Cultural Destruction in Bosnia—Then and Now

So I'd like to first introduce Amila Buturović.

She's a professor in the Department of

Humanities at York University in Toronto.

Her research spans the intersection

of religion and culture in the context

of Islamic societies, in particular

the Ottoman era in modern Bosnia.

In addition to multiple

journal articles and essays,

she has authored and edited several books

with a focus on medieval and Islamic

tombstones in Bosnia, the spaces

and cultural practices surrounding death

and the Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar.

Her current research examines

inter confessional health culture

in Ottoman Bosnia

with a special focus on material

and written evidence of occult

knowledge and practices.

Amelia has also written a wonderful essay

on the national question

for Bosnian Muslims as explored

by the author Meša Selimović

in his 1966 book.

known as Death and the Dervish

in the English translation.

This is one of the greatest

novels ever written, I think.

Even if it is not well-known

outside of his homeland.

And I recommend reading Amila's essay,

which you can find on her academic.edu

page and Selimović's novel.

So I'll turn this over to you now.

Thank you.

First of all, thank you

to the hosts.

Thank you, Laurie Hart,

for bringing us all together

and for opening a conversation

between Ukraine and Bosnia, which

I think is a very important conversation.

We haven't really had time

much in the media to highlight

the connections between these two

tragedies.

Two case studies.

But I think

they are important to somehow

refer

mutually refer, because

there are lots of similarities,

but then also lots of differences.

And in Bosnia, of course,

we've had now almost 30 years

to reflect.

We haven't advanced too far, I must say.

But this is a little bit,

today's topic is mainly about that.

And it's a little bit also academic.

So we also had thirty times

to think academically about this topic.

So I will show you some slides

and read a little bit from my paper,

which really tries to focus on

not just the war theater,

but also postwar theater

when it comes to cultural heritage

and when it comes to

management of cultural heritage.

So when it

comes to culture, and

specifically cultural heritage,

nationalist projects seem

to be locked in a paradox.

They necessitate historical depth

to be able to claim what Benedict Anderson

called subjective antiquity.

A sense of long

and rich lineage and presence

in the cultural landscape

through both tangible

and intangible evidence.

Yet there is synchronic

focus on a unified,

uncontested and exclusive

objective modernity.

Again, to use Anderson's term runs

against their own predecessors,

who often tell different stories about who

and what they are in distinctive

historical epochs, often

highlighting these divides from within.

Mark Mazower points to the paradoxes

of such fluid identities in the

ethnonational history of

the Balkan peoples,

drawn along language,

ethnicity and material culture.

One account that Mazower

cites, among many,

is by a British journalist,

Henry Brailsford, who

tries to understand some young

Christian peasant's sense of belonging

at the turn of the 20th century,

at the time of the national awakenings

in the region.

This anecdote, dating to

"I took them up to the ruins

of the Bulgarian czar's fortress,

which dominates the lake

and the plane from the summit,

and asked: Who built this place?

The answer was significant.

The three men, they said.

And who were they?

Our grandfathers. Yes.

But were they Serbs, or Bulgarians,

or Greeks, or Turks?

No, no, they were not Turks.

They were Christians.

And this seemed to be

the measure of their knowledge."

End of quote.

These multiple divides,

of course, one can dissect

this quotation in many ways,

but these multiple divides

and blurred categories as to who is

who became the earliest victims of purist

nationalist propaganda throughout

the 20th century in the Balkans

and continue to date, albeit

under different political conditions.

When Bosnia and Herzegovina seceded

in 1992 to be recognized by the UN

as an independent state,

Its cultural complexity, both

historic and and demographic,

was the first target of

nationalist claims to purity.

Ethnic cleansing, the

euphemism invented by the Serbian

nationalist leaders, was

aimed against all Bosnians

who would not give up on their layered,

messy identities and culture.

While it is not to be ignored

that Bosnian Muslims were the dominant

victims targeted for expulsion,

torture camps, rape camps, and genocide,

the perpetrators aimed at anything

that told a different story

from the one they were rewriting

with bullets and in blood,

determined to project their vision

both into the past and into the future.

Some analysts

attribute the situation to the

emergence of a new type

of warfare, where

cultural property is targeted

because it manifests the identity

of conflicting identity groups.

The destruction of cultural property

also serves, they say, as a weapon

of psychological warfare,

and its looting prompts

informal economies and funds insurgents,

as we have seen in Iraq, in Syria,

Afghanistan, and now through the examples

of Ukraine. Removing the people,

therefore, is not enough.

Based on the examples of Bosnia,

we see how targeted population

had to be biologically

as well as culturally destroyed.

Their presence needed to be

systematically reduced to absence

in all aspects of their centuries-long

history, culture and values,

which were manifested through

architecture, art and written culture.

