• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Such myths were first rooted in oral folktales. Later the account of these events was written down, but existed only in very few manuscript copies. In 1601, a Carthusian monk called Mavro Orbini in the Adriatic city of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) published the story of Lazar in Kingdom of the Slavs (Il regno degli Slavi).15 In 1722, on the orders of Peter the Great, this powerful advocacy of “the Slavic nation and language” was translated. 16 It was not, it seems, a full or faithful translation, but the Kosovo story had an increasing impact, especially among the Serb communities in the Habsburg lands whose ancestors had left in 1690.17

Balkan Muslim communities, although they did not use written or visual materials to the same degree as the Christians, also developed their sense of cultural identity. These Muslim communities were as deeply rooted in the land as their Christian counterparts, for most of them were the descendants of local converts and not of migrants. As a result, Islam in the region developed many characteristics not found elsewhere in the Islamic world. These lasted to the end of the twentieth century. It was considered “being Muslim the Bosnian way,” according to Tone Bringa, who interviewed Bosnians in the 1980s. She describes an incident during the mandatory fast of Ramadan (Ramazan), which in Bosnia was thought suitable for women and old men, who did not have to work hard.

One evening a couple had a rather typical dispute during Ramadan. The quarrel started when the wife urged her husband to come along for evening prayers in the mosque. It then developed into a row about past events of their twenty-year marriage, the husband asking his wife why she had not married a hodza [imam, or Islamic teacher] if that was what she wanted. He then summed up his miseries: “… I had no coffee all day and it is Ramadan, and [so] I may not drink brandy.”18

Nor was this just a twentieth-century development. In 1897, H. C. Thomson, visiting Bosnia, had also noted this characteristic of Bosnian men: “He will not drink wine, but will drink beer, or brandy or whiskey, or any other form of alcohol, because the Prophet only forbad the drinking of wine.”19 Plainly, in many of these Muslim communities the strict religious law was quietly put to one side.20

Storytelling reinforced the sense of community. Both Christians and Muslims shared a common tradition of stories, often about similar themes. But they had very different messages, each version changing subtly and distinctively over time. Some Christian tales were profoundly anti-Turkish: “The songs of the hajduks and the klephts have no substance or meaning without the Turks, and the Moslem counterparts would not have meaning without the hajduk songs. This whole genre depends upon the Turks. The Kosovo cycle is patently impossible without the Turks.”21 The Muslim tales were usually much longer than the Christian ones. Relating them might extend over several days. As with the stories told until recent times in modern Turkey, the entire village would settle down to listen, would interrupt, comment on the quality of the storytelling, and even add to the speaker’s account. These were oral epics in the Homeric style, experienced by the whole community. And in Bosnia this tradition of community was strong in other respects: Bosnians would rally to repel any enemies from outside. They resisted the armies of Austria who invaded the provinces in 1878 just as they had attacked marauding Ottoman janissaries a few years before.

A sense of place and community was often as significant as language and religion. The people of one valley or one hillside would be set against those of another, even if they used the same language and shared the same faith. Moreover, while outsiders might see a unitary community defined by a common language and a common faith, those inside the community would more often perceive stark and unmistakable distinctions within these broader categories. The reality (if not the theory) of the Balkans