Autumn Has Come, My Quince, Early Autumn Autumn has come, my quince,* early autumn, From autumn to autumn, The whole village is already married off, My quince, run to me, To your dear friend… Every night, my quince, every day, I count the hours, I think of you! My quince, I am dying for you! Be mine, my treasure! Don’t […]
The borders of great civilizations, as we know from the ‘new historians,’ are drawn by the zones of the major agricultural cultures – of the olive and the grapevine… Bosnian everyday culture is characterized by…. the plum. Ivan Lovrenović When Simo is at work, I always watch Sarajevo TV. Well, it’s not called Sarajevo TV any longer, rather some sort […]
In a study of families and marriage practices carried out before World War II in what was called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at that time, Vera Stein Erlich described a distinctive feature of marriage in Bosnia. She said that “In patriarchal regions [referring to Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia] the bride was chosen almost exclusively and autonomously by the parents of […]
The evening after the funeral, a pigeon descended for the first time on the window, carried by the noiseless fan of spread wings. At first sight it was ordinary, a grey pigeon with unsymmetrically painted stains of white and blue feathers. He didn’t coo, but with a lazy step he balanced his weight like a tired acrobat on his last […]
K&T Meats is my favorite butcher shop on Broadway, in Astoria. It resembles me of those in Vitez, Maglai, and other small Bosnian towns, except this one’s jointly owned by six or seven immigrants—Greeks and Romanians—who, apart from English, speak a meat-market hash of all the Balkan languages, even Hungarian, since their customers’ meat recipes, products, and foods come from […]
The poetry collection Hyperborea, by our longstanding contributor Milorad Pejić, was awarded a newly established prize “Slovo Makovo – Mak Dizdar” for the best poetic work published last year in the Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Serbian language. The Prize was established at the initiative of Dr. Alija Behmen, Mayor of the City of Sarajevo, and was a result of the […]
AWARD In the courtyard of the National Library, workers are loading a truck filled to the brim with obsolete books, sentenced to death by combustion in the city’s heating plant in order to free shelf space for new popular items. The truck moves and a few lighter copies drop onto the sidewalk. A thin one with a maroon paperback cover […]
frankenstorm’s trick-or-treating forcing a delicate village maiden into split-second decisions – what kind of shoes are appropriate for the 10 block blackout venture to the nearest smart phone charging outpost oh my gosh my atm card doesn’t work either it’s like it’s… what was the name of that movie?
The end of the world is happening every day, every evening and morning The four riders of the apocalypse are thundering over our heads. Do you hear them? Gliding from Bosnia to Rwanda, Afghanistan, they gallop to Iraq and Libya The first horseman, on a white horse, the conqueror, seduces people, drives them mad The second rider is on a […]