This would ensure that their

spatial memory was to be erased as well

for the generations to come.

Here we see a case, in Brčko,

of a mosque that was blown up

and bulldozed in May 1992.

And then it's rubble

was dumped over

a mass grave of the

Muslim population

that resided there.

Another one in Foča,

on the left side of the

mosque built in 1557,

blown up in August of 1992,

with leaving nothing

that shows its presence there.

So this would ensure that the

spatial memory would be erased,

as well. When there remains no

relationship to a place and its values,

there also remains no kinesthetic memory

that enables us to cope with the world

we inhabit, which helps

us find things again

based on the location

where we had placed them.

Therefore, a premeditated

demolition of historical

and cultural heritage went hand-in-hand

with killings and forced expulsions.

First, building by building, village

by village, carving micro histories.

Then region by region.

Removing the evidence of the past

was also ensuring the removal

of any desire to return

in the future by those who escaped

mass graves and executions.

A UN Commission in close

association with the ICTY

established, after thorough investigations

and multiple reports on the ground,

that the Bosnian Serbs, with the help

of the residual Yugoslav army,

bore the greatest responsibility

for these campaigns directly

targeted against Muslims and

Croat Catholic historical

and cultural heritage.

To a lesser extent, the Croats also bore

responsibility for ethnic cleansing

of the Muslims and Serbs

and the destruction of their

religious and cultural objects.

While the Bosnian government forces,

while accused of serious

breaches of conduct in several

situations, bore no responsibilities

for organized ethnic cleansing

and destruction of heritage.

These reports were entered into the UN's

report already at the very end of 1994.

Half a year before the genocide in

Srebrenica was to take place.

All this, much like in Ukraine today,

happened under the watchful

eyes of world media, the UN

peacekeepers, international

political observers, and activists.

In other words, in the full view of the

world. Everything was documented.

And thanks to dedicated scholars

like András Riedlmayer, whose

photograph we saw actually earlier,

during the

tribunal at The Hague, András Riedlmayer,

Helen Walasek, Amra

Hadžimuhamedović and many others,

it is also available online.

So there is an image of a

destroyed mosque where Muslims

pray for dead and missing

fellow villagers.

These are some of the photos that András

this kindly agreed that I use.

The image of the destroyed

Mostar Bridge in 1993.

I want to turn your attention

to the siege of Sarajevo

that lasted

relentlessly for nearly four years.

And the reason why I would

like to do this, is to

draw your attention

to specific challenges

dealing with postwar reconstruction,

management and preservation

of cultural heritage, to show

how much it is showing the uneven

result, and how much actually

the challenge of postwar

reconstruction is deeply

embedded in this idea

of what constitutes cultural heritage.

It has become increasingly evident

the cultural heritage, despite its seeming

stability in the landscape

and the seemingly common sense

as to what it is and where it can be

found, has been as vulnerable

in the postwar period as it

was during the war.

This is the opening

scene of the film

by Remy Ourdan, The Siege, to which

I would like to also draw your attention.

If you have a chance to see it,

it's quite an extraordinary

film which, as it says,

mentions how Sarajevo was

besieged for almost four years.

It's the longest siege in modern

history with 350,000 Sarajevans

under deadlock and

over 11,000 who died.

Some of the images of

the siege of Sarajevo,

these are from family archives

that I inherited from my family,

from my parents who were there,

and from my family who were there,

just shows the extent of the

devastations and all across

the city in all forms

of its urban life.

Some of the earliest victims

that constitute

historical heritage

are the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo,

a place where I had done my undergraduate

or to which I was associated

during my undergraduate years, where

Persian, Ottoman, Turkish

and Bosnia were destroyed.

The institute that also contained

provincial archives of Ottoman Bosnia,

court registers and cadastral records.

It was shelled in May of 1992.

So some of these most amazing

manuscripts that, you know,

we have lost and the world has

lost, with this destruction.

András Riedlmayer, myself and [. . .]

tried to organize it.

We put together something

called the Ingathering

Manuscript Project, where after

the war, we try to look for people

who had done research

at the Oriental Institute,

and collect the photocopies

of some of these items.

And this was one of those initiatives,

you know, privately organized and funded

to recover some of the manuscripts.

And sure enough, we actually had some

luck that there were people.

It happened so that a colleague in Toronto,

Professor Birnbaum, had actually a rather

substantial photocopy collection

of the manuscripts that he had used.

And we managed to digitize it

and present it to the institute later on.

The destruction of

the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina

shelled on 25th and 26th of August,

destroying over

the written records of Bosnia's

shared history and culture.

And it is considered

the largest single act

of deliberate book

burning in modern times.

Some more images of the destruction.

In 1993,

as a kind of gesture

of cultural resistance,

Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra organized

a performance of Eroica

in the ruins of the library.

