This article appeared in: Islam and Bosnia: Conflict Resolution and Foreign Policy in
Multi-Ethnic States. Ed. Maya Shatzmiller (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press,
2002), pp. 98-135.
__________________________________________________________________________
FROM THE ASHES: THE PAST AND FUTURE OF BOSNIA'S
CULTURAL HERITAGE
András J. Riedlmayer
(Harvard University)
Barely a decade ago, in March 1992, the people of Bosnia voted for independence. In a national
plebiscite, with close to two thirds of the electorate participating, voters cast their ballots almost
unanimously in favor of an independent, democratic, and pluralistic Bosnia. As Bosnia's
National Assembly met in the capital city of Sarajevo after the vote, more than 100,000 citizens--Muslims, Christians, and others---rallied in front of the Parliament building, holding signs and
shouting in unison: "Mi smo za mir!"---"We are for peace!"
The shouts for peace were silenced by gunshots, as Serb nationalist gunmen, concealed on the
upper floors of the Holiday Inn across the street, opened fire on the crowd, killing and wounding
dozens of people as they ran for cover.
The date was 6 April, 1992. In the days and months that followed, the Serb-led Yugoslav
National Army systematically bombarded Sarajevo from prepared positions on the mountains
overlooking the city. Snipers with telescopic sights picked off civilians as they ran down the
streets of the capital in search of food, water and shelter. [1]
Thus began the assault on Bosnia-Herzegovina. From the beginning, it was characterized by two
features that had little to do with military objectives:
• The mass expulsion of civilians driven from their homes, robbed, raped and murdered for
being of the "wrong" ethnicity and religion, and
• The deliberate targeting and destruction of cultural, religious and historic landmarks by
nationalist extremists.
Their targets have included: the National Library in Sarajevo, the Regional Archives in Mostar,
local and national museums, the Academy of Music, the National Gallery, entire historic districts,
Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, and, above all, the places of worship of the ethnic and religious
groups that were singled out for what was euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing.”
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 1 -
Three and a half years of war and “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, allowed to proceed unchecked
by the international community, turned more than half of the country’s four million people into
refugees and cost the lives of more than 200,000 men, women and children. The cultural
casualties were no less staggering. More than one thousand of Bosnia’s mosques, hundreds of
Catholic churches and scores of Orthodox churches, monasteries, private and public libraries,
archives, and museums were shelled, burned, and dynamited, and in many cases even the ruins
were removed by nationalist extremists in order to complete the cultural and religious
“cleansing” of the land they had seized. [2]
Table I. Destruction of Islamic religious buildings in Bosnia 1992-95
Building type
Congregational
mosques (Dzamije)
Total no. before
Total no. destroyed
Percent destroyed
the wa r
or damaged
or damaged
1149
927
80.68 %
557
259
46.50 %
Total no. of
mosques
1706
1186
69.52 %
Qur’an schools
(Mektebi)
954
87
9.12 %
Dervish lodges
(Tekije)
15
9
60.00 %
Mausolea, shrines
(Turbe)
90
44
48.89 %
1425
554
38.88 %
Small
neighbourhood
mosques
(Mesdzidi)
Bldgs. of religious
endowments
(Vakuf)
Based on data from the Institute for Protection of Cultural, Historical and Natural Heritage of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, A Report on the Devastation of Cultural, Historical and Natural Heritage of the
Republic/Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (from April 5, 1992 until September 5, 1995 (Sarajevo, 1995),
supplemented with information from the incidents database of the State Commission for the Documentation of
War Crimes on the Territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Drzavna komisija za prikupljanje cinjenica o ratnim
zlocinima na podrucju Republike Bosne i Hercegovine), the Islamic Community of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and
other sources.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 2 -
Table II. Destruction of Islamic religious buildings in Bosnia 1992-95
Building type
Total no.
before the
war
Congregational
mosques (Dzamije)
No. damaged/destroyed
No. damaged/destroyed
by Serb extremists
by Croat extremists
damaged/destroyed
T
damaged/destroyed
T
1149
540/249
789
80/58
138
557
175/21
196
43/20
63
Total no. of
mosques
1706
715/270
985
123/78
201
Qur’an schools
(Mektebi)
954
55/14
69
14/4
18
Dervish lodges
(Tekije)
15
3/4
7
1/1
2
Mausolea, shrines
(Turbe)
90
34/6
40
3/1
4
1425
345/125
470
60/24
84
Small
neighbourhood
mosques
(Mesdzidi)
Bldgs. of religious
endowments
(Vakuf)
Although we have been told that it was "ancient hatreds" that fueled this destruction, it is not true.
The history that has been destroyed, the buildings, the books, and the historical documents, all
spoke eloquently of centuries of pluralism and tolerance in Bosnia. It is this evidence of a
successfully shared past that exclusive nationalists have sought to erase.
Since the Middle Ages, Bosnia has been a complex and multifaceted society, where cultural and
religious influences from East and West have met and interacted, both with each other and with a
rich indigenous tradition.
Alone in medieval Europe, the Kingdom of Bosnia was a place where not one but three Christian
churches---Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and a schismatic local Bosnian Church--existed side by side. While the leaders of all three churches were called upon by medieval
Bosnian rulers to witness acts of state, the state did not regularly favor one church over the others.
Religious tolerance, or perhaps one might term it a relative detachment from religious affairs, was
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 3 -
characteristic of Bosnia for most of the medieval period. As a result, none of the three churches
could rely on the steady and exclusive patronage of either the ruling dynasty or the nobility and
all three remained organizationally weak, their clergy largely uneducated (these factors later
contributed to the decision by a large part of the Bosnian people to abandon Christianity for
Islam). Poorly endowed, the churches in medieval Bosnia were in no position to build great
cathedrals or impressive monastic establishments. [3]
The kings of Bosnia and the powerful local nobles, on the other hand, built as many as 300
castles to guard their mountainous domains and grew prosperous from the revenue of trading
caravans and the precious metals extracted from Bosnia’s mines. Aside from a few precious
manuscripts and art objects, however, little remains of the rich material culture of the medieval
period. What has survived in relative abundance are examples of a distinctively Bosnian art
form, the stecci (singular: stecak): massive medieval gravestones, some in the shape of solid
stone sarcophagi, others vertically oriented. Many of the stecci are beautifully decorated with
figural carvings and incised geometric patterns; often they are grouped in spectacular locations
overlooking the countryside. [4] [Ill. 1]
Islam arrived in Bosnia more than 500 years ago, when the armies of the Ottoman sultans swept
across the Balkans and onwards into Hungary. Their advance appeared unstoppable, and many
at the time felt it was directed by the hand of God. Throughout Europe, this was an age of
religious ferment and preachers everywhere, among them Martin Luther, saw in the coming of
the Ottomans a sign of divine judgment. In Bosnia, many people from all social and religious
backgrounds---more than half the population by the 1700s---adopted the triumphant faith of the
Islamic conquerors. A distinctive Bosnian Muslim culture took form, with its own architecture,
literature, social customs and folklore.[5] [Ill. 2]
Although the vast majority of the new Muslim converts in Bosnia were and remained poor
farmers, many Bosnians rose to join the ranks of the Ottoman ruling elite as soldiers, statesmen,
Islamic jurists and scholars. Among the most famous of these Bosnian converts was Mehmed
Pasha Sokolovic (1505-79), who served as grand vizier (chief minister) to three Ottoman sultans,
among them the greatest ruler of the age, Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent.
Mehmed Pasha administered an empire that stretched across three continents, from Yemen to
Algiers, from Baghdad to the gates of Vienna, and he married Princess Esmahan, Sultan
Süleyman's granddaughter. In addition to his accomplishments as a soldier and statesman,
Mehmed Pasha was also a generous patron of architecture. Among his many endowments were
two great mosques in Istanbul, the imperial capital, designed by the court architect Sinan, and the
famous bridge over the Drina that he commissioned as a benefaction for his home town of
Visegrad.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 4 -
In turn, the Ottoman sultans and their local governors also embellished Bosnia's towns with
splendid mosques and established endowments to build and support libraries, schools, charity
soup-kitchens and other pious foundations, around which markets, neighbourhoods and entire
new towns grew. [6]
Among these new Ottoman towns in Bosnia were Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Mostar. Located at
strategic river crossings and the intersections of trade routes, they became cultural and
commercial centers, thanks to newly-built bridges, bazaars, inns for merchants and travelers, and
other social service institutions.
The history here is reflected in the buildings: Muslim, Christian and Jewish townspeople lived,
worked and worshipped side by side. Standing in the center of Sarajevo's old bazaar is the Gazi
Husrev Beg Mosque, founded in 1531 by Bosnia’s first native Muslim governor. Within sight
of the great mosque stands the Old Orthodox church, built in the same period (before 1539) for
the use of Orthodox tradesmen attracted by the city's newly laid-out bazaars.[7] Another
Ottoman governor, Siyavus Pasha, endowed an Islamic pious foundation (waqf) in 1580-81 to
erect a large apartment building (han) for the poorer members of Sarajevo's Jewish community
and granted permission for the construction of the city's first synagogue next to the han.[8] A
bit to the west is Sarajevo's Roman Catholic cathedral, built in 1889 on the site of an older
church, in a part of the old city known in Ottoman times as Latinluk, the Latin (i.e. Roman
Catholic) quarter.[9] The mosque, the synagogue, and the Orthodox and Catholic churches are
all located close to each other in the city center, within an area of less than half a square
kilometer.
