Culture Name: Bosnian - Herzegovinan

Orientation

Identification: The name "Bosnia" comes from the Bosna Pond, which cuts from the region. Herzegovina takes its name from the saying herceg, which designated this duke who decided the southern section of the region until this Ottoman invasion inside the fifteenth century. Both regions are culturally indistinguishable and for high of their history happen to be united under 1 government. Although ethnical variations in Bosnia as well as Herzegovina are small, cultural identity is extremely divisive. The three main groups are Muslims (Bosniacs), Serbs, as well as Croats. Before this recent civil warfare, many areas from the country had merged populations; now the populace has become a lot more homogeneous in almost all regions.

Location as well as Geography. Bosnia is southeastern Europe on the Balkan Peninsula, bordering Slovenia for the northwest, Croatia for the north, and Serbia and Montenegro south and southwest; it's got a tiny coastline along the Adriatic Sea. The land area is 19, 741 block miles (51, 129 block kilometers). Herzegovina could be the southern portion from the country; it is shaped like a triangle whose word of advice (surrounded by Croatia as well as Yugoslavia) touches this Adriatic. Northern Bosnia is characterized by plains and plateaus. The central and southeast regions are mountainous. The Dinaric Alps that cover this location also extend southward in to Serbia and Montenegro. These kind of regions, including areas around Sarajevo, the capital, are conducive to skiing and other winter sports and before the civil war were a popular tourist destination. A lot of the land (39 percent) is forested; only fourteen percent is arable. Most of the farmland is inside the northern section of the country.

The local climate varies from cold winters and slight, rainy summers inside the mountains to docile winters and very hot, dry summers in the rest of the country and a more Mediterranean climate at the coast. The entire region is vulnerable to severe earthquakes. Bosnia also is suffering from air and water pollution on account of poorly regulated industrial production inside the years before this civil war.

Demography. The people was 4, 364, 574 throughout 1991. A You. S. estimate from the population in September 2000 was 3, 835, 777; nevertheless, that figure seriously isn't reliable as a result of dislocations and deaths from military pastime and ethnic cleansing. In 1991, approximately 44 percent from the people were Bosniac, thirty-one percent were Serb, 18 percent were Croat, 5. 5 percent were Yugoslav (of merged ethnicity), and a couple of. 5 percent ended up of other civilizations. Since that time, the Bosniac populace has declined knowning that of the Serbs has risen on account of ethnic cleansing with the Serbian army. (The terms "Bosniac" as well as "Muslim" often are used interchangeably; "Bosniac" refers more explicitly a great ethnicity, to avoid confusion using the term "Muslim, " which means any follower from the Islamic faith. )

Considering that 1995, the country may be internally divided in a Bosniac/Croat Federation, which controls 51 percent from the land and in whose majority is Bosniac as well as Croat, and any Serb Republic, that has the other 49 percent possesses a Serb the greater part. Herzegovina, which edges Croatia, has historically had a Croat the greater part.

Linguistic Affiliation. Croatian, Serbian, as well as Bosnian language are essentially identical; the distinction most notable is a make a difference of identity governmental policies. Serbians write their language inside the Cyrillic alphabet, whereas Croatian and Bosnian make use of the Latin script. Turkish and Albanian are spoken by way of small minority.

Importance. The flag is blue, with a yellow-colored isosceles triangle for the upper right as well as seven five-pointed

A Bosnian Alphabet

APOLOGY: A ought to be for Alphabet: the unit I am resorting to in a few desperation to structure my ideas on this subject: our relations vis-à-vis a pair of Yugoslavian wars. That is my fourth try at organising the material, the deadline looms plus the only virtue with this catch-all structure is actually its transparency. An ABC? You learn the writer’s with trouble. So, a new pre-emptive strike in exaggerated expectations. A, in this instance, must be pertaining to Apology.

BAD FAITH: Primary sources for records on the second Austro-Turkic battle of 1787-89 are merely available in this country over the British Museum’s Burney Variety. A badly catalogued collection of late eighteenth-century newspapers have been
transferred to microfiche which is available to readers in a windowless room journey North Library Gallery. It is just a vile working surroundings; neon-lit, unventilated plus the heat from the
projectors parches what air there's. A fortnight’s digging gave me the important points I needed to patch together a picture on the earlier war. I visited see the current conflict first-hand. Thus, with my remarkable credentials thus established…. Except that it gambit-that I have got knowledge, that you do not~will not scrub. The assumption of superiority according to experience takes no account on the deracinating effects on the experience itself. Recrossing the River Drina to flee the present-day conflict, far from comprehending it better, We felt I grasped it worse. War can be a special case; as being a writer it making you less capable less. Let B symbolize Bad Faith, the typical rubric for any account of an war that provides ‘I was there’ as being a guarantee that ‘this is actually how it was’.

