{"id":2719,"date":"2021-10-14T11:59:14","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T09:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/herito.pl\/?post_type=artykul&p=2719"},"modified":"2022-06-15T13:12:20","modified_gmt":"2022-06-15T11:12:20","slug":"visegrad-as-metaphor","status":"publish","type":"artykul","link":"https:\/\/herito.pl\/en\/artykul\/visegrad-as-metaphor\/","title":{"rendered":"Visegrad as Metaphor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The place name Vi\u0161egrad, as Wyszegrad, sounds familiar to Polish ears, although it is not in Poland, but in northern Hungary. Since 1991 this small town has been the venue for the annual summit of representatives of the democratic countries of Central Europe, in emulation of the crowned heads of their states before them. The Visegrad Group was formed as an attempt to overcome the burden of past conflicts and to build a framework for mutual understanding between the countries of Central Europe.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the fall of communism, this bruised and sore region worked to establish institutions seeking unity between nations with similar experiences but differing visions of them. Although their cooperation was not always ideal, the states of the former Yugoslavia, which bordered Hungary to its south and east, and throughout the 1990s were engulfed in war, were overtly envious \u2013 often to the point of excessive idealisation \u2013 of their fellow members of the former Soviet Bloc. They envied their ability to confront their past contentions, a method far preferable to going to war over them. The Hungarian town of Visegrad became \u2013 at least in the symbolic sphere \u2013 a metaphor for unity.<\/p>\n

Several hundred kilometres to the south, but at virtually the same longitude, in eastern Bosnia, there is another small town by the name of Vi\u0161egrad. This backwater of barely a few thousand, inhabited prior to the recent war by a population 70 per cent Muslim (Bosniaks), and in its remaining part Serbian, is now home to almost exclusively the latter. Vi\u0161egrad, like so many other places in Bosnia, saw barbaric acts of ethnic cleansing, and as such is a symbol diametrically different to its Hungarian namesake, a metaphor for crime and forced displacement. It is one of many names on the blacklist of Central Europe\u2011 an phantom towns all linked by similar experiences at various times in their history. Others in the same group include nearby Sarajevo, Pula in Croatia, and, further afield, Kosice, Bratislava, Lviv, Vilnius, War\u2011 saw and Wroc\u0142aw. Also close by is Srebrenica, where in 1995 an army of Bosnian Serbs under Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Ratko Mladi\u0107 murdered 8,000 Muslims.<\/p>\n

At\u00a0 the\u00a0 time when Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s psychopathic henchmen were implementing his plan to \u201creclaim\u201d Bosnia from the\u00a0\u201cTurkish infidel\u201d, another Serb \u2013 the\u00a0well\u2011known architect and urban planner Bogdan Bogdanovi\u0107 \u2013 emigrated from Yugoslavia in pro\u2011 test at\u00a0their nationalist policies. Together with other intellectuals who remained in the\u00a0country, he raised opposition to the\u00a0war and its bestialities. He\u00a0looked with horror on the\u00a0devastation wreaked on its towns and cities \u2013 Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo and Mostar. In\u00a0his conception of urbanism, rooted in a\u00a0profound humanist conviction, the\u00a0city was an\u00a0idea virtually synonymous with civilisation. By\u00a0contrast, destroying cities \u2013 which he called, more forcibly, \u201critual killing of cities\u201d[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 was an\u00a0act of aggression directed at\u00a0the\u00a0very foundations of culture.<\/p>\n

There are two ways of destroying a city: razing it, or driving out its people. Both ways are equally effective, although the latter has more lasting consequences and is more refined \u2013 even, one might say, more perfidious \u2013 because it preserves the illusion of continuity of the urban tradition. Lights go on in windows just the same, plaster continues to fall off walls just as it always did, people even look similar. But the city is not the same. New residents are settled, usually not through their own choosing but pursuant to decisions taken from above by new leaders \u2013 barbarians whom a prank of history has permitted to don suits. The habits and attitudes towards a city accumulated over years, even centuries, cannot be learned at once, so the new inhabitants bring new mores[2]<\/a>. They move into apartments not yet properly empty, in which the odour of the previous owners remains pervasive for some time, perhaps even months. Perhaps they have left some of their clothes, or books \u2013 after all, it is never possible to take everything. In such situations people are rarely given enough time to pack cases or trunks.<\/p>\n