South of Sarajevo lies the city of Mostar, which owes its name (=“Bridge-keeper”) and
prosperity to the graceful Ottoman bridge that joins the banks of the Neretva River. When the
Ottomans conquered the region in the late 1400s, Mostar was a modest settlement of 20
households grouped around a medieval tower that guarded a shaky bridge of wooden planks
suspended on chains. After the administrative center of Herzegovina was moved to Mostar in
1522, the Ottoman provincial governors, most of them Bosnian Muslims, and other prominent
local Muslim families made pious endowments that built more than a dozen mosques, as well as
schools, markets, and inns, around which the city’s new neighborhoods developed. The addition
of the soaring stone arch of the Ottoman bridge in 1566 gave the city its defining landmark. By
the end of the 16th century, Mostar had grown into the third largest town in Bosnia, a thriving
center of commerce and culture. At the height of its prosperity in the late 1600s, the city had 30
mosques, and 7 madrasas (theological schools); the craftsmen in its bazaars were organized into
30 different guilds according to their specialties. As in Sarajevo, the look in Mostar also
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 5 -
bespeaks a long history of intermingled public life, with the Islamic minaret, the Catholic
campanile and the steeple of the Orthodox cathedral reaching up from one skyline. [10] [Ill. 3]
The placement of architecture is an intentional, thoughtful, political act. People who cannot abide
the sight of each other will not build their houses and the most important monuments of their
religious and communal life in the shadows of those of the others. Those who commissioned
these buildings and works of art, as well as those who made them, represented a variety of
religious traditions and artistic influences. The resulting monuments, manuscripts and art objects
demonstrate the degree to which cultures transformed and acted upon each other in Bosnia.
Thus, a number of mosques in Bosnia, among them one built in the 16th century by the powerful
Predojevic family in the village of Plana, near Mostar, have the look of medieval churches, with
minarets that resemble rustic Romanesque church steeples. We see another example of crosscultural influence in a splendid 16th -century cope, a Roman Catholic liturgical vestment in the
treasury of a Bosnian Franciscan monastery. The cope is made of silk brocade that is
immediately recognizable as a luxury textile in the high Ottoman court style. A Church Slavonic
Gospel manuscript, produced in the scriptorium of a Serbian Orthodox monastery at the
beginning of the 17th century, has the Cyrillic text of the Christian scriptures framed by bands of
illumination that are unmistakably Ottoman and Islamic in inspiration. The illuminator of this
manuscript, presumably a Christian monk, was familiar with and must have had access to Islamic
books as models. [Ill. 4–5]
Finally, we have the example of two little churches in the village of Ljubinje in Herzegovina, one
of them Roman Catholic the other Serbian Orthodox, both looking almost exactly alike. One
could say that their uncanny resemblance stems from the fact that the area probably had only one
master stonemason, who probably knew only one way to build a church. But more important is
the fact that these two churches stood within sight of each other in the same small community for
a hundred years or more and that this apparently did not bother either the Orthodox or the
Roman Catholic parishioners. [Ill. 6]
The remarkable thing about all of the above examples is that they involve items made for
religious purposes, for which the symbolic content matters more than it would in objects
intended for mundane uses. Yet, those who commissioned these objects, those who made them,
and those who used them deliberately chose to reach across religious and cultural boundaries
and evidently did not perceive such choices as problematic.
Of course, the fact that different religions and cultural traditions managed to coexist and engage
in fruitful interactions in Bosnia should not be taken to imply an absence of hierarchies of status
or of periodic frictions and rivalries between individuals and groups. Like other regions of
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 6 -
Europe in the early modern era, Ottoman Bosnia had its share of corrupt officials, oppressive
landlords and rebellious peasants, bandits, blood-feuds and other sources of social discord.
However, the fact of pluralism itself was considered a given. Over the longue durée, Bosnians of
different religious traditions found ways to live, work and build together.
The "ancient hatreds," then, are for the most part of recent vintage---not the inevitable outcome of
a history marked by endless conflict, but conscious creations of the essentialist ideologies of our
own troubled times. Before the Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque in Sarajevo was deliberately targeted
for shelling by Bosnian Serb artillery in 1992, it had stood unmolested for hundreds of years.
Bosnia's Ottoman centuries came to an abrupt end in the year 1878, when a conference of the
European powers met in Berlin and placed the province under Austro-Hungarian administration.
The new rulers brought a Viennese taste for the eclectic to their efforts to modernize Bosnia's
cities. Erecting new schools, museums and civic institutions they sought to bring their newlyacquired territory into the modern age. The buildings and cityscapes that are the most enduring
legacy of four decades of Habsburg rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina display a characteristically
Bosnian blend of cultural influences.[11]
Among the most handsome monuments of this eclectic era is Sarajevo’s beloved Town Hall
(Vijecnica in Bosnian), a Moorish-Revival style building erected on the bank of the Miljacka
river in the old town center of in the 1890s. In addition to housing the municipal administration,
Vijecnica was also where Bosnia's first national parliament convened on the eve of World War I.
After 1918, when Bosnia was absorbed into the newly-created Yugoslav state, the building
continued to serve as Sarajevo's city hall until the end of World War II. In 1945, the mayor’s
office was moved out and for the next half century the historic Town Hall became the home of
Bosnia’s National Library.
[Ill. 7–8]
An hour after nightfall on the evening of August 25, 1992, the National Library was bombarded
and set on fire by a tightly targeted barrage of incendiary shells, fired by Serb nationalist forces
from the heights overlooking the building. The library is located in the center of Sarajevo’s old
town, at the bottom of a deep valley. According to eyewitnesses, the incendiary shells---which
have little explosive power but are designed to start high-temperature blazes that are difficult to
extinguish---were fired at the library from half a dozen different Bosnian Serb Army artillery
emplacements on the mountains facing the old town on the east and south sides of the valley.
Only the library was hit---surrounding buildings stand intact to this day. Once the library was
fully ablaze, the shelling ceased. However, Bosnian Serb Army troops swept the surroundings
with heavy machinegun and anti-aircraft cannon fire aimed at street level, in order to keep away
the Sarajevo firemen and volunteers trying to save books from the burning building. As the
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 7 -
flames started to die down around daybreak, the shelling with incendiary munitions resumed and
the building continued to burn for some 15 hours; it smoldered for days thereafter. An estimated
1.5 million volumes were consumed by the flames in this, the largest single incident of deliberate
book-burning in modern history. [Ill. 9]
A librarian who was there described the scene:
"The fire lasted for days. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and
all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashes, floated down
like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment
read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until,
as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand." [12]
The inferno left the library a gutted shell, its interior filled with rubble and the carbonized
remains more than a million books. Before it was burned, the National Library held 155,000 rare
books, unique special collections and archives, 478 manuscript codices, more than 600 sets of
Bosnian periodicals, the national collection of record of the books, newspapers and journals
published in Bosnia since the mid-19th century, as well as the main research collections of the
University of Sarajevo. The books and archives destroyed by the fire included many items
recorded nowhere else---irreplaceable documents of centuries of Bosnia's social, cultural and
political life. One of the Sarajevo citizens who risked their lives to pass books out of the burning
library building told a television camera crew: "We managed to save just a few, very precious
books. Everything else burned down. And a lot of our heritage, national history, lay down there
in ashes." [13]
Three months earlier, the Serb nationalist gunners' target had been Sarajevo's Oriental Institute,
which housed the country's largest collection of Islamic manuscript texts and the former
Ottoman provincial archives. It was shelled and burned with all of its contents during the night
of May 17, 1992. Once again, the Institute was targeted with incendiary munitions, while the
surrounding buildings were left untouched. In addition to more than 5,200 manuscript codices
in Arabic, Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and alhamijado (Bosnian Slavic written in Arabic script),
the Oriental Institute’s destroyed collection included the Ottoman-era provincial archive and a set
of nineteenth-century cadastral registers recording the ownership of land in Bosnia at the end of
Ottoman rule. There was widespread speculation at the time that the Oriental Institute had been
targeted in order to destroy the land records.
We have evidence that these attacks were not isolated cases of "collateral damage", incidental to
the general mayhem of warfare, but part of a deliberate and systematic effort to target cultural
heritage. In September 1992, BBC reporter Kate Adie interviewed Serbian gunners on the
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 8 -
hillsides overlooking Sarajevo and asked them why they had been shelling the Holiday Inn, the
hotel where all of the foreign correspondents were known to stay. The Serbian officer
commanding the guns apologized to Ms. Adie, explaining his men had not meant to hit the hotel,
but had been aiming at the roof of the National Museum behind it.