And in 1994, another

performance conducted by Zubin Mehta,

you can see him here,

of Mozart's Requiem,

also in the library.

This is a website

that has been put together by

quite a few research organizations

and individuals who are interested in

the issues

concerning cultural heritage in Bosnia

and its reconstruction, documenting

everything that had happened,

and really very well-documented

which can be used

of course, for research,

but also as evidence, of course,

of what went on.

More than three years

after the beginning of the war

of organized

campaigns of expulsions,

killings, genocide and destruction,

the Dayton Accords was conceived

to end the bloodshed

and also reverse

some parts of ethnic cleansing.

It was signed on the 14th of December of 1995.

In the aftermath of this genocide

and destruction, Bosnia's postwar nation

building has been set up by the 1995

Dayton Accords on the premise

that the three constituent peoples,

Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks

must not only nurture a common goal

of a unified state,

Bosnia and Herzegovina,

but are also encouraged

to enshrine their differences

and memories in discrete terms.

And this is where the big problem begins.

The reality of war gains and losses

is thus enshrined in postwar

commemorative narratives and practices.

One village memory of destruction coexists

with the same village's memory of triumph.

The push and pull between two normative

value systems, one state-centered

and geared towards postwar rebuilding

and the reunification of Bosnia,

and the other nation-centered

and divisive, has further fragmented

the uneven map of collective memory

and created rivalries over

which and whose memories is

more objective and whose heritage

must be prioritized.

In 1996,

Diana Paul from the US Helsinki

Commission remarked the following:

My last visit in April

I found the city,

she's here referring to Banja Luka,

I found the city newly populated

with internationals who seem to have

little concept of the horrors

which have happened there.

It was as if the past had never happened,

as if the Dayton Agreement

was the beginning of time.

It's a curious, of course, observation,

because it does become a new calendar

in political terms, but also in terms of,

obviously, of postwar reconciliation.

And what it draws attention

to is not just what goes on

internally in Bosnia,

but also who comes to Bosnia

under what terms and how they

participate in this process of

state rebuilding.

And this is where Ukraine

has to be extremely vigilant.

I would say.

So what is happening?

Diana Paul observes this increasing presence

of international agencies, nonprofit

and for profit agencies, postwar

flux of capital, all making claims

as if Bosnia were tabula rasa

on which various interests of postwar

theater were to be realized.

Within such an atmosphere,

the question of how heritage

is understood, recovered, sustained,

has no longer been the topic

of creating a cohesive civil society

that would foster commonalities

among these differences

that had been expressed during the war,

but one whose values

have become increasingly entrenched

in the politics of division

that actually centralizes the differences,

rather than accepts the commonalities.

From the institutionalization

of divisive memories

and commemorative calendars to new

school curricula and new historiographies,

historical interpretations have

multiplied and so have the ideas

of what constitutes

cultural heritage and where.

I can now sadly say that I am no

longer able to express in Bosnia,

say it openly, that some

church belongs to me

as cultural heritage

or some place that in fact

is of shared

historical value,

it is now completely divided.

So I'm going to show you

three examples in Sarajevo,

the main mosque, the National Museum,

and the National Library, and what

happened to them and in what way.

In fact, we are witnessing

something that should

not be happening.

It's somehow in hands

that are not responsibly

dealing with this question of

joint and common heritage.

So this is Gazi Husrev Bey's

mosque built in 1531,

damaged from the artillery attacks.

This is the inside, the interior,

of the Gazi Husrev Bey's mosque,

very much reflecting all kind of Ottoman

architecture. As you can see,

it is rather lively, rather colorful.

It has a variety of esthetic

styles, but it is a mosque

which very much reflects

also the kind of architectural heritage

that Bosnia has put together in

its Ottoman context,

in, of course, reference to its

also pre-Ottoman heritage.

This is Gazi Husrev Bey's mosque

after it was restored in 1998

by a Saudi-funded restoration.

Basically, practically it was bleached.

In other words, it was, as Michael Sells

mentions, what the Serb militias

couldn't finish in their

siege and shelling of Sarajevo,

the Wahhabis are now trying to complete.

So we have a situation where suddenly

the mosque is no longer a Bosnian mosque.

There were some protests.

This was one of those early days when

there was still a

political will

and as well as a cultural will

to intervene in these processes.

The energy was still there.

The question of cultural resistance

in Sarajevo in particular

was still a very, very powerful.

And people protested and thankfully,

after those protests,

the Gazi Husrev Bey's

mosque got back some of its

some of its features,

including the two medallions.

These were the contested issues.

Here it says "Muhammad".

So the Saudis said: Oh, no,

we have to remove that.

Otherwise people would come to

mosque to worship

the Prophet Muhammad rather

than to worship God.

