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A Presentation by András Riedlmayer, Bibliographer, the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University
MS. FLEMING: András Riedlmayer will begin our program with a presentation on Bosnia's multicultural heritage and its destruction. A native of Budapest, he received his education in Germany, the United States, and Turkey. Mr. Riedlmayer's academic interest in Bosnia began 25 years ago with a senior thesis on "Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Congress of Berlin," submitted for a degree in History at the University of Chicago. He also holds a Master's Degree in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University and a second Master's in Library and Information Science from Simmons College.
Mr. Riedlmayer has spent several years living and travelling in the Middle East and the Balkans, where he conducted research in archives and manuscript libraries.
During the 1970s, he was a Fulbright Fellow in Turkey. His articles on Islamic architecture and on Ottoman history and manuscript sources have appeared in journals such as Muqarnas: An Annual of Islamic Art and Architecture; the Turkish Studies Association Bulletin; the Middle East Studies Association Bulletin; and Harvard Ukrainian Studies.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Sarajevo, 1994, in the heart of Europe, forty minutes by air from Rome, a little more than an hour from Zurich. We see a row of people standing in line amidst the rubble of their city in their dangerous daily quest for water. Naturally and rightly our attention is focused first on the people, on their need and on their danger, on the scandal of a modern city and its inhabitants being reduced to this.
But we should also take a closer look at the rubble, because in Sarajevo as well as elsewhere in Bosnia rubble signifies not only the ordinary atrocities of war like people's homes destroyed, hospitals targeted for shellfire, businesses and civic institutions burned down, entire neighborhoods reduced to ruins, cities torn apart by blasted bridges these are two scenes from Mostar.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: These are to remind you that Sarajevo and much of Bosnia is a very modern country. On your left you see the headquarters of Bosnia's largest trading center, UNIS, before the war. On the right you see the UNIS building in flames in the Spring of 1992.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: On your left a scene from Mostar, an entire neighborhood destroyed. On the right, the ruins of the headquarters of Sarajevo's prize-winning newspaper, Oslobodjenje, which still goes on being published from a bunker in the basement.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: And these are two halves of one of Mostar's seven bridges, destroyed during the three-month Serbian siege in the Spring and Summer of 1992.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, rubble signifies national extremists hard at work to eliminate not only human beings and living cities but also to erase all memory of the past.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: The targets thus far have included the National Library of Sarajevo, seen gutted on your left.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: The regional archives in Mostar, seen on your right, with the books spilling out through the hole blasted in the facade.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: Local and national museums. On your left is the Museum of the City of Sarajevo before its destruction. On your right is the Museum of Herzegovina with its corner blasted away by shelling by the Yugoslav National Army in the Summer of 1992.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: The Academy of Music, on your left, and an entire historic district. This is a district in Mostar built in the 16th century, lovingly renovated in the early 1980s and blasted to bits by Serbian extremists in 1992. Jewish and Moslem cemeteries and, above all, places of worship: mosques, churches and synagogues.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: On your left is a mosque of Hadji Mehmed Beg Karadjoz in Mostar built in 1557 as it was before the war. On your right is what it looked like in the Summer of 1992, after three months of bombardment by Serbian extremists. Since then it has sustained further damage through bombardment by the Croatian nationalist militia.
We are being told that it is ancient hatreds that fuel this destruction. It is not true. The history that is being destroyed, both the buildings and the documents, speak eloquently to centuries of pluralism and tolerance in Bosnia. It is this evidence of a shared past that exclusive nationalists are seeking to erase.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Alone in Medieval Europe, the Kingdom of Bosnia was a place where not one but three Christian churches, Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and a schismatic local Bosnian church existed side by side and while leaders of all three churches were called upon to witness acts of state, the Bosnian Kingdom did not regularly favor one church over the other.
On your left, you have a map of the Kingdom of Bosnia as it existed in the High Middle Ages. The red area is the core area around the Bosna River which gave the country its name. The yellow area in the southwest is Herzegovina, the duchy, which has been associated with Bosnia from the earliest times. The purple indicates the farthest extension of the Kingdom when for a period it controlled some of the Dalmatian islands as well.