The museum was badly damaged during the 3-1/2-year siege. Shells crashed through the roof and
the skylights and all of its 300 windows were shot out; shell-holes penetrated the walls of several
galleries. Parts of the National Museum's collection that could not be moved to safe storage
remained inside the building, exposed to damage from artillery attacks and to decay from exposure
to the elements. Dr. Rizo Sijaric, the museum's director, was killed by a shell burst during
Sarajevo's second siege winter (December 10, 1993), while trying to arrange for plastic sheeting
from U.N. relief agencies to cover some of the holes in the building. [14]
The catalogue of losses does not stop there. One could mention the destroyed and looted
monastery, church and library of the Franciscan Theological Seminary in the Sarajevo suburb of
Nedzarici; the shelling and partial destruction of the regional archives of Herzegovina in Mostar;
the 50,000 volumes lost when the library of the Roman Catholic bishopric of Mostar was set
ablaze by the Serb-led Yugoslav army; the burning and bulldozing of the 16th-century Serbian
Orthodox monastery of Zitomislic, south of Mostar, by Croat extremists; and similar acts of
destruction in hundreds of other Bosnian communities subjected to "ethnic cleansing" by Serb
and Croat nationalist forces.
This systematic assault on culture can be explained an attempt to eliminate the material evidence--books, documents, and works of art---that could remind future generations that people of different
ethnic and religious traditions once shared a common heritage and common space in Bosnia. The
goal of nationalist extremists is to create a religiously and ethnically “pure” future, based on the
premise that coexistence is---and always was---impossible. The continued existence of a heritage
that speaks of a history characterized by pluralism and tolerance contradicts this premise, which is
why, amidst an ongoing armed conflict, such efforts were invested in destroying the relics of
Bosnia’s “impure” past.
In addition to transforming the landscape to better accord with the demands of ideology, there is
also a practical aspect to the war on culture. While the destruction of a community's cultural and
religious institutions and records is, first of all, part of a strategy of intimidation aimed at
intimidating driving out members of the targeted group, it also serves a long-term goal. These
records were proof that others once lived in that place, that they had historical roots there. By
burning the documents, by razing houses of worship and bulldozing graveyards, the nationalists
who overran and “cleansed” hundreds of towns and villages in Bosnia were trying to insure
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 9 -
themselves against the possibility that the people they expelled and dispossessed might one day
return to reclaim their homes and properties.
In a context where ethnic identity is defined by the religious choices made by one’s ancestors, it
is religious buildings---mosques, churches, monasteries---that serve as the most potent markers
of a community’s presence. Thus it is not surprising that the destruction of houses of worship
became one of the hallmarks of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. [15]
At the conclusion of hostilities at the end of 1995, in the territory seized by Bosnian Serb forces
during the war more than 95 percent of all non-Serb residents had been killed or expelled, and
out of many hundreds of mosques almost all had been damaged or destroyed. According to one
report, citing United Nations officials, at the end of the war in 1996 the sole surviving mosque in
what is now the Republika Srpska (Bosnia’s Serb entity) was the one
in the village of Baljvina near Mrkonjicgrad. Although the Bosnian Serbs
had expelled Muslims from the village early in the war, when a Serb gang
later came to destroy the mosque, the local Serb inhabitants persuaded them
to leave the mosque alone, saying it was part of the "local color." [16]
More typical is what happened in Trebinje in eastern Herzegovina on the night of January 27,
1993, where Serb nationalist militiamen celebrated the feast of St. Sava, the medieval founder of
the Serbian Orthodox Church, by burning down the town’s oldest mosque and expelling
thousands of Trebinje’s Bosnian Muslim residents:
It burned all night as drunken men in paramilitary uniforms fired machine guns
in the air. By morning Trebinje's 500-year old mosque was ashes and a dark-eyed
young man, Kemal Bubic, 29, joined thousands of numbed people moving eastward.
"At that moment everything I had was burned down," he said. "It's not that my family
was burned down, but it's my foundation that burned. I was destroyed." [17]
Another small town in Bosnia is Foca on the Drina, east of Sarajevo. In April 1992, Foca was
overrun by Serb nationalist militia, who killed or expelled the town's majority Bosnian Muslim
population, set up a rape camp for Muslim women in the local sports arena, and set about
blowing up and bulldozing Foca's sixteen ancient mosques. Among them was the Aladza
Mosque, built in 1557, once one of the loveliest examples of Islamic religious architecture in the
Balkans. Hardly a trace remains of it today; the blasted walls were leveled by bulldozer and
dumped into the nearby river. Only the faint outlines of the mosque's foundation and a small
circle of white marble splinters, the shattered remnants of the ablution fountain, poke through the
weeds. "Cleansed" of its mosques and Muslims, Foca has been renamed Srbinje ("Serb Town")
to celebrate its new ethnically-pure identity. [18] [Ill. 10–11]
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 10 -
On March 13th, 1993, six mosques were blown up in a single night in the Serb-occupied town of
Bijeljina in eastern Bosnia. The next day, bulldozers were clearing away the rubble and a long
line of trucks and buses stood ready to take away those town's terrified Muslim residents. Two
months later, in May 1993, Western reporters visiting the town found grass and trees planted on
the leveled sites; it was as if the mosques and Bijeljina's 30,000 Muslims had never been there.
[19]
In the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, which had been under the control Serb nationalists
since before the beginning of the war and where there was no fighting, all of the city's mosques
were blown up between April and September 1993. In the center of the city stood the Ferhadija
Mosque, built in 1583 by Ferhad Pasha Sokolovic, the Ottoman governor of Banja Luka and a
cousin of Sultan Süleyman's famous Bosnian grand vizier. In the same way that Gazi Husrev
Beg’s benefactions had made Sarajevo flourish, it was the endowments founded by Ferhad
Pasha and his successors that helped turn Banja Luka from a sleepy village into Bosnia’s second
city.
On the evening of May 6,1993, as the city's Serbs were celebrating Djurdjevdan (the Orthodox
feast of Saint George), Banja Luka’s remaining Muslim residents huddled in their houses,
apprehensive that, as on other such occasions since the start of the war, the celebrations would
turn into a pogrom. At around 11 pm, witnesses looking out their windows saw Bosnian Serb
Army troops blocking off the streets around two old mosques near the city center, the 410-yearold Ferhadija and the 17th –century Arnaudija Mosque. A short while later, they heard military
trucks pulling up in front of the two mosques. After midnight, powerful explosions were heard
and by morning both mosques were gone. Of the lovely Arnaudija, nothing remained but a pile
of rubble. Next to the empty site of the Ferhadija, the stump of the minaret still stood, but not for
long. Despite pleas from the Muslim community to spare the remains, Banja Luka’s Bosnian
Serb mayor, Predrag Radic, declared the minaret a “hazard to passersby” and ordered the
municipal roads department to remove it. Using more explosives and pneumatic drills, the
remaining fragments of the ancient stonework were broken up into gravel, which was trucked off
to a secret dump site outside the city limits to prevent it from ever being used in rebuilding the
mosque. [20] [Ill. 12]
By the end of that year, all of Banja Luka's remaining Islamic religious sites and eleven Roman
Catholic churches in the Banja Luka region had been destroyed. As elsewhere, the destruction of
the monuments was also a signal for the expulsion of the people who cherished them---an
estimated 550,000 Bosnian Muslims, Catholic Bosnian Croats, Roma (Gypsies) and other nonSerbs who lived in this area of northwestern Bosnia before the war were killed or forced into
exile.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 11 -
In Visegrad, site of the famous old Ottoman bridge on the Drina, they came for the Muslims in
August 1992. A British reporter passed through town at the end of the month and interviewed
refugees huddled in sheds outside the city limits. "We are ready to run if they come for us
again," one Muslim refugee said, as he described how the great bridge had been used night after
night as a killing ground by drunken Serb militiamen. "They bulldozed the two mosques in the
main street in Visegrad so we wouldn't come back," he said. [21]
In 1993, emboldened by the Western powers' endorsement of ethnic partition, Croat nationalists
launched an all-out war to carve an ethnically pure "homeland" out of Herzegovina and parts of
central Bosnia. There had been ominous signs the year before, in the first months of the war,
following the the devastating April-June 1992 siege of Mostar by the Serb-led Yugoslav National
Army (JNA), in which most of the city’s historic monuments---including 17 of Mostar’s 19
mosques and all three of its Roman Catholic churches---had been damaged or destroyed by JNA
shelling. [22]
On a high ridge overlooking the old town of Mostar is the great Serbian Orthodox Cathedral
(Saborna crkva). The cathedral was built in 1863-1873, during the last years of Ottoman rule;
Sultan Abdul Aziz himself approved the site for the church and donated 100,000 silver coins for
its construction, while the Russian czar sent money for the interior decoration. For more than a
century the tall, Serbian Baroque steeple of the Orthodox cathedral had been part of Mostar’s
skyline---it had survived even the horrors of World War II, when Croatian fascists had first
turned on their non-Croat neighbours.