COINCIDENCES: Extend the actual conflict about one humdred and fifty miles east, allow
Belgrade stand pertaining to Sarajevo, and you could have the Austro-Turkic battle
of 1787-89. Exactly the same participants, the identical hesitant foreign
interventions, the same muddled aims, the identical atrocities. I wrote
about this war around my first novel that was completed three several weeks
before the existing war began. A historical novelist rarely contains the
chance to verify his rendering next to reality and, viewed from
London, a few of the parallels appeared impressive enough-little
villages and areas whose names I did unearthed and quickly
forgotten were sprouting up in the conflict: Bosanski Brod,
Gradiska, Dubica, Zvornik. I did researched and transcribed
details of an ill-equipped refugee camp at Karlovac as an illustration,
and the whipping to death of an Muslim prisoner~column a pair of days’
march by there. Tjrnopolje, Omarska in addition to Manjaca, where this kind of
act has latterly been repeated, are within fifty miles on the
current Red Combination camp at Karlovac. We was seeing situations two
centuries old about the Six O’Clock Information.

DOUBTS: A sense which the war as I did written it, having now
become available as a possible experience, was for some reason inauthentic.
The early reporting on the present conflict ended up being necessarily
fragmentary. Martin Bell’s reports to the BBC in unique were
always at pains to point the information that wasnt available.
All this cast quite a lot of retrospective suspicion by myself
effort. I wanted what exactly I thought I did before the full story-but
this was will no longer true. What I did was the pieces of a war.

CAFFEINE: War is serious which will seem too trivial to bring up,
but E is for Espresso. I achieved an Austrian battle correspondent called
Karl Wendl with November 1992 at a party in Vienna. We were both
attempting, unsuccessfully, to get some good coffee. We have been both extremely
intoxicated. The previous night, Karl had got a dream. He / she was
standing over a dock in Serbia. Below him from the water was a new
submarine. Karl was attempting to hitch a lift up to Venice to get an
espresso. Within the circumstances, it could have been more reasonable
of me in order to pursue the espresso type of conversation (this was after all
what had encouraged this odd disclosure), and even the submarine.
Instead, I asked him if he'd ever been in order to Serbia.

FARCE: We spent other night drawing roadmaps of
Yugoslavia in writing napkins and comparing notes about the two-
hundred-year-old war I did written about around my book and it's
modern equivalent, which he'd then visited several times. We
never ever got our capuccinos. Instead, we planned a Serbian submarine-
look. (They have, by simply most accounts, of sixteen. ) This can be a stupid
little story, and events could overtake our plan whatever the case, but
it’s quite true and, in around it was the first in a string of
events that will eventually have me personally dodging bullets with
Sarajevo, I discover its absurdity quite prophetic. F is for Farce,
which as an off~colour joke in some supposedly momentous
occasion, can also find its set up a war.

GUN: G, rather clearly, is for Marker. I have managed guns, am
reasonably at ease with the thinking behind a device pertaining to firing projectiles.
The guns in Bosnia vary. Their stocks never have been
lovingly refined. Their barrels are generally unoiled. The metal they are
made from is actually black and scarred along with little nicks in addition to scratches.
Almost everyone We meet here carries a gun, but they are careless
of them, waving them concerning, dumping them roughly about the
ground. These are not really treasured possessions and there is nothing
iconic about them-they could look ridiculous put above a
fire place. It is apparent instantly that a Zastava Kalashnikov
was never intended for pheasant. These markers are rough tools for
the career of shooting persons.

HEADS: On 12 03, 1788, the Regular Universal Register claimed
that the Ottoman (which is usually to say Muslim) makes, far from
getting prisoners, were getting rid of any Austrian solders unlucky
enough to become captured and cutting off their mind, In April, the
same paper (now renamed The particular Times) related that several grouped
headless bodies have been discovered in a great overrun Turkish camp
near Dubica, north Bosnia. A codicil to this story was published on 27 May possibly. Apparently a sackful of ears cut from your
heads of the Austrian dead have been suspended from the gates of
the seraglio in Constantinople. This is actually the story of a new disappearance,
or rather it is just a story with it's central fact missing~a poor story. In
story terms it doesn’t function. Such deficiencies are generally, at one
degree, the reason I visited the latter-day version with this war. I proceeded to go
to find what exactly I, the passages on war around my novel and this kind of story in
unique lacked. H is for the Heads.