Those sitting close enough to the front can see a thin turquoise line which indicates the modern boundaries of Bosnia and Herzegovina. You can see it has had an enviable continuity of borders over a period of nearly a thousand years.
On the right here is a Bosnian Christian gravestone from the Middle Ages showing knights on horseback and a mystical scene down below. This is a fairly large cenotaph thousands of these were found throughout the Bosnian countryside and are a leading testimonial to the artistic vitality of the community.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: Islam arrived in Bosnia 500 years ago when the armies of the Ottoman Sultans swept across the Balkans and onwards into Hungary. Their advance appeared unstoppable and many felt that it was directed by the hand of God. Throughout Europe this was an age of religious ferment. Many foretold the coming end of the world and preachers everywhere, including Martin Luther, saw in the coming of the Ottomans a sign of divine judgment.
In Bosnia itself people from all religious and social backgrounds hastened to adopt the triumphant faith of the Islamic conquerors. Many Bosnians rose to join the ranks of the Ottoman ruling elite as soldiers, statesmen, Islamic jurists and scholars.
On your left you see a map of the Ottoman Empire as it was around the time that the English were beginning to settle in North America. You can see, it dominated not only the Middle East and the Mediterranean, but a good deal of Southeastern Europe.
Bosnia is located at the high end of the Adriatic, the province outlined in brown. You can see, whereas the rest of the Balkans for the most part have disappeared into one large province of Roumelia and great medieval kingdoms like Bulgaria and Serbia disappeared from the map of Europe, not to reappear until the 19th century, Bosnia continued to have a distinct identity. It owed this distinction and its political autonomy to two factors. One was that it sat astride the main trade routes from the East, leading across Asia Minor towards Venice at the top of the Adriatic, which was Europe's gateway to the Orient. The other reason was the presence of a large native Muslim ruling class which became rich off of this trade and also from Bosnia's strategic position right on the frontier. In the 16th and 17th century the Ottoman Empire was still expanding and there were careers to be made. This is the grave of one of the people who made such a career. This gravestone, just like the medieval Bosnian gravestone that you saw, is distinguished by its large size it is over two meters tall. The top is a stylized representation of the headgear of the deceased, an Ottoman Pasha.
Among the most famous of these Bosnian converts was Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, who served as chief minister of the Empire under three Ottoman sultans, among them Süleyman the Magnificent. On the left we see one of the mosques Mehmed Pasha endowed in Istanbul, the work of Sultan Suleyman's court architect, Sinan.
On the right is his tomb, built in 1572, at the shrine of Eyub, just outside the walls of the imperial capital. What you see here, the white mausoleum, is where Mehmed Pasha himself is buried; the striped one has his wife and children buried in it; in between is a very typical feature of such foundations, in this case a school, where the pupils and the teachers, in an exchange for their building and endowed maintenance, were supposed to pray for the repose of the soul of the founder.
In turn, the Ottoman sultans and their local governors embellished Bosnia's tombs with splendid mosques and established endowments to build and support schools, libraries and other social institutions.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: These institutions became the nuclei around which new neighborhoods and entire new towns grew up.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: What you see here, on your left is the town of Mostar, which at the beginning of the 16th century, in the first decades of Ottoman rule, was a tiny place with a crumbling medieval fortress at a river crossing with a population of less than 30. By the end of the 16th century, it was a bustling commercial metropolis with the famous bridge seen in the front. Behind, on your right, is the mosque of Koski Mehmed Pasha, and scattered throughout the town in each neighborhood, were the social institutions I was talking about.
On your right here is a picture of the main market in Sarajevo and at the head of the market is Bascarsija mosque, built in 1528; in the background is a much later structure, the National Library, about which we will have more to say.
Indeed, among the new Ottoman towns, were Sarajevo and Mostar, located at strategic river crossings that were turned into bustling cosmopolitan commercial centers by the construction of bridges, markets, and caravansaries, or hotels. Here you have another shot of the famous old bridge at Mostar, built in 1566. On this side you see one of the covered bazaars of Sarajevo built in 1551, an early precursor of the "mall concept" where you had not only the convenience of many shops under a single roof, but for those uncertain times an entrance that could be locked and guarded at night to keep valuable merchandise safe.