At the beginning of June1992, the Serb forces besieging Mostar were driven out of artillery
range. Within days, the city’s Serbian Orthodox cathedral was destroyed in a single, enormous
explosion in the middle of the night of June 15, 1992. Those responsible clearly wanted no
stone left on stone: more than a hundred nearby houses were also damaged in the blast. While
no group openly claimed responsibility for the attack, it was widely understood to have been the
work of Croat extremists taking vengeance for the JNA's destruction of the city’s Catholic
churches. [Ill. 13]
During the same month, Croat militias rounded up and expelled or imprisoned many Bosnian
Serb civilians living inthe areas under their control. By summer's end, Croat nationalist forces
began the process of expelling all non-Croats from their self-styled “Croatian Republic of
Herceg-Bosna”. First to be “cleansed” was the small town of Prozor, where in October 1992,
Croat nationalists shelled the mosque and the surrounding neighborhood, robbed and terrorized
the town's 5,000 Muslim inhabitants and and sent them fleeing into the mountains as night fell.
[23]
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 12 -
By the spring and summer of 1993, "ethnic cleansing" was in full swing throughout the areas
designated for Croat nationalist control under the proposed Vance-Owen partition plan for
Bosnia, and the old town of Mostar was once again being shelled, this time by Croat forces.
The following is an excerpt from a report issued by the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees on 23 August 1993:
In early July [1993], hundreds of draft-age men in Stolac, a predominantly Muslim town,
[southeast of Mostar] were reportedly rounded up [by the Bosnian Croat authorities] and
detained, probably in [the concentration camps at] Dretelj and Gabela. The total number
of detained civilians from Stolac is believed to be about 1,350. [...] On 1 August, four
mosques in Stolac were blown up. That night, witnesses said, military trucks carrying
soldiers firing their weapons in the air went through the town terrorizing and rounding up
all Muslim women, children and elderly. The cries and screams of women and children
could be heard throughout the town as the soldiers looted and destroyed Muslim homes.
The soldiers, who wore handkerchiefs,stockings or paint to hide their faces, took the
civilians to Blagaj, an area of heavy fighting northwest of Stolac. [24]
The four mosques mentioned in the report are (or were) charming examples of regional
architecture, three of them dating from the 1730s, one from the 1600s, built by local craftsmen to
the taste of the patrons, well-to-do Muslim Slav families from nearby Mostar. These were not
what art historians call great works of art. But for the Muslim residents of Stolac, they embodied
their hometown's Islamic past. The extremists who destroyed these monuments are well aware
of the vital connection between a community of people and its cultural heritage.
More than a year after the end of the war, in January 1997, United Nations police monitors
escorted two busloads of Bosnian Muslim refugees seeking to return to their homes in Stolac.
They were turned back on the outskirts of town by a stone-throwing mob organized by the Croat
nationalist mayor of Stolac. As the refugees and their UN escorts retreated under a hail of eggs
and stones, the mob chanted: "No more Muslims, no more mosques, no more bowing prayers."
[25]
A Croat nationalist militiaman, interviewed in Mostar in September 1993, explained to a British
reporter why he was trying to destroy the 427-year-old Ottoman bridge: "It is not enough to
clean Mostar of the Muslims," he said, "the relics must also be removed." [26]
A Muslim resident of Mostar, interviewed during that summer, was asked why he had stayed on,
despite the shelling, the hunger and the other dangers of life under siege: "I'm fighting for the
bridge," he said, as if that explained it all. Less than two months later,on November 9, 1993, after
hours of concentrated bombardment by a Croatian Army tank firing its cannon at point-blank
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 13 -
range, the bridge at Mostar finally collapsed into the river. By an eerie coincidence, the bridge
was felled on the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht the night when Jewish synagogues and
institutions were smashed and burned throughout Hitler's Great German Reich---that, too, was an
integral part of what today is euphemistically called "ethnic cleansing."
Like German Jews in the '30s, most Bosnian Muslims today are in fact highly secularized. But a
people's identity is inextricably linked with the visible symbols of their culture. Once those
anchors are gone, the past like the future, can be recreated by the victors.
In the Drina river town of Zvornik there were once a dozen mosques; in the 1991 census, 60% of
its residents called themselves Muslim Slavs. By the end of 1992 the town was 100% Serb, and
by the following spring Branko Grujic, the “cleansed” city’s new Serb mayor, was telling
foreign visitors: "There never were any mosques in Zvornik." [27]
The historian Eric Hobsbawm has written:
History is the raw material for nationalist or ethnic or fundamentalist ideologies,
as poppies are the raw material for heroin addiction [...] If there is no suitable past,
it can always be invented. The past legitimizes. The past gives a more glorious
background to a present that doesn't have that much to show for itself. [28]
To this, one should also add: before inventing a new past, the old one must first be erased.
In Bosnia, this erasure took a quite literal form. Consider, as an example, the city of Banja Luka,
where in early 1994, only months after the last of the city's sixteen mosques had been blown up,
the city fathers presided over the opening of an exhibition marking the sixty-fifth anniversary of
Banja Luka’s designation as the regional capital. The exhibition was organized by the regional
museum, which had been renamed “The Museum of the Republika Srpska,” and featured
historical photographs of Banja Luka from the 1920s and 30s and documents of the period. Of
the dozens of old photographs displayed in the exhibition, not one showed any trace of a mosque
or minaret. Like the “vanishing commissars” airbrushed out of photographs in Stalin’s Russia,
these major landmarks of Banja Luka’s urban landscape had vanished from the photos on
display. In the new, "ethnically pure" construction of the past, they had never existed. In fact,
they could not have existed---since according to the newly promulgated version of local history,
Banja Luka was and always had been a purely Serb city. [29] [Ill. 14]
In the world view of those who organized this exhibition, pluralism is anathema and coexistence
is declared to be an impossibility. The past, with its evidence of cultural intermingling and
synthesis has to be refashioned to conform to the nationalist paradigm of an apartheid future.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 14 -
That which contradicts the paradigm---people, buildings, works of art, or the written word---has
to be removed along with the memory of its existence.
In an effort to fight this assault on memory and to resurrect lost collections of original
manuscripts and documents from the ashes, a group of scholars from Bosnia, Canada and the
United States have established the Bosnian Manuscripts Ingathering Project. We were prompted
by the realization that although the Oriental Institute and many other manuscript collections in
Bosnia are now ashes, a number of the destroyed originals probably still exist in the form of
microfilms, photocopies or other facsimiles taken by foreign scholars as part of research projects
or sent abroad as part of exchanges between Bosnian libraries and foreign institutions. By
collecting copies of these copies of lost originals and making them available via the Internet, we
hope to help our Bosnian colleagues to resurrect at least part of their burned collections in
facsimile.
We collect data is by a variety of means, including an interactive Web site, announcements in
scholarly conferences and journals and by direct approaches to individuals. Our first successful
recovery, a haul of ca. 700 pages of recovered copies of manuscipts, came from a retired
professor at the University of Toronto, who had brought the copies back from a research trip
to Sarajevo nearly 20 years ago. We scanned these and other recovered photocopies onto a
CD-ROM, which we delivered to the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo in November 1998. While
that represents a mere fraction of what was lost, we are determined to continue. Each item
we uncover is one spark of light rescued from the darkness of oblivion and one more way to
frustrate the aims of those who tried to destroy Bosnia, its people and their cultural heritage. [30]
Unfortunately, cultural heritage and cultural institutions tend to rank low on the international
community’s list of priorities for post-war reconstruction. For the United Nations and for most
NGOs and intergovernmental agencies, operating in the usual crisis-response mode, the
aftermath of genocide in the Balkans is just another "humanitarian crisis" which, paradoxically,
reduces those most immediately affected from full human beings to "victims." Stripped of all
local specificity (a personal or collective past, cultural characteristics---let alone cultural values or
needs), they become indistinguishable from all the other nameless victims of floods, wars and
other calamities around the world. What the international agencies, quite rightly, focus on first is
people's elemental requirements: shelter, food, medical care. Usually ignored in the process are
questions such as who these people (specifically) are as individuals or as a community, what in
fact happened to them, or what they (specifically) might want or need.
What is particularly striking in all this is the reversal of perspectives---the "ethnic cleansers"
show a keen understanding of cultural and religious factors: these are the main criteria on which
they select their targets (both human and material) for attacks and destruction. The people who
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 15 -
have been “cleansed” because of their cultural and religious identity also understand this all too
well, which is why, amidst the devastation, they express such concern for the rebuilding of
houses of worship and cultural and educational facilities. Paradoxically, it is those engaged in
the "humanitarian response" who prefer to set aside such considerations as "inappropriate to the
first phase of reconstruction."
Long after the end of the war, international officials have continued to mostly pay lip service to
the need for the reconstruction and protection of Bosnia’s war-ravaged cultural and religious
heritage. One of the features of 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement is a clause (Annex 8)
establishing a Commission to Preserve National Monuments which, along with the Commission
on Human Rights (consisting of the Office of the Ombudsman and the Human Rights
Chamber), is among the few governmental bodies granted jurisdiction in both the Federation of
Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska, the two entities that together make up post-war
Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, more than five years after Dayton, the Commission to Preserve
National Monuments remains mired in disputes about procedural issues and, as of this writing, it
has yet to undertake any meaningful measures for the protection of Bosnia’s cultural heritage.