Ethnic cleansing \u2013 often referred to perniciously as the \u201cairing\u201d or \u201cpurging\u201d of a city (and not only cities!), are the common experience of Central and Eastern Europe. Nowhere in post-communist Europe is far from a Vi\u0161egrad. In the western part of the continent, by contrast, this is virtually an unknown phenomenon. For some time now there have simply been no mass crimes there, or expulsions of populations because of their race or political beliefs. Bogdanovi\u0107 would most likely see this as an expression of civilisational maturity. But how, then, can we explain the fact that all these crimes in Central Europe, including the destruction of at least all the cities listed above, were perpetrated with the approval or shameful acquiescence of Western politicians?<\/p>\n

The Bosnian Vi\u0161egrad is famous for the bridge founded in 1577 by the Ottoman grand vizier Mehmed Pasha Sokolovi\u0107 and in 2007 (how late!) inscribed on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List. It owes its place there not only to its extraordinary artistic merits, but also to its symbolic significance. It is there as an emblem of Bosnia \u2013 a metaphor for the symbiosis and connections between different worlds: Islam and Christianity, East and West, present and past. It was close to this bridge \u2013 although not in the town centre proper, but on the slope of the hill above the road running alongside the river \u2013 that Ivo Andri\u0107 (1892\u20131975), the only literary Nobel laureate from this region of the world, spent his childhood. It is here, too, that his novel The Bridge over the Drina <\/em>(1945) is set. The story starts in the 16th century, with a young boy of the Eastern Orthodox faith, along with dozens of others like him, being taken by a detachment of Janissaries into devshirme (a levy to the sultan). The boy later grows up to become one of the most influential Slavs in the history of the mighty Ottoman state \u2013 a grand vizier. The novel ends in 1914, with the first after-effects of the shots fired at the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, a hundred kilometres away. Almost a century has now elapsed since that moment, but the echo of those bullets in Sarajevo still ricochets off the hills between which the blissfully quiet Drina meanders.<\/p>\n

In Andri\u0107\u2019s time, Vi\u0161egrad was a Turkish settlement even smaller than it is today. In his novel, he uses two words to describe it \u2013 kasaba<\/em>, from the Turkish, and varo\u0161<\/em>, from the Hungarian. The vernacular Slavic word grad <\/em>(meaning \u201cfortified town\u201d) features only incidentally, despite the fact that it is preserved in the very name Vi\u0161egrad<\/em>. Its proud residents say that Vi\u0161egrad is \u2013 literally \u2013 more than a town; it is vi\u0161e od grada<\/em>. This clever pun, however, is no more than a neat metaphor, as the town really is tiny. Andri\u0107 wrote of it: \u201cThe town and its outskirts were only the settlements which always and inevitably grow up around an important centre of communications and on either side of great and important bridges.\u201d[3]<\/a> Its most significant, most impressive feature is, indeed, its bridge. \u201c[\u2026] this great stone bridge, a rare structure of unique beauty, such as many richer and busier towns do not possess (\u2018There are only two others such as this in the whole Empire,\u2019 they used to say in olden times), was the one real and permanent crossing in the whole middle and upper course of the Drina, and an indispensable link on the road between Bosnia and Serbia and further, beyond Serbia, with other parts of the Turkish Empire, all the way to Stambul.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Andri\u0107\u2019s novel the bridge was a witness to human passions, cruelties and inconceivable tragedies alike. The writer himself remains a controversial figure to this day; some see in him a symbol of Serbian nationalism and Islamophobia. But reading Andri\u0107 in a patriotic key \u2013 including this novel \u2013 demands truly remarkable feats of the imagination, although it is, alas, common practice, not only among Serbs. Radical Islamic nationalists see him as a figurehead of the anti-Islamic Eurocentrism that imposed the figment of the Orient on Bosnia to justify its colonisation. At the outbreak of the war, one fanatical Muslim destroyed a bust of Andri\u0107 in a gesture intended to signify rejection of his legacy and the ideology attributed to him. This act subsequently served the Serbs as justification for their policy of ethnic purges, which they claimed were protecting the town from barbarity.<\/p>\n

Andri\u0107\u2019s book is not, as apologists of the patriotic interpretation would have it, a nationalist manifesto (for the term patriotism is often used in this context to propagate nationalism). It is a modernist novel par excellence, with all the pessimism and catastrophism characteristic for that current \u2013 a truly Mannesque work. It is a profound, philosophical reflection on human suffering and the hopelessness of fate, cloaked in a mantle of outstanding artistic creation. For, as the narrator says, \u201cin fact we are all of us already dead, only we descend one by one into the grave\u201d[4]<\/a>. Thus the bridge is a painful, although beautiful utopia. It is like God observing impassively the suffering of his children, and the man on the bridge in no way resembles either a Serb or a Bosniak, only the insane figure from the Edvard Munch painting.<\/p>\n