In these Bosnian towns, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish merchants and craftsmen lived, worked and worshipped side by side.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: In the commercial center of Sarajevo we see the principal mosque, the Sephardic synagogue, the old Orthodox church, and the somewhat newer Roman Catholic cathedral, all located practically adjacent to each other within an area of less than half a square kilometer. Let me show you what I am talking about.
In the center here you see the Mosque of Gazi Husrev Beg, which is the principal mosque of Sarajevo. Practically across the street from it is the old Sephardic synagogue built at the beginning of the 16th century to accommodate a large community of Jews who had fled from the Inquisition in Spain and had found a home in Sarajevo, where they were tolerated and indeed encouraged to settle because they brought valuable skills with them.
A block down is the old Eastern Orthodox church, built at the express orders of the Ottoman Governor in the 16th century because, again, he wanted to attract craftsmen of that particular religious persuasion to work in the town center.
The Roman Catholic cathedral is just down the street. It is a 19th century structure, but it replaces an earlier one that stood on the same site.
Here are some more pictures of these buildings.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: On your left is the old Sephardic synagogue as it has survived for almost 500 years. It survived the Second World War, when it was turned into a garage by the Nazis, but was turned back into a synagogue after the defeat of Germany.
On your right is the old Orthodox church of Sarajevo, which was already in existence in 1539 and which just yesterday was the scene of a festive celebration of Orthodox Easter at which representatives of the Bosnian Government came and congratulated the Orthodox community of Sarajevo.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: And there is the Roman Catholic cathedral. Mostar, which you see on your right, shows similar intermingling, with the Islamic minaret, the Catholic campanile, and the Orthodox cathedral occupying the same skyline. What you see here is the minaret of a mosque, since destroyed.
To the left of the clock tower is the Catholic church of St. Peter and Paul, the Catholic church of the Franciscan Order in Mostar. It was targeted by the Yugoslav National Army in 1992 and burned to the ground. Some months later the Croatian National Militia, the HVO, blew up this church, which is the New Orthodox Church, Nova Pravoslavna crkva, built in Mostar in 1873 in the last years of Ottoman rule and at the time of its building the largest Orthodox church in the Balkans. All three of the monuments you see here are now either heavily damaged or gone.
Bosnia's Ottoman centuries came to an end in the year 1878. The new Austro-Hungarian administration brought the Viennese taste for the eclectic to its efforts to modernize Bosnia's cities. Erecting schools, museums and civic institutions, they sought to bring their newly-acquired territory into the modern age.
On your left you see some Bosnian postage stamps from the turn of the century, showing examples of the architectural heritage that we have just been talking about. The result is uniquely Bosnian in its blend of cultural influences. The Moorish revival building, seen under construction in the historic photograph on your right, housed Bosnia's Parliament until World War I.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: After 1918, when Bosnia was absorbed into the newly-created Yugoslav state, this building served as Sarajevo's city hall and for the last half-century it has housed Bosnia's National Library.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: In August, 1992 it was burned to the ground, bombarded for three days within incendiary grenades from Serbian nationalist positions across the river; it was reduced to ashes along with the greater part of its irreplaceable contents.
Before the fire, the Library held one and a half million volumes, including 155,000 rare books and manuscripts, the country's entire national archives, 150 years' worth of Bosnian newspapers and periodicals, as well as the collections of the University of Sarajevo.
Under constant threat of sniper fire, citizens of Sarajevo formed a human chain to pass books from the flames. Interviewed by ABC News, one of them said, "We managed to save just a few very precious books. Everything else burned down and a lot of our heritage, national heritage lay down there in the ashes."
A friend who was in Sarajevo at the time of the burning of the library has told me that even though it was late August it felt like a premature fall, because for a period of almost a week charred bits of books and ashes fell like leaves from the sky.