[Ill. 15]
Among the Commission’s meager accomplishments so far has been a tentative agreement on a
list of buildings and sites to be designated as “national monuments” (although there is still no
consensus on precisely what obligations such a designation might impose on property owners
and on the local authorities). One of these designated “national monuments” is the Ferhadija
Mosque in Banja Luka, a historic building that no longer exists and whose reconstruction has
been persistently blocked by the Serb nationalists who remain in control of the Republika
Srpska. The municipal authorities in Banja Luka not only removed the rubble of the Ferhadija
and the other demolished mosques, they also deleted the mosques from the city’s master plan.
The sites where the mosques once stood have been reserved for public parks and other uses,
according to the authorities, who declared reconstruction to be out of the question.
In frustration, the Islamic Community of Bosnia, acting on behalf of the few thousand Muslims
who still remain in the Banja Luka and the tens of thousands of exiled Banja Lukan Muslims
who want to return, turned to the Human Rights Chamber for redress. In July 1999, the Human
Rights Chamber ruled that the Government of the Republika Srpska had denied the right of the
Islamic Community to freedom of religion by refusing to allow the reconstruction of mosques
destroyed in the war. The Chamber specifically established that the Islamic Community had
property rights to fifteen sites of destroyed mosques and the right to enclose the properties.
According to the decision, the Government of the Republika Srpska may not allow other
construction on these sites and must issue any construction permits necessary to rebuild
mosques on seven of the sites. [31]
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 16 -
Following another year and a half of obstruction by the Bosnian Serb authorities, threats of
further legal action, and a great deal of earnest exhortation and cajoling on the part of
international officials, on March 19, 2001, the urban planning department of the Banja Luka
municipality finally issued the necessary construction permit authorizing the rebuilding of the
Ferhadija Mosque.
Although the funds and the plans for the reconstruction were not yet ready, a cornerstone laying
ceremony was set for May 7, 2001, the eighth anniversary of the mosque’s destruction. The
Republika Srpska ministry of the interior and Banja Luka’s police chief promised to provide
security for the event, the police chief assuring reporters that he expected no problems. However,
the ceremony, which was supposed to mark the beginning of reconciliation in Banja Luka, turned
into a pogrom instead. As one wire service report described the event,
Up to 2,000 nationalist Serbs rioted Monday to prevent a groundbreaking ceremony
for reconstruction of a 16th century mosque in the Serb-run city of Banja Luka.
The mob broke through a police cordon protecting international diplomats and some
1,000 former Muslim residents of Banja Luka who arrived to attend the ceremony.
The visitors were stoned and beaten, their prayer rugs stolen and burned, the
Muslim flag ripped down from the Islamic community building, burned and replaced
by a Bosnian Serb flag.
To further insult the Muslims, the mob chased a pig into the park where the mosque
once stood, slaughtered it, and hung its head in front of the Islamic community building,
where about 250 people, including the diplomatic corps and former Muslim residents,
hid from the mob. [32]
The mob surrounded the building for six hours, breaking all the windows and screaming “Kill
the Turks [i.e. the Muslims].” Among those trapped inside were the U.S., Canadian, British,
and Swedish ambassadors to Bosnia, and Jacques Klein, head of the UN Mission in Bosnia. To
their credit, the diplomats refused offers of safe passage until all of the Bosnian Muslims in the
building had been evacuated to safety. More than 30 people were injured in the Banja Luka
pogrom; Murat Badic, a 61-year-old Bosnian Muslim who had come pray at the ceremony, was
beaten unconscious and subsequently died of his injuries.
In the days after the incident, it became clear that the riot in Banja Luka, and a similar antiMuslim mob action to stop the reconstruction of a mosque in Trebinje two days earlier, had been
carefully prepared. The Banja Luka municipal public works department had reportedly dumped
truckloads of rocks near the site of the mosque the night before the event, as ammunition for the
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 17 -
rioters. In an effort to placate international officials after the riot, the Republika Srpska’s
Minister of Education sacked the principals of six secondary schools in Banja Luka who had
released their pupils from classes to allow them to take part in the “protest.” [33]
After the initial wave of expressions of outrage, some officials suggested that projects for the
rebuilding of mosques and churches that were destroyed during the war ought to be postponed--perhaps indefinitely---because such buildings may be perceived as “provocative” (presumably
by those who destroyed them in the first place).
However, after many years of pandering to such sensitivities, the time has come for the
international community to face reality. There has to be a recognition among policy makers that
cultural rights, religious freedom, and the right of refugees to return to their pre-war homes are
inextricably linked with each other. The protection and reconstruction of religious and cultural
heritage damaged or destroyed in the 1992-95 “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnia is not a frill to be
dispensed with or a “sensitive matter” better left untouched. It is central to the issue of
restoring multiculturalism and a civil society in postwar Bosnia. Without guarantees of cultural
security, including the rebuilding of destroyed houses of worship and cultural institutions,
hundreds of thousands of Bosnians will never have the confidence to return to the communities
from which they were expelled.
How can and should we respond to these attacks against culture? First, we have to reassert and
act on our own belief that there are principles of decency and international legality that are worth
defending. This means doing everything in our power to make sure that those who have violated
laws protecting cultural property are indeed punished and not rewarded for their deeds. In
addition to supporting criminal prosecutions of those responsible, the international community
should make a concerted effort to ensure some measure of restitution. In Bosnia, Kosovo and
other post-conflict situations, it is vital that effective steps be taken to make certain that
reconstruction projects will not be held hostage by bureaucratic obstruction or mob violence.
The restoration of damaged or destroyed cultural heritage is not a matter that can be safely
ignored, left to the victims to sort out, or hopefully put up for adoption by interested NGOs. As
the postwar experience in the Balkans has amply demonstrated, most of the NGOs active in the
aftermath of war and “ethnic cleansing” are neither interested in nor well qualified for
undertaking such projects. The NGOs’ lack of experience in dealing with heritage, combined in
some cases with aggressive sectarian agendas, can do more harm than good, compounding and
completing the destruction wrought by the “ethnic cleansers” and causing further divisions in
the community.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 18 -
However, in general, international aid gencies and non-sectarian organizations concerned with
heritage protection have tended to shy away from projects that involve religious structures, in the
mistaken belief that the reconstruction of houses of worship is a “sensitive issue,” which it is
best to avoid or postpone for the sake of postwar reconciliation. In this, they ignore the key role
that such projects can play in promoting the return of minority refugees, which is one of the
principal goals of the international community in post-Dayton Bosnia. By keeping their distance
from such projects, the secular organizations have also left the field open to sectarian sponsors,
among them Islamic fundamentalist aid agencies from the Arab world that have their own radical
agendas and have little interest either in the preservation of heritage or in the promotion of
interreligious and intercommunal harmony in Bosnia. [34]
Among the many negative consequences of the fragmented political arrangements imposed on
Bosnia by the framework of the Dayton Agreement is that the institutions that used to be
supported at the national level, including those involved in the protection of cultural heritage, have
been left orphaned, without adequate support or legal mandate. However, at the local level, where
regulatory authority now resides, there is a serious shortage of expertise and resources for
dealing with the cultural catastrophe wrought by the war. In addition to funding for specific
projects, there is a need for training in proper methods of assessment and in current methods and
approaches to the conservation of war-damaged monuments. The local authorities also need
support in drafting and effectively enforcing standards and regulations to stop the ongoing
destruction of important buildings and heritage sites that survived the war only to fall victim to
uncontrolled postwar development.
One of the most important ways in which governmental and international agencies can promote
the work of cultural reconstruction is through sponsoring programs for professional education
and technical and material assistance that can help build up the capability of the local institutions
in Bosnia. For some years to come, the need for an international presence and for international
assistance will continue. But ultimately, it will be these institutions and the new generation of
Bosnian architects and heritage experts who will be responsible for ensuring that their country’s
rich multicultural past will remain as a legacy and a lesson for future generations of Bosnians.
NOTES:
[1] On the vote for independence, see Daniel Kofman, “Self-determination in a Multi-ethnic
State: Bosnians, Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs,” in: Dzemal Sokolovic and Florian Bieber, eds.,
Reconstructing Multi-ethnic Societies: The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Aldershot: Ashgate
Publishing, 2001), pp. 31-61. For a day-by-day account and analysis of the siege of Sarajevo
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 19 -
through February 29, 1994, see: Final Report of the United Nations Commission of Experts
Established Pursuant to Security Council Resolution 780 (1992), Annex VI, Part 1: Study of the
Battle and Siege of Sarajevo, United Nations Security Council Doc. S/1994/674/Add.2 (Vol. II),
27 May 1994; also available on line at http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/comexpert/ANX/VI-01.htm
et seq. For the impact on the Bosnian capital’s cultural heritage and institutions as of 1994, see:
Cultural Institutions and Monuments in Sarajevo, ed. by Aida Cengic and Ferida Durakovic
(Budapest: Open Society Institute, 1994, [1995]); and the catalogue of a 1993-94 exhibition
organized by the Society of Architects of Sarajevo to document the destruction of their city,
Urbicide--Sarajevo = Sarajevo, une ville blessée (Bordeaux: Arc en rêve, Centre d'architecture;
Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, [1994]).
