banjaluka: Together for Partition of Bosnia
Regardless of the party in power, Serbia’s strategy for Bosnia-Herzegovina is a constant. Belgrade has not given up its strategic goals in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the safeguard of Republika Srpska as laid down in the Dayton Peace […]