This is a picture of the gutted interior some months after the fire. That is an Associated Press photo of the burning of the library, which only one major American newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, bothered to run.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: What you see here are examples of the heritage under threat. On your left is one of Sarajevo's greatest artistic treasures, the 14th century Sarajevo Haggadah. It was illuminated by medieval Hebrew craftsmen in Spain. It was brought from Spain as a closely guarded treasure when the Jews settled in Sarajevo at the beginning of the 16th century. It survived World War II, buried under an apple tree, and it very nearly perished in the summer of 1992 under Serbian bombardment. It was saved at the peril of his life by a Bosnian Moslem curator.
On your right is a Bosnian treasure from the 15th century, a Slavonic psalter, now presumed lost.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Three months earlier the Serbian gunners' target had been Sarajevo's Oriental Institute, home to the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscript texts and Ottoman documents in all of southeastern Europe. Shelled with phosphorus grenades on May 17th, 1992, the Institute and all of its contents were consumed by the flames.
On your left is one of the lost treasures of that Institute, a medieval Islamic astrological manuscript. It is one of close to 6,000 medieval manuscripts that were burned in that fire.
On your right is an example of the over 70,000 Ottoman documents, much of the history of Bosnia for 500 years, that burned in the same fire. This one is an Ottoman firman, a rescript of Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror, confirming the privileges and liberties of the Catholic Franciscan Order in Bosnia.
In case you are still thinking in terms of collateral damage incidental to the general mayhem of warfare, consider this. In September, 1992, BBC reporter Kate Adie interviewed Serbian gunners on the 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 profusely to Ms. Adie, explaining they had not meant to hit the hotel but had been aiming at the roof of the National Museum behind it. The museum, though severely damaged, still stands.
What you see on your left is a peace-time panorama of Sarajevo's government center. The yellow building just to the left of the tree is the Holiday Inn. The National Museum from this vantage point is directly behind it and across the street. The street, for the last two years, has enjoyed the unpleasant name of "Sniper's Alley." This is a frontal picture of the Sarajevo National Museum. In front are some of the Bosnian medieval tombstones we have been talking about. Most of those have been smashed by the shelling. The building still stands, but the roof has been caved in by shell fire. Most of the exhibits have been moved, some of them to the basement of the museum, for safekeeping.
Unfortunately, when the shelling ruptured the central heating system, the basement flooded and items which had been safeguarded from the shells fell victim to the water.
Hundreds of mosques throughout Bosnia, however, have not even been as fortunate as the museum.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Many have been reduced to rubble by concentrated shelling over a period of time. A minaret makes a slim target it takes many tries to hit it with a mortar shell. On your left you see the Koski Mehmed Pasha mosque in Mostar, built in 1618, as it stood before the war. On your right, if you look very carefully (the vantage point is about 90 degrees to the left), you see the stump of the minaret and to the left of the minaret, the smashed remains of the portico of the mosque. What you don't see from this angle is the dome which also has sustained numerous shell holes.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Away from the battlefront in occupied areas under the control of Serb and Croat nationalist militias, often in areas where there has been no fighting, most mosques have been dynamited or torched, usually in the middle of the night, as the key element in a campaign of terror aimed at driving out the Muslim inhabitants.
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MR. RIEDLMAYER: Consider for example the following report of what happened in one predominantly Moslem town in Herzegovina on the night of January 27th, 1993, in the tenth month after its occupation by Serbian militiamen:
It burned all night as drunken men in paramilitary uniforms fired machine guns in the air. By morning Trebinje's 300 year old mosque was ashes and a dark-eyed young man, Kemal Bubic, age 29, joined thousands of numbed people trudging 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."
That is from a report by Dusko Doder published in the Boston Globe last February.
On the left you see Trebinje; the minaret of the mosque we were talking about is visible behind the house at the center. At the right is a picture of a ruined mosque from the 16th century, from Mostar, as are two other slides that will follow, since I didn't have pictures of the mosques I'll be talking about.