[2] Council of Europe. Committee on Culture and Education, Information Reports on the
Destruction by War of the Cultural Heritage in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (Strasbourg:
Council of Europe, Parliamentary Assembly, 1993-97), nos. 1-10 = Assembly Documents nos.
6756, 6869, 6904, 6989 + addendum, 6999, 7070, 7133, 7308, 7341, 7674, 7740; András
Riedlmayer, "Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina,"
Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 29 i (July 1995), pp. 7-11; Vesna Blazina, "Mémoricide ou
la purification culturelle: la guerre et les bibliothèques de Croatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovine,"
Documentation et bibliothèques 42 (1996), pp. 149-64; Alain-Charles Lefèvre, "Bosnie et Croatie:
un désastre culturel sans précédent," Archéologia no. 328 (Nov. 1996), pp. 26-35.
[3] The remains of no more than about two dozen medieval churches have been recorded in
Bosnia. The most monumental among these still standing is the Gothic belfry of St. Luke's
Church (built 1461-65) in Jajce. Some scholars, such as Srecko Dzaja, Konfessionalität und
Nationalität Bosniens und der Herzegowina: voremanzipatorische Phase 1463-1804.
Südosteuropäische Arbeiten, 80 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1984), pp. 159-165, have
argued that, since medieval written sources mention additional churches and monastic
establishments, the fact that so few ruins have survived is entirely attributable to destruction and
neglect during the Ottoman period and the ravages of time. However, given the fact that more than
a century of archaeological investigations have failed to uncover more substantial remains of
monumental church buildings from the Middle Ages in Bosnia (in contrast to some other regions
of the Balkans), it may be safer to conclude that one reason why the churches and monasteries
(hize) mentioned in the sources have not left more of a trace in the archaeological record is that
most of them must have been quite modest structures.
[4] On medieval Bosnian art and its deployment in support of modern discourses on Bosnian
identity, see Marian Wenzel, Ornamental Motifs on Tombstones from Medieval Bosnia and
Surrounding Regions = Ukrasni motivi na steccima (Sarajevo: Veselin Maslesa, 1965), and Idem,
“Bosnian History and Austro-Hungarian Policy: The Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo, and the Bogomil
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 20 -
Romance,” Museum Management and Curatorship 12 (1993), pp. 127-42; the complex history of
Bosnia's cultural heritage is presented in a study by Ivan Lovrenovic, Unutarnja zemlja: kratki
pregled kulturne povijesti Bosne i Hercegovine [The Inner Land: A Brief Survey of the Cultural
History of Bosnia and Herzegovina] (Zagreb: Durieux, 1998); Lovrenovic's argument is summed up
by Milenko Jergovic, in a review article in Bosnia Report (London) n.s. 4 (June/July 1998):
"Bosnia's cultural and civilizational identity forms a unity in its meanings, but its image is expressly
that of a mosaic. No element of the mosaic was formed on its own or can today represent the whole."
An English translation of this work was recently published under the title, Bosnia: A Cultural History
(London: Saqi Books; New York: New York University Press, 2001)
[5] The best survey in English of Bosnian society and culture in the Ottoman era is Noel Malcolm,
Bosnia: A Short History, rev. ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1996), chapters 4-10; the
richness and complexity of the artistic heritage produced in this period is well illustrated in The Art
Treasures of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ed. Mirza Filipovic et al. (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1987).
[6] On the the great Islamic foundations (waqf) that built Sarajevo, see Nijazija Kostovic, Sarajevo
izmedu dobrotvorstva i zla [Sarajevo between philanthropy and evil times] 2nd ed. (Sarajevo: ElKalem, 1998); for the role of waqf in the development of Mostar, see Hivzija Hasandedic, Mostarski
vakufi i njihovi vakifi [The Islamic foundations of Mostar and their founders] (Mostar: Odbor
Islamske zajednice, 2000). Amir Pasic, Islamic Architecture in Bosnia and Hercegovina, transl. by
Midhat Ridjanovic (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art, and Culture, 1994).
[7] Boris Nilevic, “O postanku stare pravoslavne crkve u Sarajevu” [On the origin of the Old
Orthodox Church in Sarajevo], Prilozi historiji Sarajeva: radovi sa Znanstvenog simpozija “Pola
milenija Sarajeva”, odrzanog 19. do 21. marta 1993. godine, ed. Dzevad Juzbasic (Sarajevo: Institut
za istoriju, Orijentalni institut, 1997), pp. 61-65. According to Nilevic, some sources suggest the
existence of a local Orthodox community predating the building of Sarajevo's Old Orthodox Church,
and he concludes that they must have had a pre-existing house of worship; that may be so, but the
fact remains that this particular church was erected following the Ottoman conquest. On Orthodox
Christian art produced in Bosnia under Ottoman rule, see also Svetlana Rakic, Serbian Icons from
Bosnia-Herzegovina: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century (New York: A. Pankovich Publishers, 2000).
On Islamic influences on Orthodox Christian art in Bosnia, see Zagorka Janc, "Islamski elementi u
srpskoj knjizi," [Islamic elements in the Serbian book] Zbornik Muzeja primenjene umetnosti, 5
(1959), pp. 27-43, and Andrej Andrejevic, "Prilog proucavanju Islamske uticaja na umetnost XVI. i
XVII. veka kod srba u Sarajevu i Bosni," [A contribution to the study of Islamic influences on the art
of the Serbs of Sarajevo and Bosnia in the 16th and 17th c.]Prilozi za proucavanje istorije Sarajeva, 1
(1963), pp. 51-57.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 21 -
[8] For the early history of Sarajevo's Spanish-Jewish community and of the city's first synagogue,
see Moritz Levy, Die Sephardim in Bosnien: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Juden auf der
Balkanhalbinsel (Sarajevo, 1911; reprt. Graz: Wieser Verlag, 1996), pp. 11-22, 134. Siyavus Pasha's
grant of permission for the building of a synagogue next to the new han was, technically, a violation
of Islamic law—which allows the repair and reconstruction of pre-existing non-Muslim houses of
worship, but not the erection of new ones where none had stood before. What makes this bending of
the law all the more remarkable is that the property was entangled with not one but two Islamic pious
foundations: the waqf of Gazi Husrev Beg, which owned the land underneath the buildings, and that
of Siyavus Pasha. For the history of Siyavus Pasha's foundation and of the great han he built for
the Jews of Sarajevo (which they called El Cortijo, the "Great Courtyard," in Judaeo-Spanish), see
Alija Bejtic, "Sijavus-pasina daira," Prilozi za proucavanje istorije Sarajeva, 2 (1966), pp. 61-102.
[9] For the history of the Catholic community in sixteenth-century Sarajevo, see Fra Ljubo
Lucic, “Franjevacka prisutnost u Sarajevu” [The Franciscan presence in Sarajevo], Prilozi
historiji Sarajeva: radovi sa Znanstvenog simpozija “Pola milenija Sarajeva”, odrzanog 19.
do 21. marta 1993. godine, ed. Dzevad Juzbasic (Sarajevo: Institut za istoriju, Orijentalni institut,
1997), pp. 239-260; on Catholic art and culture in Bosnia under Ottoman rule, see Franjevci na
raskrscu kultura i civilizacija: blago franjevackih samostana Bosne i Hercegovine =
Franciscans on the Crossroad of Cultures and Civilizations: The Treasures of the Franciscan
Monasteries of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ed. Ante Soric, Jasmina Dautcehajic Avdagic, [et al.]
(Zagreb: Muzejsko Galerijski Centar, 1988).
[10] Amir Pasic, The Old Bridge (Stari Most) in Mostar (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic
History, Art, and Culture, 1995).
[11] Ibrahim Krzovic, Arhitektura Bosne i Hercegovine 1878-1918 [Architecture of Bosnia and
Herzegovina, 1878-1918] (Sarajevo: Umjetnicka galerija Bosne i Hercegovine, 1987); Borislav
Spasojevic, Arhitektura stambenih palata austrougarskog perioda u Sarajevu [Architecture of
residences and mansions of the Austro-Hungarian period in Sarajevo], 2nd ed. (Sarajevo: Rabic,
1999).