So they had removed all of that

and they would be distracted.

So now it was partly pulled back.

So you see it has some resemblance

of what it used to be,

but it's actually no longer

the same mosque.

And while it still is a

of course is considered

to be the major mosque in the city.

It really has lost that splendor

that it had as a kind of cultural heritage

with which we had grown

up with and lived with.

As such, I would say here would agree with.

Vijećnica,

this National Library, renovated in 2014.

In fact, actually, Sasha,

you were in this photo.

I just cut you out.

But you are in the original.

So this is when we

were walking up the hill.

So here is Vijećnica in

its new robe - architectural.

It's beautifully renovated.

There's no question about it.

Here is Vijećnica from inside.

As you can see,

it's really very well done,

quite a splendid creation.

But Vijećnica is no longer

the National Library.

Vijećnica now belongs to

the city administration

True, it had been, when it

was first built, when the

Austro-Hungarians came to Sarajevo,

it was built as a city hall.

But it's really,

it became the symbol of Sarajevo

and it was the National Library.

It was a place where, it was

also a public library.

It was a place through which the city

lived its sort of intellectual,

open intellectual life.

The books were burnt.

Vijećnica was a symbol of

Sarajevo during the siege.

So much of the public

attention was geared towards Sarajevo

because of the burning

of the National Library.

But now we are dispossessed of the books.

The books no longer belong

to Vijećnica. Now administrators

belong to Vijećnica.

And we really have no reason to go there,

other than to take beautiful pictures

and sort of leave.

So the National Library, the University

Library had been placed now on campus.

So it is a totally different

urban set up now.

But we have lost the symbol

that we once had

with which, in fact, we

we fought against the siege of Sarajevo.

The National Museum of Bosnia

and Herzegovina founded,

sorry, this is a typo, it's 1888.

Again, one of those cultural institutions

that was introduced by,

was founded by the Austro-Hungarians, who,

in their sort of colonial mindset,

set up a civilizational mission

that was channeled through this museum.

But also because of the way in which

the Austrians inherited

internal strife of national awakening

at the end of the 19th century,

they very much promoted

a unified Bosnian identity.

And they insisted that the museum should,

in fact, should host the collection,

to house the collection

of all Bosnians of all walks of life,

of the complex Bosnian history.

And sure enough,

this is where the most incredible

artifacts of the long

and this sort of rather

multilayered Bosnia and Herzegovina

history are deposited.

The museum,

I'll show you some of it.

This is the internal courtyard

of the National Museum with the medieval

tombstones that

were collected from around Bosnia

to be here, to be placed and studied

and looked at as again,

as part of the joint heritage, shared

heritage. The inside of

the Interior Museum that,

again, houses prehistoric, early historic

and pre-modern artifacts,

an extremely rich collection.

And the beautiful building.

These are some of the artifacts

that are laid out there.

And this is where also I have

as of recently done, I've been

doing my research on some of the

in terms of the occult medicine

and esoteric medical practices,

some of the most integrative

cross-confessional artifacts that testify

to the way in which people shared

resources, knowledge,

the transfer of knowledge in pre-modern

times, all sorts of directions,

intra-regionally

as well as inter-imperially.

So things that testify to

how the social intimacy of the population,

the cultural intimacy of Bosnians,

of all religious backgrounds.

You know, so these are

some of the amulet cases

other than perhaps this one here,

which has some Arabic inscription,

you probably would have

a hard time guessing

whose is whose. They all look alike.

And you really have to pay

extremely detailed attention to figure out

what the provenance, religious

provenance, of these artifacts is.

These are all items that

I was invited to look at and study

and figure out, you know,

what to do because they had

no resources to deal with it.

So what is going on here?

The museum, the National Museum of Bosnia,

as we know, has fallen into an

administrative black hole,

precisely because it nurtures

a sense of supranational identity,

a kind of unified Bosnian identity.

It has been defunded

and systematically not funded

by any of the governmental agencies.

So they have no salaries,

they have no money, they have no heat,

they have no resources

to actually keep up this collection.

So they rely on goodwill of international

agencies, diplomatic offices,

to give money to deal with

immediate costs, of course,

you know, turning on the lights

and having the heat in winter time.

So when I was

asked to look at

some of these items, I was

blown away by the

richness, the wealth of these kinds of items,

that were sitting in the attic,

and that were deteriorating

as shared cultural heritage,

because in postwar period,

there's nobody to actually finance it.

This is one of the talismans,

which was dug out

from under a tree in 1905.

Since 1905, it has been sitting like this

without resources

to be actually preserved,

conserved and studied.

It is a talisman which is written

in Bosnian script and Latin.

It testifies to some dualist belief

system, appeals to the names of angels

and demons who are, in fact, associate

with Bosnian version of Christianity.