But an erroneous \u2013 ideologically determined \u2013 interpretation of Andri\u0107 has transformed him, against his will, into the patron of the \u201creclamation\u201d of these lands from Muslims by their Serbian population. Andri\u0107, born into a Catholic Croat family in Bosnia, later chose Yugoslavianism, although with a marked Serbian slant. Like Franz Ferdinand\u2019s assassin, he was a member of the Young Bosnia organisation, which some see as a patriotic fraction and others call nationalistic. The Young Bosnians saw the liberation of Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian control not as a stepping-stone on its route to autonomy, but as a way of incorporating it into Serbia. It is for this reason that The Bridge over the Drina<\/em> has been reduced to an anti-Islamic pamphlet (note has also been made of the fact that in his doctoral thesis, which was only translated into Serbian after his death, Andri\u0107 gave a critical assessment of the role of Islam in these territories). It is claimed that the book predestined the Serbs to fight for the liberation of these lands from Muslim control, and hence for their Serbian identity. This ideological construction was \u2013 surprisingly \u2013 soaked up possessively and deviously by Yugoslavian communism, and Princip \u2013 the hero of the Serbian monarchists \u2013 was elevated to a canonical hero of all socialist Yugoslavia (it was no exception that the heroes of the despised state country manned the barricades of the proletariat revolution). Contemporary Serbian school textbooks only know this Andri\u0107 \u2013 the Serbian patriot.<\/p>\n

The bridge still spans the Drina today. It was not destroyed like the equally old bridge in nearby Mostar. The destruction of this historic structure, which spanned the Neretva on its course to the Adriatic, by other fanatics \u2013 on that occasion Croats \u2013 was intended as a symbolic act arresting the co-existence of different ethnic groups in the town. Many international organisations ultimately came together to rebuild the bridge, but this could not bring understanding between the conflicted parties[5]<\/a>. Although the bridge over the Drina was not destroyed, another way of stripping it of its symbolic meaning was devised: it became the site of the killing of Muslims. The rest of the town\u2019s inhabitants were driven away, and now barely a few descendants of the former kasaba<\/em> residents ever set foot on the bridge. None of them are Muslims, Catholics or Jews. A few Ashkenazi Jews found their way here from as far away as Galicia in the wave of officials of the black-and-yellow monarchy, but they, like their Sephardic cousins, were wiped from the face of the earth by the Second World War. The only evidence of their presence is Andri\u0107\u2019s novel and a small, decaying cemetery on the fringes of the town, on a hill with fantastic views of the mountainous region. The mosque stands abandoned, and the synagogue has been converted into a public facility. Here, by a cruel ploy of fate, Jews and Muslims are on the same side \u2013 the side of the victims.<\/p>\n

Little is left of Vi\u0161egrad\u2019s historic fabric. Aside from the bridge, there are other architectural landmarks that supplement the symbolic imaginarium of the kasaba<\/em>. Foremost among these are the \u201capartment buildings\u201d \u2013 mutant structures by contemporary \u201curban planners\u201d more commonly known as developers \u2013 the equally unfortunate hotel Vilina Vlas from the experimental socialist period, and the most monumental memorial to the Nobel laureate himself \u2013 Andri\u0107 grad.<\/p>\n

It is not worth shedding ink over the apartment buildings. They are just as ugly everywhere else in post-communist Europe \u2013 shoddy, and grossly out of keeping with the surrounding space.<\/p>\n

The history of the Vilina Vlas hotel, a few kilometres out of the town centre, cannot be passed over, although it is not its architecture which is responsible for its \u201cmomentousness\u201d. During the last war, Serbian soldiers brutally raped and murdered more than 200 Muslim women at the hotel. In 2008, Australian artist Kym Vercoe happened to stay there. When on her return home she learned the truth about this place of torture, she created a theatre performance on the theme of her experiences from her time in Vi\u0161egrad called Seven Kilometres North-East<\/em>. She has been back to Bosnia several times, and is currently, with Jasmina \u017dbani\u0107, director of the prize-winning film Grbavica <\/em>(Golden Bear in Berlin, 2006), making a film based on her art and her experiences called It Begins Like This<\/em>. She is to play one of the leading roles herself. The Vilina Vlas Hotel has also found \u201cfame\u201d in another set of circumstances. Recently \u2013 in October 2012 \u2013 Vi\u0161egrad hosted a conference devoted to Andri\u0107\u2019s novel. Local Serbian politicians, who question the war crimes, prevented the head of the Institute of Slavic Studies at the University of Graz from paying tribute to the victims of the crime committed at the hotel[6]<\/a>. The affair was made public by women\u2019s organisations.<\/p>\n