[12] Eyewitness account by Kemal Bakarsic, at the time chief librarian of Bosnia's National
Museum (Zemaljski muzej), in "The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book That Saved Our Lives,"
The New Combat: A Journal of Reason and Resistance, 3 (Autumn 1994), pp. 13-15. On the
burning of the National Library, the Oriental Institute, and other libraries and archives and the
role these attacks played in the process of “ethnic cleansing,” see also: András Riedlmayer,
“ Convivencia under Fire: Genocide and Book-burning in Bosnia,” The Holocaust and the
Book: Destruction and Preservation, ed. Jonathan Rose (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2001), pp. 267-91, and Idem, “"Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 22 -
Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina." Middle East Studies Association Bulletin vol. 29 no. 1 (July
1995), pp. 7-11.
[13] Account of the attack on the library and the ensuing fire based on: reports filed from the
scene by Kurt Schork, “Sarajevo's Much-loved Old Town Hall Ablaze," Reuters Library Report,
26 August 1992, and John Pomfret, "Battles for Sarajevo Intensify as Bosnian Peace Conference
Opens," Associated Press, 26 August 1992; personal interviews with library workers, fire
fighters and other eyewitnesses; unedited footage from TV BiH; quote from volunteer rescue
worker aired on ABC News, 13 January 1993.
[14] Kate Adie's interview cited in "Bosnia's Written History in Flames? The Major Libraries and
Archives Reported Destroyed," The Art Newspaper (London), vol. 3 no. 21 (October 1992), p. 1;
for damage to the National Museum, see Rizo Sijaric, "Update on the Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo,"
Museum Management and Curatorship 12 (1993), pp. 195-99; Marian Wenzel, "Obituary: Dr.
Rizo Sijaric, Director of the Zemaljski Muzej, Sarajevo. Killed in Sarajevo, 10 December 1993,"
Museum Management and Curatorship 13 (1994), pp. 79-80.
[15] On the fatal nexus between ethnicity, religion and genocide during the 1992-95 Bosnian
war, see Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia, rev.
ed.(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); a Bosnian edition was recently published
under the title, Iznevjereni most: religija i genocid u Bosni, transl. by Zoran Mutic (Sarajevo:
Sedam, 2002).
[16] Jolyon Naegele, “Banja Luka's Mufti Tells Of 'Four Years Of Horror',” RFE/RL.Weekday
Magazine, September 6, 1996; the report is available on line at
http://www.rferl.org/features/1996/09/f.ru.96090616572638.asp.
[17] Dusko Doder, “On Serb Holy Day, Hellfire for Foes,” The Boston Globe, February 10,
1993.
[18] On the destruction of Foca’s Bosnian Muslim community and of the monuments that
testified to more than 500 years of Muslim culture in Foca, see Faruk Muftic, Foca: 1470-1996
(Sarajevo: Sahinpasic, 1997); Semso Tucakovic, Aladza dzamija: ubijeni monument [The
Aladza Mosque: a murdered monument] (Sarajevo: Institut za istrazivanje zlocina protiv
covjecnosti i medunarodnog prava, 1998); Denis Basic [et al.] “History, Culture and
Destruction of Foca” (Web site) http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/foca/foca.html
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/foca/foca2.html
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 23 -
[19] U.S. Department of State. Supplemental United States Submission of Information to The
United Nations Security Council In Accordance with Paragraph 5 of Resolution 771 (1992) and
Paragraph 1 of Resolution 780 (1992): [Eighth Report] June 16, 1993, posted on the Web at
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/reports/8thC.html . The expulsion of Bosnian Muslim
civilians from Bijeljina during the war, and the continued abuses Muslim returnees have met with
since Dayton, are described in the May 2000 Human Rights Watch report, Unfinished Business:
The Return of Refugees and Displaced Persons to Bijeljina
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/bosnia/
[20] Based on eyewitness accounts of the destruction, including that of Bedrudin Gusic, who
had the unenviable task of serving as the elected chairman of the Committee of the Islamic
Community in Banja Luka from May 1992 until November 1994. Mr Gusic’s account was
published in Bosnian in the Sarajevo daily Oslobodjenje, March 16-23, 1995; an English
translation is posted on line at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/banjaluka/gusic1.html and
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/banjaluka/gusic2.html .
The removal of the remains of the mosques was witnessed by Frank Westerman, who reported
on the Bosnian war for the Amsterdam daily NRC Handelsblad; his account of the destruction
and his interview with Banja Luka’s Serb nationalist mayor, Predrag Radic, appears in
Westerman’s book, De Brug over de Tara (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Atlas, 1994), pp. 7-13; my
English translation of the interview is posted at
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/banjaluka/banjaluka.html . The destruction of Roman
Catholic churches in Banja Luka and elsewhere in Bosnia and Herzegovina is documented in
Raspeta crkva u Bosni i Hercegovini: unistavanje katolickih sakralnih objekata u Bosni i
Hercegovini (1991.-1996), ed. Ilija Zivkovic (Banja Luka, Mostar, Sarajevo: Hrvatska matica
iseljenika Bosne i Hercegovine; Zagreb: Hrvatski informativni centar, 1997).
[21] Maggie O’Kane, “Then they set the house on fire and everyone inside was screaming… I
was the only one who got out,” The Guardian (London), August 20, 1992; Alec Russell, “Serbs
pursue survivors of 'ethnic cleansing',” The Daily Telegraph (London), August 20, 1992.
[22] The systematic destruction of the historic center of Mostar and its architectural monuments
during the April-June 1992 JNA siege was documented by the Mostar Society of Architects
(Drustvo arhitekata Mostar) in an illustrated exhibition catalogue, Mostar '92: urbicid, ed. Ivanka
Ribarevic-Nikolic and Zeljko Juric (Mostar: Hrvatsko vijece obrane opcine Mostar, 1992).
[23] On the destruction of Serbian Orthodox sacred sites by Croat and Muslim extremists, see
Slobodan Mileusnic, Duhovni genocid: Pregled porusenih, ostecenih i obesvecenih crkava,
manastira i drugih crkvenih objekata u ratu 1991-1995 = Spiritual Genocide: A Survey of
Destroyed, Damaged, and Desecrated Churches, Monasteries, and Other Church Buildings
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 24 -
during the War 1991-1995 (Belgrade: Muzej Srpske Pravoslavne Crkve, 1997); and Michael
Sells and András Riedlmayer, "Zitomislici (1566-1992): Meaning, History, and Tragic End"
(Web site), online at http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/zitomislici/zitomislici.html and
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/zitomislici/zitomislicirenewal.htm , On the 1992 "ethnic
cleansing" of Prozor by Croat militiamen, see Ed Vulliamy, Seasons in Hell: Understanding
Bosnia's War (London and New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 221-34; John Burns,
“Croats Wield the Guns in ‘Cleansed’ Town,” New York Times, October 30, 1993.
[24] UNHCR Press Release REF/1034; on the destruction of cultural heritage in Stolac, see
also Matej Vipotnik, "Searching for Bosnia's Lost Cultural Treasures," Berserkistan [on-line
newspaper], (July 30, 1996), available on line as "Ethnic Cleansing and Destruction in Stolac," at
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/stolac/DestroyingStolac.htm and the documentation compiled
by the Presidency-in-exile of the Municipality of Stolac, Crimes in Stolac Municipality, 19921994 (Sarajevo: Did, 1996), pp. 45-54, also available on line at
http://www.haverford.edu/relg/sells/stolac/StolacDocuments.htm.
[25] “Bosnian Croats Block Return of Muslims,” (Reuters, Feb 2, 1997); four years later, an
investigation revealed that remarkably little had changed in Stolac: Nick Thorpe, “Croat Town
Now a Criminal Haven: SAS Investigator Asks Why Gangsters And Ethnic Warriors Live Freely
in Stolac, Bosnia,” The Guardian (London) May 2, 2001, on line at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,481599,00.html
[26] Robert Block, "Croatian Death Squad Talks Tough around the Pooltable," The Independent
(London), September 6, 1993. Since the end of the war, the stones of the historic bridge have been
recovered from the riverbed---the bridge is being rebuilt as part of an international project sponsored
by UNESCO; see Jerrilynn Dodds, "Bridge over the Neretva," Archaeology 51 i (Jan.-Feb. 1998),
pp. 48-53. For updates, see the website of the Center for Peace and Multiethnic Cooperation
Mostar (Centar za mir i multietnicku saradnju Mostar) http://www.centarzamir.org.ba/eng/index.html
[27] Branko Grujic interviewed by Carol J. Williams, “Serbs Stay Their Ground on Muslim
Lands: Conquering Warlords Bend History and Reality in an Attempt to Justify Their Spoils,”
Los Angeles Times, March 28, 1993; Laura Silber, “Serb Mayor Confident in Bosnian Town
Where Mosques Are Rubble: Voters Go to Polls in Referendum on Peace Plan,” Financial
Times (London), May 17, 1993; Roger Cohen, "In a Town Cleansed of Muslims, Serb Church
Will Crown the Deed," New York Times, March 7, 1994.
[28] Eric Hobsbawm, “Debunking Ethnic Myths,” Open Society News (Winter 1994), pp. 1,
10-11, p. 10, condensed from a lecture delivered at Central European University, Budapest, at the
opening of the 1993-94 academic year; a longer version was published, under the title “Outside
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 25 -
and Inside History,” in Hobsbawm’s collection of essays, On History (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1997), pp. 1-9.
