Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [132]
The Turks and the Christians in Bosnia, except for service in the army, are on a footing of equality; but the remembrance of ancient persecutions still inspires those deadly hatreds which, like the passions of the Ribandmen [a Catholic association] and Orangemen [a Protestant association] in the north of Ireland are ever ready to break out with a violence all the more astonishing because the causes that might justify it have long been removed.
[In Bosnia] a feast, a procession, a word or a song may set the province in a blaze which would throw even the riots of Belfast into the shade … God knows the Turkish Government is not the most enlightened administration in Europe; but it has fearful difficulties to contend with and its despotic and paternal rule certainly prevents the Bosniacs from tearing each other to pieces.
Every misfortune is attributable to the Turks, and we hear so often that they are tyrants and oppressors that the people generally believe they are so.17
In Montenegro, later on his journey, he had another encounter, very similar to Robert Kaplan’s meeting with Mother Tatiana.
A gentleman, bristling with arms and wearing a light green body coat told me he was a barrister. Expressing wonder at my having escaped without any incidents during so long a journey in Turkey [in Europe] he began to apostrophise the Turks in gracefully rounded periods, delivered in impassioned gestures of forensic eloquence. With flashing eyes, he called them dogs, pigs, foxes, snakes and serpents; and declared that they were as brutal, uncivilised and degraded, as the Christians of the same provinces were cultivated, polished and advanced.
Creagh politely demurred, saying that was not his experience. The lawyer rounded on him, saying that “he never heard such an opinion in the whole course of his life, and it was the duty of all Christians to hate the Musselmans.”18
These travelogues—and there were many others like them—are neither diaries nor documented history, but kinds of polemic. Each writer was telling a tale that he had made up for himself. Characters such as the verdant Montenegrin advocate or the fiery-eyed Orthodox nun were selected for a narrative purpose, to tell a particular story. Kaplan wanted to show that the Balkans were fixed in ancient hatreds: Mother Tatiana obliged. Creagh, who had come rather to like the “gentlemanly” qualities of the Ottomans, presented his Slavic popinjay who would condemn himself as in essence a “coarse mountaineer” and whose God was called, Creagh claimed, the “Old Murderer.”19 Within the Balkan lands it seemed possible, in the space of a short journey, to piece together almost any view of the past and, hence, of the present. One prolific modern writer on the region goes so far as to suggest that “The Balkans … is the unconscious of the world. It is here that the repressed memories of history, its traumas and fears and images reside.”20
In such a shadow world nothing could be taken on trust. Even the image of the barren and precipitous Balkan peninsula so often depicted in engravings was only partly true.21 Hills and mountains covered much of the land south of the Danube, and the Carpathian chain to the north. But there was no massive chain of towering peaks (catena mundi) that ran continuously from the Black Sea to the Alps and then continued on to the Atlantic as some geographers had once asserted.22 In reality, Italy is more precipitous than much of the Balkans.23 In many parts of Serbia, the “summits are often below 2,000 feet and seldom exceed 3,000