On May 13, 1993, six mosques were blow up in a single night in one Serbian-occupied town, Bijeljina, in Eastern Bosnia. The next morning bulldozers were clearing away the rubble and a long line of trucks stood ready to take away the town's terrified Muslim residents.
Two months later, in May 1993, Western reporters visiting the town found only grass and trees growing on the leveled sites. It was as if the mosques and the towns' Muslims had never been there.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: In the northern Bosnian city of Banja Luka, a Serbian national stronghold, the town's principal mosques were dynamited on the night of May 7, 1993.
Here you see the Ferhadija Mosque, built in 1583 by Ferhad Pasha Sokolovic, a cousin of Sultan Suleyman's famous Bosnian grand vizier.
On your right is a news agency shot of what was left the morning after the blast. Examine it carefully, please. To the left of the stump of the minaret, up there, the mosque and its portico have simply vanished; here you see the balcony of the minaret lying on the ground.
Following further explosions in July and December of 1993, so have all the rest of Banja Luka's 16 mosques as well as 50 percent of its Catholic churches.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: The Aladja Mosque in Foca, considered a masterpiece of Islamic architecture, was destroyed in a similar fashion in the first week of the war.
The Muslim population of Foca was given 15 minutes to start leaving. Then the ruins of the mosque were taken away and the site was leveled.
Here is a picture of the Aladja Mosque built in 1550. This is a detail from the interior. The name of the mosque means "multi-colored," which is a reference not only to the colorfully decorated furnishings, but also to mural paintings that once decorated both the exterior and the interior.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: In Visegrad, site of the famous old Ottoman Bridge on the Drina River, they came for the Muslims in August 1992. A reporter from the Manchester Guardian passed through the town at the end of that month and interviewed refugees huddled just outside the town.
"We are ready to run if they come for us again," one of them said as he described how the 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 would not come back," he said.
That is a view of Visegrad on your left with the old bridge, built by Sokollu Mehmed Pasha in 1577.
The list of communities destroyed in this fashion is already in the hundreds and is growing by the day. The following is an expert of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees issued on August 23rd, 1993:
In early July 1993, hundreds of draft age men in Stolac, a predominately Moslem town, were reported 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 the first of 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.
This is Stolac. One of the four mosques we were talking about, is at the center of the picture.
I looked up the four mosques mentioned in this report. They are, or were, charming examples of regional architecture, three of them dating from the 1730s, one from the 1600s, all built by local craftsmen to the taste of the patrons, well to do Muslim Slav families from nearby Mostar.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: These were not what historians called great works of art, but for the people of Stolac these four mosques represented their town's main visible link to its Islamic past.
Consider finally what happened to the town of Pocitelj, perched on a picturesque hillside above the Neretva River, south of the city of Mostar. Until last summer, the townspeople of Pocitelj, the Muslim majority and the Christian minority, had lived together for 500 years. For the last 40 years the town was a summer artist colony, visited by people from all over Yugoslavia.
In September 1993, Croatian warlord Mate Boban's troops blew up the town's mosques, the Islamic theological school, the Turkish baths, the elegant houses built by eighteenth century Muslim notables. Then they rounded up the town's Moslem inhabitants and marched them off to detention camps.
The Muslims of Pocitelj are gone now as are the monuments that testified to the culture that they and their ancestors have created there over a span of centuries.
What you see at the center of both these views is the Mosque of Hadji Ali, built in 1562. Below it, the structure with the many domes, is the eighteenth century Islamic theological seminary, and over here is an example of the domestic architecture I was telling you about, also destroyed.
One of Mate Boban's militiamen, interviewed in Mostar early last September, explained to a British reporter why it was that he was trying to destroy the old Ottoman Bridge that had given Mostar its name. "It is not enough to cleanse Mostar of the Muslims," he said, "the relics must also be destroyed."
A Muslim resident of Mostar, interviewed during the same summer, was asked why he had stayed on despite the shelling, the hunger and the other dangers of life under siege. "I am fighting for the bridge," he said, as if that explained it all.