[29] The 1994 exhibition is described by the Banja Luka local historian Aleksandar Aco Ravlic,
himself a Bosnian Serb but outraged at what was being done to his city, in his book, Banjalucka
Ferhadija: ljepotica koji su ubili [The Ferhadija of Banja Luka: A Murdered Beauty] (Rijeka:
AARiS, 1996), p. 57, English summary p. 172. For other examples of the use of retouched
photographs to “correct” an ideologically unacceptable past, see David King, The Commissar
Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 1997).
[30] The Bosnian Manuscripts Ingathering Project was established in 1994 by Amila Buturovic
(York University), András Riedlmayer (Harvard University), and Irvin Cemil Schick (Harvard
University); the recovered pages are being scanned and posted on the Internet by Prof. Kemal
Bakarsic and his students in the Department of Comparative Literature and Librarianship at the
Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. For further information, see the Ingathering Project's Web
sites at http://www.openbook.ba/bmss/ and http://www.kakarigi.net/manu/ingather.htm
[31] The Human Rights Chamber’s decision in the Banja Luka case, delivered on June 11, 1999,
is available on line at http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~ujvr/hrch/0000-0999/0029admmer.htm , Sites of
destroyed mosques in towns throughout the Bosnian Serb entity have also been rezoned for
other uses in order to prevent reconstruction. In Bijeljina, the sites of the town’s leveled
mosques have been used as flea markets, parking lots, and sites for shops and kiosks. In a letter
dated July 7, 1999, the Serb-controlled municipality refused permission for the rebuilding of the
historic Atik mosque in the center of Bijeljina. The reason cited was that the urban plan for that
part of town had changed and that now a theater was planned for that site. François Perez, at the
time the Office of the High Representative’s Special Envoy in Bijeljina, astonishingly backed the
Bosnian Serb municipal authorities, terming the request to rebuild the mosque “too extreme,”
and suggesting that "maybe in time, a mosque could be built in the periphery of town." (Human
Rights Watch interview with François Perez, Bijeljina, September 28, 1999, cited in .
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2000/bosnia/Bosn005-06.htm#P1218_278606 )
[32] Aida Cerkez-Robinson, “Muslim leader urges restraint following attack ,” Associated
Press (May 8, 2001).
[33] For a report on the mob attack in Trebinje, in which one international official was beaten
severely enough to require hospitalization, see “Serbs Block Bosnia Mosque Ceremony” BBC
News, May 6, 2001 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1315000/1315262.stm
On the advance preparations for the anti-Muslim riot in Banja Luka, see Ivan Lovrenovic,
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 26 -
“Erupcija ubiljackog sovinizma u BiH’ [Eruption of murderous chauvinism in Bosnia], Feral
Tribune (Split) no. 817, May 14, 2001; English summary at http://www.ohr.int/ohrdept/presso/bh-media-rep/round-ups/default.asp?content_id=498#6. The Croat extremists who
run Stolac have also continually tried to block efforts by Muslim returnees to rebuild even one of
the town’s four destroyed mosques, reportedly telling the mufti of Mostar, “If you start building a
mosque, we will build a [Catholic] church on its cornerstone;” reported in Ljiljan (Sarajevo), May
27, 2001; English translation available on line at
http://www.tfeagle.army.mil/tfeno/Feature_Story.asp?Article=12638 . Nevertheless, reconstruction
of the 16th -century Careva dzamija (Emperor's Mosque) in the center of Stolac is now going
forward, despite the repeated efforts of local Croat nationalist extremists, and of Dr. Ratko Peric,
the Roman Catholic bishop of Mostar-Duvno and a militant Croat nationalist, to obstruct the
project.
[34] More than 156 mosques that have been repaired, rebuilt or newly constructed in Bosnia since
the war have been sponsored by Islamic relief agencies from Saudi Arabia, which have used their
financial clout in order to promote the intolerant, Islamic fundamentalist missionary agenda of the
Saudi-based Wahhabi sect. Stephen Schwartz, “Islamic Fundamentalism in the Balkans,”
Partisan Review (July 2000), pp. 421-26; Saïd Zulficar, "Alerte aux iconoclastes!" Al-Ahram
Hebdo (February, 28, 2001), on line at
http://hebdo.ahram.org.eg/Arab/Ahram/2001/2/28/Null0.htm
Jolyon Naegele, “Saudi Wahhabi Aid Workers Bulldoze Balkan Monuments,” RFE/RL Weekday
Magazine (August 4, 2000) http://www.rferl.org/specials/yugoslavia/monuments/.
ILLUSTRATIONS AND CAPTIONS
Illustration #1
PHOTO CAPTION:
Medieval Bosnian gravestones (stecci) at Radimlja, near Stolac in Herzegovina.
Photo: András Riedlmayer
Illustration #2
PHOTO CAPTION:
Traditional Bosnian Muslim gravestones at Jakir, near Glamoc in western Bosnia. The very large
headstone in the center marks the grave of Omer Aga Basic, an 18th-c. local notable.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 27 -
Photo: András Riedlmayer
Illustration #3
PHOTO CAPTION:
Mostar skyline before the 1992-95 war, shared by a clocktower endowed by a 17th-c. Muslim
lady benefactor, a nearby minaret (18th c.), and the steeple of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral
(19th c.) on the ridge overlooking the old city.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
Illustration #4
PHOTO CAPTION:
Mosque of Hasan Pasa Predojevic (16th c.) at Plana, near Bileca in Herzegovina.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Illustration #5
PHOTO CAPTION:
Roman Catholic liturgical vestment made from an Ottoman silk brocade textile, in
the treasury of the Bosnian Franciscan monastery of Zaostrog. Pious legend has it
that the vestment was made from a mantle donated to the monastery by the last Bosnian king,
Stjepan Tomasevic (d. 1463), but the textile dates from at least a century after his death.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Illustration #6
PHOTO CAPTION:
The Roman Catholic (top) and Serbian Orthodox (bottom) parish churches in
the village of Ljubinje in eastern Herzegovina.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Illustration #7
PHOTO CAPTION:
The first Bosnian parliament, meeting in the Vijecnica (Town Hall) of Sarajevo in 1910.
Historic postcard in the collection of the Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program,
Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
NOTE: Illustrations nos. 7 and 8 should be connected to the paragraph ending:
... the historic Town Hall became the home of Bosnia's National Library.
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 28 -
Illustration #8
PHOTO CAPTION:
The same room in the Vijecnica (old Town Hall), being used as the main reading room of the
National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1980s.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Illustration #9
PHOTO CAPTION:
View of the burned-out interior of the National and University Library (Vijecnica), Sarajevo.
Photo: Matej Vipotnik. Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
University.
Illustration #10
PHOTO CAPTION:
The 16th-c. Aladza Mosque in the eastern Bosnian town of Foca on the Drina, before the war.
Photo: Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.
Illustration #11
PHOTO CAPTION:
Cleared site of the 16th-c. Aladza Mosque in Foca after the war. The circle of stones in the
foreground is what remains of the marble ablution fountain (sadrvan); the outlines of the razed
mosque's foundations can still be seen in the grass growing on the site.
Photo: Lucas Kello (1996). Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library,
Harvard University.
Illustration #12
PHOTO CAPTION:
The 16th-c. Ferhadija Mosque in Banja Luka, the day after it was blown up by Bosnian Serb
Army sappers in May 1993. The stump of the toppled minaret (in the foreground) and the
mausoleum of Ferhad Pasha Sokolovic (to the right) were subsequently also blown up and the
rubble removed by the Serb municipal authorities. The mufti's office in the background is the only
Islamic community building in Banja Luka left standing at the end of the war.
Photo: Aleksandar Aco Ravlic (1993).
Illustration #13
PHOTO CAPTION: The blasted ruins of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral in Mostar, blown up
by Croat nationalist extremists in June 1992.
Photo: András Riedlmayer
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 29 -
Illustration #14
PHOTO CAPTION: Early 20th-c. postcard showing the main market street in Banja Luka, with
the Ferhadija Mosque towering in the background.
Postcard in the collection of the Documentation Center, Aga Khan Program, Fine Arts Library,
Harvard University.
Illustration #15
PHOTO CAPTION:
Barbarism is contagious. A broken stecak, one of a group of medieval gravestones in the form of
large stone crosses carved with designs of human figures, at the village of Gornja Dreznica, in the
mountains north of Mostar. These ancient stecci have been smashed by a bulldozer and defaced
with a crudely-drawn crescent-and-star logo (symbol of the Muslim-nationalist SDA party); the
same graffiti also deface a vandalized Roman Catholic church near the entrance to the Dreznica
valley, which was the scene of intense fighting between Croat and Muslim militias in 1993-1994.
For prewar photographs of the cruciform stecci at Dreznica, see Sefik Beslagic, "Stari krstovi u
Dreznici," Nase starine 3 (1956), pp. 179-188.
Photo: András Riedlmayer
From the Ashes: The Past and Future of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage / A.Riedlmayer - 30 -