It names 29

individuals, men, who have both Muslim

and Christian names. In other words,

the first generation of converts.

So this talisman is dated to 1550,

between 1550 and 1560.

So in other words,

the messy period of identity formation

where the Muslims

were not clearly Muslims,

when the Christians

were no longer Christians,

but they were nevertheless

looking after each other's property.

Likewise, a case of

an incredibly large talisman.

We have three of them.

This is something I've been working on

with the help of a colleague of mine

from the British Library,

who is a specialist in magic squares.

Basically, when he first saw it,

when I sent him one picture

of one of these talismans

without telling him that we

had many of them in the museum,

he said: You know, I've been

working on these things,

on this material for the past 25 years.

I know that they exist, but I've never...

I mean, the manuscripts

tell us that they exist,

but I've never seen one.

Like they are not preserved.

And I said: Well, we

actually have three of them.

So promptly he got on a plane

from London and came.

And we've been working on these talismans

now. At this point, I have now

joined forces, or I have invited to come

on board for this kind of research,

some conservationists here

in North America,

Gregory Heyworth of Rochester University

who does his Lazarus Project

that does multispectral imaging

and with the Smithsonian,

Fenella France,

who is a specialist in

textile restoration.

So hopefully with their help,

we will be able to actually

conserve these incredibly beautiful

and important items,

that again, speak of

eclecticism in esoteric tradition,

that speak of shared integrated

esoteric practices.

And that, in fact, will then be

hopefully exhibited both in physical terms

in the virtual space

through these efforts.

And of course,

there is the Sarajevo Haggadah,

which is also at the museum,

which has received attention,

international attention, but only because

it is the Haggadah and only because

the other items at the museum

were not as lucky as the Haggadah.

The 14th century manuscript

that arrived in Bosnia from Spain

with the Jewish community

expelled from Spain,

that made its way

to the Ottoman Empire

and settled in Bosnia

in 1999.

Sorry, 2000.

What's this year?

I have a hard time reading numbers.

to public,

because by then they had

not received 13

salaries, 13 months of salaries,

and they had no resources.

They absolutely could not.

The heat was turned off,

the water was turned off,

and they had to close the doors.

So these are the images

from Radio Free Europe,

a group of citizens

which called itself Anti-Dayton Citizens.

So, in other words, clearly

connecting the Dayton Agreement with this

mismanagement

of cultural heritage, they

tied themselves to,

you know, to the posts around the museum

and insisted that the museum drew

their public attention

to what was going on to the museum.

It says:

We will not give up on our institutions

and cultural institutions.

So the museum closed

its door for three years.

After that in 2015,

it opened the doors again.

But it's still suffering

from the same problem.

So when I go there, for example,

I feel really bad because people around me

tell me, well, no, we haven't

received salaries for the past six months.

So there is a constant

issue of survival

that the museum actually is

is, you know, suffering from.

And and even though there

is no more war, it in

fact is in the midst of

an administrative war

as a survival mechanism.

So what are the lessons

we can learn from these examples?

It seems to me that the most important

one is that cultural

heritage is primarily about the future

and only secondarily about the past.

By selecting it, we project what we want

to be and how we want to be remembered.

Who we are is

projected onto our selection of tangible

and intangible markers that identify us.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise,

but as Cornelius Holter

suggests,

our task as we study cultural heritage

should not focus on what heritage is,

but what heritage does.

Heritage, in the other words, is a

function of where the society wants to go,

not where it was. Based on

the dominant postwar attitudes in Bosnia

heritage is now there to take us apart

rather than bring us together.

And that which once did keep us together

has no longer such status.

The National Library does not belong

to shared books and knowledge.

The National Museum remains

in the administrative vortex.

The mosques are now transnational mosques

belonging only to certain believers.

Even the Mostar Bridge

that, you know,

is renovated, at the

best belongs to the tourists.

Unless we find a way to fight this

divisiveness with a more

meaningful social interaction,

togetherness will succumb

rapidly to collective amnesia

and prevail over collective memory.

For that reason, it is paramount to think

carefully and critically about what

we are doing today and how that can have

a significant impact on the future.

Now, just to conclude how to reconcile

the fact that cultural space is

always simultaneous, the different people

and different memories always coexist

is not only a dilemma

regarding cultural heritage,

but the issue of justice and human rights

and minority rights.

We are often told in Bosnia Herzegovina

that there is too much history

in everyday life in the region,

but such entanglements with history

should not be dismissed

as a compulsive, obsessive

indulgence, as is commonly done.

Rather, in the absence of a better

understanding and treatment

of post-traumatic societies,

the past, it attaches itself

only to trauma and thus remains alive

as collective responsibility at best.