You see two pictures of the bridge here. The one closer to me shows shell damage inflicted by the Serbian extremists in the summer of 1992.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: That on your left is the state of the bridge in September 1993, several months into its bombardment by the Croatian nationalist militia. The garlands of truck tires and the improvised canopy of corrugated sheeting where desperate attempts, ultimately futile, to protect the bridge from direct shell impacts. In the middle you see the Bosnian flag.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: In the autumn, one last artillery barrage finally brought down the bridge at Mostar. The date was the 9th of November, 1993. It happened to be the 55th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the night when synagogues were smashed and burned throughout Hitler's greater German Reich. That too, was an integral part of what today is euphemistically called "ethnic cleansing."
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Like German Jews back then, most Bosnian Muslim are, in fact, highly secularized. But a people's identity is inextricably linked with the visible symbols of its culture. Once those anchors are gone, the past, like the future, can be recreated by the victors.
In the eastern Bosnian town of Zvornik, there were once a dozen mosques. In the 1991 census, 60 percent of its residents were Muslim Slavs. Now the town is 100 percent Serb, and Branko Grujic, the new Serb-appointed mayor, was telling foreign visitors last spring: "There never were any mosques in Zvornik."
Zvornik is seen, nestled in the curve of the Drina River, on your left.
Upstream on the Drina River from Zvornik (on your right) lies the Bosnian town of Gorazde, under siege for the past 24 months by Serbian nationalist extremists. Until three weeks ago, Gorazde provided shelter for 65,000 Bosnians: Muslims, Christians and Jews, local people as well as refugees who had been driven from nearby towns and villages.
[Slide.]
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Now Gorazde has, for all practical purposes, been overrun. Its people and its monuments may be about to share the fate of Zvornik. Behind their front lines, the nationalist extremists have already selected a mayor for the new all-Serb Gorazde of the future.
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 much more glorious background to a present that doesn't have that much to show for itself."
To this one might add as a corollary: if the past doesn't suit, it can also be erased.
Thank you. [Applause.]
MR. KENNEY: We will have questions for about five or ten minutes while we are setting up for the next round, but then we will have a longer discussion session following the next presentation.
QUESTION: If the historic religious structures represent the separation between people that has created the war
MR. RIEDLMAYER: No.
QUESTION: just to follow that for a minute, would it then be recommended to try with some ultimate rebuilding of these historic monuments and historic preservation, especially architectural to make that bridge between people, as opposed to simply using those projects as the symbols of an ethnic kind of purity, as it were, to make the larger connections with a religious or ethnic soul and its connection to the rest of the world?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Let me address that on several levels. One is: did these religious structures in their inception serve as things that separated people, and the answer is no.
Buildings are intentional structures. They do not appear at random. When you have a city that does not have separate religious quarters, as neither Sarajevo nor Mostar did, and when you have houses of worship located next to each other, it is an indication that people are willing to live with each other.
So their structures, being next to each other, are not acts of challenge, but rather statements of coexistence. If they couldn't stand the sight of each other, they would have built out of sight of each other.
The attacks on these buildings, both in terms of seeking to erase what was felt to be an impure past, a past where different people mingled, and in the sense of also wanting to create a false history, a history that belongs exclusively to the national group for which you claim to speak, represent a twentieth century ideology; it could not represent any kind of historical roots.
The war in Bosnia today has no thousand-year old roots. It is a war of twentieth century ideologies. The ideology of exclusive nationalism, which denies Bosnia's multicultural past after all, Bosnia has a history as a civil society that goes back 1,000 years, whereas Serbian and Croatian nationalism in its current articulation is less than 100 years old is a very modern kind of phenomenon.
What you are seeing is, yes, a drawing on tensions of the past, but these are tensions of the past half century. They are tensions created within living memory. Bosnian cities of the 1920s, and before, simply contained no people who adhered to such bizarre notions as pure ethnic communities.
As for rebuilding, it is a real problem because among the things that were destroyed were not only the houses of worship but very symbolic bridges. It is interesting you used the term because not so much by design, but purely by the way things came, the image of a bridge kept cropping up throughout the talk.