But according to Serbian politicians, who are unwilling to talk about the victims, Vi\u0161egrad also has a prettier, more positive side. The war crimes and victims are a subject best forgotten, as quickly as possible. \u201cLook into the future!\u201d is the town\u2019s new slogan. Five minutes\u2019 walk from the old town centre is a monumental architectural project in statu nascendi. On a building site three hectares in size, the well-known film director Emir Kusturica is building Andri\u0107 grad, a new, or rather \u201cold\u201d town dedicated to the Nobel laureate. It is to be Renaissance through and through \u2013 no matter that it is being built in the 21st century. And the fact that the Serbs never had the Renaissance is not their fault, Kusturica avers; it is the fault of the Ottoman Turks who colonised them. And precisely because the Renaissance never came to these lands, it is time this was corrected and the town, which would almost certainly otherwise have grown up there, built. On a single site, then, a piece of kitsch is being created that is unique on a global scale \u2013 a synthesis of Byzantium, the Orient, folklore, and pseudo-Renaissance. Kusturica is bringing a new civilisation to Vi\u0161egrad. Andri\u0107\u2019s narrator \u2013 who was essentially slow to believe in revolutionary solutions \u2013 might have passed the following comment on this civilisational proselytism: \u201cEvery human generation has its own illusions with regard to civilisation; some believe that they are taking part in its upsurge, others that they are witnesses of its extinction. In fact, it always both flames up and smoulders and is extinguished, according to the place and the angle of view.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

Fortunately, Kusturica in his creative fervour does not intend to destroy the old part of Vi\u0161egrad. (One recalls with dread the words of one of his compatriots responsible for the bombardment of Dubrovnik, who ecstatically crowed that \u201cif necessary we will build a yet older and yet more beautiful Dubrovnik\u201d. Other builders of our contemporary times, even as they razed Baroque Vukovar to the ground, had plans to build a city in the Serbian Byzantine style in its place \u2013 a style, we might add, that has no documented existence[8]<\/a>.) But Kusturica is building Andri\u0107 grad to prove its Serbian nature and to blow Bosnia as a state out of the water. He himself was born into a Sarajevo Muslim family, but converted to Orthodoxy a few years ago. Today his official name is Nemanja, despite the fact that he is known primarily as Emir (a Muslim name). He supports a party that is running in the elections under the tag line \u201cSerbian house by Serbian house\u201d. At gigs by his band, the internationally known Non Smoking Orchestra<\/em>, he sings a song called Wanted Man<\/em>, which is about the war criminal Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107. Apparently this is an artistic provocation, but his fans know otherwise.<\/p>\n

The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs is currently on trial in The Hague together with his general, Ratko Mladi\u0107. They are not sharing a cell with Dragan Mali\u0107 \u2013 a fictional character created by Gustaw Herling-Grudzi\u0144ski in his short story W\u0119drowiec cmentarny<\/em>. Mali\u0107, unlike these two fiendish criminals, was not a psychopathic nationalist but an ordinary man who became a criminal through his pragmatism. Mali\u0107 is an allegoric figure. He is not essentially evil, but weak and devoid of values. Herling is saying: people like this are also guilty of crimes. The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakuli\u0107 also wrote about ordinary criminals in her superb essays They would never hurt a fly<\/em>[9]<\/a>. In Andri\u0107 grad, at the psychopathic f\u00eate accompanying the construction of the town, no-one had heard of the ordinary man Dragan Mali\u0107. Here, questions about morality are always ignored, or analysed in a historical context that facilitates the justification of every indignity. For ethicality here, is almost all about ethnicity.<\/p>\n

Everything about Vi\u0161egrad bears the marks of Andri\u0107\u2019s literary vision \u2013 but trivialised by the nationalist interpretation. The little town is living a life all of its own. It is becoming increasingly popular as a destination for excursions, chiefly Serbian school trips. Here, they learn the truth about the Serbian patriot. It is hard to imagine their Muslim fellow Bosnian citizens coming here as tourists. Some of them \u2013 former residents \u2013 will never want to come here again, like Stanis\u0142aw Lem, who never returned to his native Lviv after the war.<\/p>\n