And is fuel for discursive

and real violence at worst.

Cultural heritage is now intertwined

with keeping the trauma alive.

Cultural heritage ought to be connected

with a new pedagogy of difference.

Unless diversity is accepted

as a principle and connected

with shared memory and heritage,

it will never matter what the differences,

ethnic, religious,

socio-economic or gender,

because it will be equally expunged,

which is evident in everyday

life across Bosnia and across

post-Yugoslav spaces.

As we want to be understood

and remembered,

all of us,

in other words, we who

believe in the pluralist society,

and we hopefully, of course,

we would like to transmit

that message to Ukraine,

we must make sure to move away

from polarized camps and tribal divisions

associated with cultural heritage

into a civil framework

where diversity features

not just as a norm, but as a major asset

for all heritage objects

and for all institutions of culture.

And I want to leave

you here just with one slide, and that is

the slide of Mostar.

Here is a beautiful photograph

of a renovated bridge.

This is my photograph.

So I am calling it beautiful.

But it is beautiful, I must say.

So this was taken last summer.

We had a conference there.

And at that time I was staying...

So Mostar is still a very divided city.

The Croat and the Bosniak side

really are,

you know, it's a continuation of war.

The bridge is all beautiful and the area

around the bridge is all lovely,

but the war continues.

And I was staying on the Croatian side

in a big hotel,

which incidentally had been built

on the site

where Tito once received a gift

from Lebanon of beautiful Lebanese cedars.

So they were all cut down as a kind of act

of denial, of course, of Tito's legacy.

So, again, talking about the destruction

of cultural heritage.

And this hotel was built.

I was walking and suddenly

this enormous oil

painting caught my attention.

And so this is the painting of Mostar.

Not a single mosque is

on this painting, here is no bridge,

there is no old bridge.

There is no nothing.

There is only in the foreground here

the kind of typical, you know, Eurocentric

view of history with

Roman ruins

as the beginning of civilization

and nothing to show

for in terms of Ottoman history.

So this was taken last summer.

So this is the reality that we are

dealing with and we are living with.

So please do not come to

this reality in Ukraine.

Thank you.

Thank you for that presentation, Amila.

Our next speaker is Aleksandar Hemon.

He's an author, screenwriter and musician

who has written several highly regarded

novels and nonfiction books,

including The Lazarus Project

and Nowhere Man.

His writing has also been featured

in multiple outlets

such as The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta,

New York Times, among others.

He's also been the recipient

of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a genius grant

from the MacArthur Foundation

and the John Mikulski Prize in Literature.

And he taught at several universities

in the United States and is currently

a professor of creative

writing at Princeton University.

He has a new novel, The World and All That

It Holds, coming out in January,

which I very much look forward to reading.

Also, I want to just

mention Alexander's most recent book,

My Parents: An Introduction,

is also relevant, I think,

to today's discussion as it

highlights as Amila did in her comments,

the importance of thinking

about culture destruction,

not just in relation to material things,

but also in the tearing apart of

communities and life worlds.

With survivors often displaced and forced

to start anew in unfamiliar places,

a process that Sasha

poignantly describes

with regard to his parents.

Good afternoon.

I don't have a PowerPoint presentation,

although this looks like one.

I only have some music.

First, I want to play a recording

of a traditional Ukrainian song

sung by these guys.

This is my father, my two uncles,

my cousin on the accordion,

and his son.

He's the only one

among them who was born outside of Bosnia

in Canada.

And then I'll talk about all that.

But here's the song.

The song is called

Whose Horse Is Over There.

I'll stop here.

It keeps going

as it should.

Both of my paternal

grandparents were born in

what is today western Ukraine.

It was western Ukraine then,

but it was called Galicia.

It was part of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire, as was Bosnia.

So their parents moved

within the borders of the empire

to Bosnia, which was

recently occupied, then

annexed by the Austrian Empire.

They were poor peasants, lured to

Bosnia by the stories of forests

with a lot of wood to survive winters.

They brought along little, a steel pillow,

a couple of beehives, some livestock.

The most precious thing that they brought

were the songs, the music,

which they sung at every gathering,

including when they all worked together.

They settled in the

northwest corner of Bosnia,

around a town called [. . .], where

there were villages populated by people

that came from other parts of empire -

Poles, Bohemians, Germans, Italians.

To this day, there's an

Italian speaking village there,

shrinking, but there's still people.

In 1988,

my father and his brothers and

some cousins sang at a concert

marking the centennial

of the beginning of Ukrainian migration

to Bosnia.

In the audience, a delegation

that came from Ukraine was left in tears.

It's a book about my parents.

This episode somewhat recounted

In the spring of 1991

as the dissolution of Yugoslavia

was accelerating,

there was a census in Bosnia, this kind of

preparing for the war in some ways.