SCHEDULE: Karl Wendl, Riccardo Herrgott (our photographer)
in addition to I drove by Zvornik to Vlasenica, where we spent the night.
The next day time we reached Sarajevo, slept from the Serb barracks in
Lukavica, and the subsequent day spent many hours in Grbavica
district in the centre of the town. Then we drove returning to Zvornik,
recrossing the Drina at ten-thirty that night.

JUSTIFICATION: Or maybe the moral information technology for one’s activities. All
sides in the current war need to be seen to be in the right. The particular
worse the atrocities the stronger the desire. Justification is having
trouble keeping velocity with events.

KOSOVO: The state working for the Serb Ministry of Information
at Pale told me this story. Within the eve of the battle of Kosovo with
1389, King Lazar Hrebelyanovic compiled his Serbian kinsmen
in addition to, looking forward towards coming battle, told them they must
fight for the Kingdom of Bliss, not for the Kingdom of Soil.
The battle of Kosovo was to be about more compared to territory. The
following day, he and the best of his nobles were slaughtered by the
Turks. The story is preserved from the song-cycles of the Serb
guslari. Nationalism and poetry have always enjoyed an in depth
alliance in Serbia (witness Doctor Radovan Karadzic’s lyric
aspirations). Within the Serbian historical brain, Kosovo
might be seen as an signal realization: which a war could not really be
fought and earned by aiming over the heads of the enemy.
Henceforth their wars could be about earth, not really heaven. The
current war falls readily into this wording: its talk is every one of enclaves,
havens, corridors, areas which might be disputed or handled or
regained. Kosovo is actually presently being recommended as where this kind of war will
occur next. Ask the Serbs why they are fighting and they will
talk about a new distant past or a spectral future. Kosovo, and all of the
other ‘Kosovos’, can be a way of not discussing what is going on
now: an amnesia on the present.

LOVE: L in an ABC is usually for Love. In Vlasenica there exists a
graveyard for the victims on the current war, forty-three of them
on I3 December l992; undoubtedly more can't. Behind it,
stretching in the hill, are graves dating from your war of I939-45.
You can find more than four hundred of these. Hanging over a wall in
the Serb Ministry of Information at Pale can be a map showing
death rate rates in Bosnia pertaining to l939~45. The colours range from
light to darker, from zero to at least one hundred per penny. About a sixth of
this place is black. Vlasenica can be a murky green coloration, which the
key tells me means sixty %. Even though (or perhaps
because) it has killed so many, the Bosnians appreciate their
land, Serbs, Croats in addition to Muslims alike.

MUJAHEDIN: Their presence on this war somehow persisted as being a
rumour long after it should have become a new generally
acknowledged truth. In July 1992, several grouped mujahedin were
captured by the Serbs in your community north of Banja Luka. Many people
had travelled in Saudi Arabian passports in order to Vienna where many people
had acquired visas from your Croatian Embassy. One~his passport
offered the name Saed al Garaf-had a digicam. The Serbs
developed the film inside it and found mind. I was demonstrated these
photographs by the Serbs in Light. The heads have been cut from
the bodies of Serb fighters wiped out by Saed in addition to his comrades. Some
had their eyes gouged out, others looked strangely peaceful. I
leafed through the prints and thought of several grouped headless
bodies found two hundred years before. As well as these mujahedin
have been fighting around Travnik in addition to Banja Luka, that's not
so not even close to Dubica. Putting Humpty together again can be a strong
novelistic instinct in addition to I confess that i would like these
gruesome holiday snaps to clean up my two hundred year mystery.
Earlier wars are often used to justify later versions. Reports of
headless bodies. Photographs of bodiless mind. With the indictments piling up against their personal militias, the Serbs are generally
naturally keen for this evidence to become accepted. Their causes are
bad though the heads, I imagine, are for actual.

TRUTH: Traditionally the first casualty of battle, in present-day
Bosnia it experiences something more analogous to death by the
thousand cuts. In its place there are degrees of probability,
increasing or lessening likelihoods, hard in addition to soft information,
disagreeing versions. Three days before we found its way to Sarajevo,
several news organizations had reported which the Serbs had closed the
road from your airport. This take action, it is usually agreed, will are the
first move should the Serbs mount a great all-out assault about the city.
Unfortunately, the report was fake. So clear-cut an instance is rare. This
is more usual to the presented reality in order to bend obliquely from your
truth. ‘Alija Izetbegovic is actually President of Bosnia’ would seem
incontrovertible, until people stop to wonder what ‘Bosnia’ is actually.