The municipal authorities are hoping that when Andri\u0107grad is finished, Vi\u0161egrad will be able to count on hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. Per\u2011 haps some of them will stay at the Vilina Vlas Hotel. Maybe they will change its name \u2013 if the names of whole towns and streets can be changed, why not the name of a hotel? Anyway, doubtless before long, no\u2011one will remember these past contentions. Recently, during a debate on Ivo Andri\u0107 and the unfortunate conference on Croatian television, the \u2013 shockingly heartless \u2013 general consensus was that in fact it would be hard to find a hotel in Bosnia that had not been the scene of one crime or another. This begs the question of whether one should steer clear of all buildings erected before 1991, or simply stifle one\u2019s conscience. Not long ago I heard that there is tourist accommodation on the actual site of the German Nazi camp of Ravensbr\u00fcck.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0kasaba<\/em> is adjusting to its new mores and to its new residents. Just over the\u00a0bridge there is a\u00a0memorial commemorating the\u00a0defenders from the\u00a0last war\u00a0\u2013 the\u00a0very people who took the\u00a0place of their predecessors. A\u00a0grimly glaring crusader bearing a\u00a0sword and a\u00a0cross on his breast warns all comers, in particular, Muslims. The\u00a0street names only extol Serbian heroes. Interestingly, the\u00a0bridge does not seem to be the\u00a0subject of controversy, even though it was built by a\u00a0Mus\u2011 lim. It\u00a0is Serbian too. Valiant Serbs live here.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0Vi\u0161egrad, unlike in Mostar, where two conflicted nations live either side of the\u00a0Neretva, there is only one nation. Nevertheless, both towns, Vi\u0161egrad and Mostar, are infected with the\u00a0same virus \u2013 hatred, and there is no knowing how many years must elapse before they attempt to build bridges of communication like those in the\u00a0Hungarian Visegr\u00e1d.<\/p>\n

Andri\u0107\u2019s literature, though pessimistic by nature, sometimes offers a glimmer of hope: \u201cBut misfortunes do not last for ever (this they have in common with joys) but pass away or are at least diminished and become lost in oblivion. Life on the kapia always renews itself despite everything and the bridge does not change with the years, or with the centuries, or with the most painful turns in human affairs. All these pass over it, even as the unquiet waters pass beneath its smooth and perfect arches.\u201d[10]<\/a><\/p>\n

But even if one day representatives of some Balkan tetragon do come together in this Bosnian town, and Vi\u0161egrad, like its Hungarian namesake, does become a metaphor of this much-needed reconciliation, what comfort is this for the victims of the bestiality?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Bogdan Bogdanovi\u0107, \u201cRitualno ubijanje grada\u201d, in: Grad i smrt<\/em>, Beograd 1994, pp. 29\u201333.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Bogdanovi\u0107 also wrote about this; he saw in the \u201cconstant current from the non-urban \u2013 or more precisely suburban \u2013 world\u201d in Belgrade, deliberately exacerbated by the socialist authorities, yet another dimension of the attack on the city and on urban life. See: Bogdan Bogdanovi\u0107, \u201cThe Serbian Utopia. Between the lost Arcadia and the unrecovered city\u201d, Herito<\/em>, 2011, no. 5, pp. 26\u201347.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Ivo Andri\u0107, The Bridge over the Drina<\/em>, Harvill Press, London 1995, p. 14.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>Translation J.T.K.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> On this subject see: Husein Oru\u010devi\u0107, \u201cThe city and its bridges\u201d, Herito<\/em>, 2011, no. 5, pp. 48\u201361.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> On this subject see: Maciej Czerwi\u0144ski, \u201cMost na Drinie\u201d, Tygodnik Powszechny<\/em>, 2012, no. 51, p. 32.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> I. Andri\u0107, The Bridge over the Drina<\/em>, op. cit., p. 233.<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> B. Bogdanovi\u0107, \u201cRitualno ubijanje grada\u201d, op. cit., p. 30.<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Slavenka Drakuli\u0107, They would never hurt a fly<\/em>, Abacus, London 2004.<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> I. Andri\u0107, The Bridge over the Drina<\/em>, op. cit., p. 101.<\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n <\/div>\r\n<\/section>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"featured_media":3227,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[337,125,395],"region":[],"kraj":[],"magazyn":[231],"class_list":["post-2719","artykul","type-artykul","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-history","tag-hungary","tag-visegrad","magazyn-herito-10en"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nVisegrad as Metaphor - herito<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The place name Vi\u0161egrad, as Wyszegrad, sounds familiar to Polish ears, although it is not in Poland, but in northern Hungary. 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