And many of these divisions

that Amila was talking about, political

and administrative

and territorial,

were really set up by that census.

But on that census, there were about 4,000

Ukrainians in Bosnia,

which was less than one

hundredths of a percent of the total

Bosnian population.

But about 50% of my family.

In the summer of 1991,

I was in Kyiv at the time of the August

putsch and the subsequent dissolution

of the Soviet Union.

After the putsch,

for a few days before it was resolved,

we demonstrated in the Maidan demanding

Ukrainian independence.

People sang familiar songs.

Not these two specific songs, though

it was possible, I just don't remember.

As the rumors spread that

the Soviet army troops

were heading toward Kyiev.

Later, the songs were sung outside the Rada

as it was voting on Ukrainian independence

and then declared it.

My parents left Sarajevo in the Spring of 92,

right at the beginning of the siege

and in fact the day the circle closed.

And they ended up in Canada

in December of 1993.

Soon they were followed

by many more of the Hemons,

my father's side of the family,

including my cousin,

even the one with the accordion

who had played the instrument

in the orchestra of the Ukrainian Cultural

and Arts Society in Bosnia, the northwest part.

By now it's under control

of the Serbs, part of Republika Srpska.

He brought

along two notebooks

with some chords and words.

One of them contained Ukrainian songs

and the other Bosnian and Yugoslav songs.

When he was not playing in

the Association

Orchestra, he was doing weddings and parties.

So he had a large, large repertoire,

and these notebooks were his repertoire.

So my family sang those songs

and then some more.

And then they learned some more songs,

because they engaged with

the Ukrainian community in Canada

and they sang them at every get together

whenever

there was a critical mass of singers,

which means more than one in my family.

Personal note.

My parents threw a party

for my firstborn daughter

in their backyard,

and they sang for 8 hours straight.

I am not exaggerating.

They were going to stop after 6 hours,

but there was a Polish neighbor

who was listening to this, you know,

Slavic nostalgia and drinking alone.

Then he came over

and then they said: Sit down.

And there was two more hours

of singing while the Pole cried.

Anyway, my father and his brothers

would join a Ukrainian choir

in Canada and they toured

and recorded with the choir.

They still sing in the choir.

They also recorded a CD

featuring their standard repertoire,

including the songs I just played.

This is the Hemons there.

The choir also recorded a CD.

In 2003 I went to Ukraine to research for

what would become my novel, The Lazarus Project.

One evening in Lviv,

on the city's main square,

I listen to people

singing these songs again.

These were citizens.

These citizens gathered every Sunday,

I think, at least once a week

just to sing together spontaneously.

I've never seen that anywhere else,

that people just get together in a public

space and just sing. Dancing, you know,

can have it. But singing

was something.

I sang a few songs with them, thinking:

These are my people.

Because I recognize the same cadences

and sort of tonalities and registers.

There's a deep, heroic voice

that men use when they sing.

And then I saw, as many people

did, the recent videos of people

in the Kyiv Metro under the shelling,

singing these same songs.

One of the songs is kind of

an unofficial anthem of Ukraine,

you know, signifying resilience.

It's been sung throughout the world,

and my family sings it still.

In fact, my cousin, I was just in Canada,

my cousin has it as

ringtone on his phone.

So recently when I

watched those videos

from the metro, I thought,

these are my people

and they can never be defeated.

I felt Ukrainian to

the exactly same extent

to which these songs brings

tears to my eyes.

The point of this little story

is not for me

to establish my

Bosnian-Ukrainian credentials,

but rather to bring up the notion

of embodied cultural heritage.

So these songs create

the physical reaction in me

and they have to be

carried in the body.

Other than those two notebooks

my cousin even carried across the world,

the Ukrainian musical tradition

in my family has been sustained

throughout history in and

by their or our bodies.

While we now have the aforementioned CD,

the musical tradition in my family

will last as long as there

are bodies to sustain it,

much as Ukrainian or Bosnian culture

will live for as long as there are living

Bosnians and Ukrainians.

I'm a big fan of singing,

obviously, so I have to say this:

The best and most obvious way

to protect Ukrainian or Bosnian culture

from destruction is to protect Ukrainian

or Bosnian bodies from destruction.

Ukraine needs help to

protect the bodies of its citizens,

which will be in danger

until Russia is defeated

and held accountable

for its genocidal invasion

and the crimes it inflicted.

Another obvious thing

related to this, genocide

is never just destroying the bodies

or just destroying the culture.

To destroy the culture,

the bodies must be destroyed.

To destroy the bodies, they must be

emptied, as it were, of culture.

They are reduced

to their biological function,

which is then violently extinguished.

Wherever a mosque in Bosnia

was destroyed by the Serbs, Muslims

were rounded up and killed.