It depends on the nature of the peace settlement that is achieved. If Bosnia is allowed to be partitioned, and if those who hold to this fascist ideology, that a state is only for one group prevail, then it is not a question only of money. It is a question of intention.
There will be no intention to rebuild the mosque of Banja Luka or the Catholic churches of Banja Luka because it will be declared that Banja Luka is, and "always" has been, an all-Serbian city, and death to you if you dare deny it.
Within the ideology of the Bosnian government, which represents a continuity of the past, there is a very real willingness to restore monuments of all three religious and cultural groups. There it is simply a question of the opportunity, namely, peace, and the funds. A lot of the expertise is already there, and you will see one example in the next presentation.
QUESTION: What I am trying to get at then, to transcend the past, transcend the tendency to devolve into this type of separation to use historic preservation as a means of teaching.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: At the very least, historic preservation can be a way of denying victory to the forces that cause the destruction.
Let me emphasize again: the destruction that Sarajevo has suffered from 1992 to the present, these past two years, is the first time that city has suffered war damage since 1697.
Sarajevo was not physically damaged in World War II. A lot of its people were killed by the Nazis, but the city did not suffer significant damage.
World War I was started by an incident in Sarajevo, but Sarajevo suffered no damage in World War I. In fact, there was no fighting in Bosnia in all of World War I, and there was no war damage in Sarajevo or Mostar for several centuries before that.
So what you are seeing happening there is something without historical precedent. It is not that you have to teach people how to live together again; these people learned how to live together again after the carnage of World War II, as did people in Spain and Italy and Greece. And it was not because of an act of collective amnesia, but because most people in peaceful times behave decently toward their fellow human beings.
I think if we establish the conditions for peace, there would be the conditions for reconstruction.
QUESTION: And the root costs?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: The costs? Obviously, there are no internal resources to bear them, but there are international agencies that could provide help, I'm sure.
Could I have someone else's question? Yes, sir?
QUESTION: I don't know if you specifically said it, but were cemeteries also desecrated?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Cemeteries were also desecrated. In fact, one of the few instances that the destruction of cultural property was covered in the press was about a month ago there was a little piece, I believe, in Newsweek that talked about the destruction of Sarajevo's 500-year old Jewish cemetery.
The old Jewish cemetery is on a hillside overlooking the town, and it was systematically desecrated and dug up for an artillery position by the Serbian besiegers of the town.
Similarly, things have happened to Muslim and Catholic cemeteries throughout the Serbian occupied area.
Let me go into a little bit of the rationale for this. It is not vandalism, pure and simple.
You have essentially three motivations that are in play here. Number one is destruction as an aid to "ethnic cleansing." If you take the principal monumental architecture belonging to a group in a town and you destroy it, if you destroy the cadastral archives which house the land holding records, and if you destroy the cemeteries where their grandparents and ancestors are buried, those people will have no reason to come back and no way to prove that they belong to this place. So in that sense this kind of destruction is a cold-blooded practical measure.
In a secondary sense it also deals with ideology. The very fact of these monuments existing in close proximity is an affront to the historical myth that underlies fascist ideology. The ideology proclaims that people, in fact, cannot live together.
If you have these presences next to each other, it is a daily reproach to that ideology. In order to live with the ideology, you have to remove all the things which contradict it. And so that goes into the broader issues of destroying not only records of land and property ownership, but libraries and every cultural landmark that contradicts division.
The last step is to make up an artificial past. In the city of Zvornik, which figured toward the end of my talk, the same major, Branko Grujic has issued an appeal to Serbs abroad to donate money to build a huge neo-medieval Serbian cathedral on the site of the blown-up mosque.
So then, in his vision, 50 or 100 years from now, people will be able to come and say: ah ha, this has always been thus.
QUESTION: It is an interesting point because I believe there are Jewish cemeteries which have survived in Nazi Germany.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Yes.
QUESTION: That were not desecrated.
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. And, in fact, the Germans, in their perverse systematic way, actually had a collection point in Frankfurt where they collected Jewish treasures from all over Europe to be used in a museum after they had finished exterminating the Jews. The Serbian nationalist extremists and the Croat nationalist extremists seem to have no similar considerations.