UNIFORMS: Uniforms, in a war, are intended to distinguish the
combatants. Within Bosnia, however, all sides wear the identical uniform
-that on the former Yugoslavian Army. The correspondent Kate
Adie tells a tale about having in order to ask one selection of soldiers the
identity on the soldiers they have been firing on, then requiring you to ask the
identity of people doing the heating. The real variation is between
examples of uniform. Full uniform implies an experienced soldier
under order; someone unlikely in order to shoot you with no good
reason. Part-uniform suggests a militiaman-something associated with an
unknown quantity thereby more frightening. No uniform is very
bad. But worst off, for some purpose, are people donning
tracksuits.

VICTIMS. Before the war, Slavko Milanovic used to be the
director on the Kamerni Theatar ’55, a great avant-garde theatre with
Sarajevo. Now he works to the Serbian Ministry of Information.
He is actually quiet, urbane, extremely literate, a leading person in the
Sarajevo intelligentsia when such a thing existed. At first I had
Slavko pegged to get a victim of this kind of war; not a clear one, but
still someone whose life have been transformed utterly in addition to would
never are the same again. With the noise of the shelling, we
brought up productions of Bunuel in addition to Jarry who, We couldn’t
help thinking, would have approved with this scene.

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Cinema

 
Bosnian Culture: Cinema

If the Bosnian filmmaker best known is undoubtedly Emir Kusturica (b. 1954), who, however, chose a long time to live part of the year away from the Balkans, the cinematic tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the years after the Dayton agreements, has experienced a moment of great vivacity. The directors were given the task not only to make known to the international community the horrors of war, but to reflect on the causes and reasons that may be contrary to hope for the return of a peaceful interethnic coexistence. Among the names of directors Bosnian most significant to report Danis Tanović (1967), which won the Oscar for No Man's Land (2001), bitter narrative reports on the days of the disaster, and especially Pjer Zalica (b. 1964), author of Welcome Mr. President (2003), known documentary of Sarajevo who was among the most active members of the saga (Sarajevo Group of Authors), a group of intellectuals, poets and artists founded in 1990 by director Ademir Kenović (b. 1950), years of the siege. The same Kenović, along with Zelica and others, was the author of MGM Sarajevo, a long documentary sull'assedio and civil war made in 1992-94, and touching the perfect circle (1997), the first film shot in Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war ended. Finally remembered the name of Srdan Vuletic (b. 1971), author of Summer in the Golden Valley (2003).

Music

Bosnian Culture: Music

Classical music found its place of distribution, especially in Catholic churches and mosques; musician of some importance was F. Bosanac (Franciscus Bossinensis), active in sec. XVI. The Austrian occupation in 1878 led to an improvement in the musical life. In Sarajevo in 1881 he gave his first concert in 1900 was opened the first school of music. The National Theatre was built in Banja Luka in 1930 and the Sarajevo Opera was founded in 1946 by it, two years later, came the Philharmonic Orchestra. The music education and musicology has its fulcrum in the Academy of Music, founded in 1955. Among the contemporary composers remember J. Majer (1888-1965) and J. Pleciti (1901-1961). § The popular song is the characteristic ojkanje (lament), spread to Croatia and other neighboring regions, consists of a 2-part voices with alternating trills. Muslim populations sing songs reserved to men alone also prevalent in the cities, where once were executed in public places accompanied by accordion. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in rural areas, is still very popular and listened to the music of popular tradition as the sevdalinka, a kind voice with accompaniment firsarmonica or a few other tools, which severely suffered the influence of Turkish music: among interpreters are to be reported Safet Isović (b. 1936) and Himzo Polovina (1927-1986), a psychiatrist who was one of the most acclaimed performers of this genre of popular songs. Even the musical tradition has suffered the repercussions of the civil war, and currently listening to sevdalinka is limited to the older generation and non-urbanized. Since 1960, in the early nineties, the capital has been the epicenter of the so-called "school of pop-rock of Sarajevo", which initiated the spread of the rock around the territory of Yugoslavia. Only with the end of the war the Bosnian music production has leaned on the international scene, especially in the wake of the films of Emir Kusturica, who was assisted in the soundtracks of his works, especially the musician Goran Bregovic (b. 1950), star Yugoslav rock as early as the seventies. Bregovic's music blends the rhythms of gypsy brass, the polyphonic popular Bulgarian origin to elements in the rock world. Also known in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the band Zabranjeno pušenje, in the eighties began to mix the garage rock to traditional folk sounds and rhythms, after the war, with the name of the band No smoking Orchestra has recorded the soundtrack of the film Kusturica's Black Cat, White Cat.