Although, a rather sad symptom of what is going on is a report from the Associated Press that appeared, I believe, last November, which mentioned that Belgrade has become the largest antique market in all of Europe.
The Yugoslav government proclaims that this is "poor impoverished Yugoslavs" being forced to sell their family treasures because of the evil effects of the international sanctions on Yugoslavia. In fact, however, it is interesting to see that these "family treasures" seem to contain a disproportionate number of items that were once furnishings for houses of worship and the like.
QUESTION: It has been said that given the destruction and rebuilding process, in symbolic and literal terms, even with historic preservation and full restoration sometime in the future, there is ultimately no way to get people to return to the site of such negative associations.
In other words, we can go forward and destroy the memory, but surely we cannot return to it simply by rebuilding the buildings.
Would you comment on that?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: Yes. Obviously, people will have very bitter memories, and as long as they have no security in a physical sense, they will not go back. And security in a psychological sense is a much more long-term process.
But all of the Bosnians I have encountered, almost without exception, seem to be very eager to pick up the pieces.
I can tell you about one of the projects that I am involved in along with some academic colleagues. One of the things that was destroyed was the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. It burned with 99 percent of its contents, and we got together and we figured out that since its establishment in 1950, the Institute had had a lot of exchange relationships with foreign libraries and had played host to many foreign scholars, all of which had involved microfilming portions of its collections.
We got in touch with the staff of the Institute who have still remained together in Sarajevo even with their Institute in ashes and have continued to function as a group, holding scientific conferences and the like. They are very eager to collaborate in this project, which would involve gathering in all the "virtual" contents of the Institute, the microfilms, the photocopies, and thereby not only helping to rebuild the Institute, but also to deny victory to those who thought they had destroyed it.
That sort of shows you both what is possible and the spirit that underlies all this.
QUESTION: I wanted to ask a very similar question about the contents of the National Library. You said a lot of what was destroyed is irreplaceable. Has anyone calculated what percentage, for instance, of the original manuscripts have survived in good copy, and how much of the information in that library can be
MR. RIEDLMAYER: I was in touch with the director of the National Library not long ago, and I got an estimate that, first of all, about 20 percent of the collection was saved through the courageous efforts of volunteers.
One of my librarian colleagues, who was actually in charge of the exchange section of the National Library, was shot and killed by a sniper while handing books from the flames.
But about 20 percent was saved. The catalogue of the National Library in Sarajevo was on computer, and computer records of its holdings had been sent to the National Library of Slovina and Ljubljana, and so we know what was in there at least in those terms.
As a suggestion, let me answer you with a parallel. The first major instance in the twentieth century of such an event was in World War I when, in 1914, the German army marched into Belgium. On August 25th, 1914, as the German army entered the university town of Louvain, they were shot at by snipers, and the German general commanding that particular unit ordered in reprisal the burning of the University Library at Louvain. It is a much smaller library, several hundred thousand volumes instead of 1.5 million.
But the incident created such an uproar throughout the world that the burning of the library at Louvain was written into the Versailles Peace Accords at the end of the war. As part of the reparations that Germany had to pay to Belgium after the war, they had to contribute to the rebuilding of the library in the following way: every rare book library in Germany had to contribute part of its treasures to the new library in Louvain.
An ironic coincidence is that August 25 is also the day that the Sarajevo library was burned down 88 years later. The precondition that is lacking is, of course, the will on the part of the international community to force Serbia or anyone else to make such amends.
QUESTION: May I ask a followup? Is anything else known about the Muslim curator?
MR. RIEDLMAYER: There was an article on this in a London publication entitled "The Art Newspaper" toward the end of last year that gives some quite dramatic details on it. The Sarajevo Haggadah was not in the National Library but in the National Museum. The director of the National Museum Library is now assistant minister of culture and science in the Bosnian government and he is supervising efforts to safeguard what treasures remain in Sarajevo.
The Haggadah is safe but its location is being kept a secret because, obviously, it would make a very tempting target.
Thank you.
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