Art

Bosnian Culture: Art

Although we may find some traces of a penetration of Western architectural forms, of which the most significant example is the Benedictine basilica of Trebinje, Bosnia and Herzegovina has not developed in the medieval period, a significant Christian monumental architecture. From sec. XII established itself in the region instead Bogomil religion, inspired by Manichean, which gave life to an art form native of extraordinary originality. Of particular interest in this regard are the reliefs that adorn the steles and sarcophagi of the necropolis bogomile of Radimlje Boljuni and in particular, with geometrical designs and scenes of everyday life. Bogomil civilization are also very valuable manuscripts on parchment. § Since the end of the century. XV the region fell under the rule turkish and remained there until 1878. Of these four centuries remain important examples of civil construction, such as markets, baths and bridges, mosques, among which we highlight in particular Begova Dzamija and Ali Pašma Džamja in Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Ferhadija džamija. § During the 1992 to 1995 conflict that has bloodied Bosnia and Herzegovina proclamatasi independent Republic, the enormous loss of life were added destruction of monuments and works of art irreplaceable, as was the case with the shelling of the Old Town of Sarajevo or the destruction of the old bridge of Mostar turkish. After the end of the conflict, despite the precarious living conditions of peace, in Sarajevo, once a city of culture and culturally vibrant and resumed a certain avant-garde artistic activity, which has brought together artists of the younger generation with the international scenario. This relationship between Sarajevo, Bosnia and contemporary art is not broken even with the choice by some of these artists, a voluntary exile in other European countries. Among the names most recent examples are Anur (b. 1971), who calls himself "an operator of communication", invited to represent Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 49th Venice Biennale, and video-artists Sejla Kameric (b. 1976) and Edina Husanovic (no. 1975).

Literature

Bosnian Culture: Literature

The Bosnian literature as such was born to Serbian and Croatian identity opposed to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. As the Bosnian entity is more sociological and political language: before the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina had never used the term Bosnian language, and even the term "learn Bosnian" is appearing for the first time in a document of the Dayton Accords. At one time, in fact, between the language of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia were not generally perceived by the speakers, really significant differences. The first written document of the area dates back to 1189, and a letter written using the Cyrillic alphabet, other texts medieval church in the Cyrillic alphabet are stored in a dozen manuscripts. The major corpus of the Middle Ages desk of Bosnia and Herzegovina, however, had an impact on thousands of tombstones of churches and cemeteries in the area (stecci). From the sixteenth century, the Ottoman rule in the region spread Arab culture: some Slavic literary production was indeed written in Arabic characters (alhamiado). Only with the romanticism of the nineteenth century in Bosnia and walked some nationalist consciousness, which led some researchers to document and collect oral traditions and legends of the region. In the twentieth century, writers born in Bosnian territory, as Ivo Andric, have always been considered the authors of the Serb-Croat literature, a category that included the first interethnic hatred of course, the language and the works of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and only with the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, and especially with the civil war, has begun a process of radicalization of identity that has resulted in the choice of field even linguistic and literary. Not all birth Bosnian intellectuals, however, share this nationalism background, as in the case of the writer Predrag Matvejević (b. 1932), born in Mostar but for years resident in Italy, the author of essays (Mediterranean Breviary, 2004) and works of fiction that partly reflect sull'improvvisa explosion of a world that seemed settled in its peaceful coexistence. Affirm their identity in Bosnia, and then non-Serb nor Croat, albeit with soft tones free from nationalist rhetoric and sincere adherence to the secular culture, the poet Izet Sarajlic (1930-2002), author of some thirty libraries, among which The Book of goodbyes and War Diary of Sarajevo, the narrator and dramatist Abdullah Sidran (b. 1948), and the playwright and essayist Dzevad Karasahan (b. 1953) - all brought in a different way to think about the fate of Sarajevo and the end of the coping skills that had once characterized the life of their beloved Bosnia - and the poet Marko Vesović, Bosnian Serb (b. 1945).