Wherever Muslims were rounded up

and killed, the objects

containing the culture -

mosques, books - were destroyed.

The urge to destroy museum or mosque

comes from the same place

as the urge to torture the body.

We can find anecdotal evidence for that

in the stories of Serbs forcing Muslims

to recite or urinate on the Koran

before they were killed,

or Russians torturing to death people

for merely speaking Ukrainian.

Genocide is a means of converting

living people into passive

objects of the genocidal force.

The end result is a total suppression

of any kind of human agency,

reducing people to nothing

which can then be disposed,

that nothing. Extermination, corporeal

and cultural, is the main mode,

but nominally and theoretically

absorption into the absolute

singlehood of the genocidal

nation works as well.

This is what the Russians are claiming.

They have to kill Ukrainians

to make them Russian effectively,

literally and figuratively.

The goal of genocide

is the erasure of otherness

so as to establish the absolute

us-ness in the world.

The main target of Serb

genocide were Bosnian Muslims,

but while they were beheaded,

they were eliminating,

as Amila was suggesting,

whoever else they could,

who could not conform

to the narrative of

Serbian superiority and purity.

Fascism is not that invested in diversity,

have a striving for monolithic oneness

of the absolute nation.

In 1992, for example,

the Greek Catholic Ukrainian

Church in [. . .] was blown up

by the Serbs for being too Catholic.

They're kind of confused about, you know,

Ukraine in a classical situation.

But just in case they blew it up,

I don't know the numbers,

but I would venture to say that most

the 4,000 Ukrainians from the 1991

census are elsewhere

now, or they're not Ukrainian.

Living in Bosnia.

It's not Ukraine.

I, for one, have about

alone, three of the four generations

coming due to the war in Bosnia.

The fourth generation

just being born there.

One more obvious thing, culture is memory,

both collective and individual.

I find it useful to

think about the difference

between the collective and

the individual in terms similar

to the structuralist distinction

between language and speech.

Language is impossible

without individual speech acts

which unnecessarily embody,

while speech acts perpetually constitute

and reconstitute the collective practice

and rules of language.

The dialectic of language

and speech is structurally

very similar to the relationship

between information and knowledge.

Information is stored elsewhere.

Knowledge is in body.

Language also contains

dialects and dialects

and all kinds of variations,

all of which are part of language,

but to which the language

can never be reduced. To one of them.

Certainly not.

No one knows all of their language,

but we all have access to all of it

from our specific positions,

which is to say that

the more bodies they are,

the more culture or language there is,

and the richer they are.

This is diversity.

Conversely, if there are no bodies,

there is no language or culture,

nor culture preserved,

though it may be in some digital file

or a museum for a living culture or living

tradition. There have to be

living bodies where the tradition

and culture can live.

But of course the bodies change

biologically and metaphorically.

The songs my family sings are peasant

songs featuring water, weeds,

periwinkle, horse, war,

mother, and, of course,

some form of usually heterosexual love.

The songs came from

the early 20th century,

or maybe late 19th century,

from an old language, as it were,

because of the distance, geographical

and political, from the place of origin.

My family never directly connected

after the departure

to the experience of the people

actually living in Ukraine.

I had some distant

family in the early 2000s,

the last time I was there,

but we haven't been in touch.

So I would assume they're

still there, but I don't know.

In any case, for my family,

Ukraine was a kind of a utopian homeland

while Bosnia was their native land.

The songs were and are loaded

with an assuage

about nostalgia, referring

to a never lived past, but that nostalgia

was contingent upon their actual lives

unfolding in the present space of Bosnia.

They never sang songs

about Bosnia in Ukrainian,

they sang Bosnian songs about Bosnia.

There was a strict, as it were,

experiential segregation.

The music was never updated

as it was not updatable.

My family visited Ukraine once in 1991,

before everything came down

and before the internet.

Came down in Yugoslavia,

and came up in Ukraine.

Of course, contemporary

Ukrainian culture is as rich and diverse

as any other contemporary culture,

but contemporary culture is synchronous.

It happens, as it were, everywhere.

At the same time,

much like language, culture

could be perceived and experienced,

both synchronically and diachronically.

A culture is something

that contains and exists in history,

but it is also seen chronically practiced

in individual cultural acts,

institutional support, material objects,

buildings and digital platforms.

Preservation is essential

for preserving the diachronic,

the language, the information,

the history. But there has

to be a synchronic experience

involved as well.

My family could reasonably assume

that Ukrainians in Ukraine were singing

the same songs at the same time

as they were, but they never really knew.

Their music became synchronic only

in 1988, when the Ukrainian delegation

teared up in [. . .]

during their concert.

Some of you might be familiar

with the traditional Bosnian music known

as [. . .], which comes from

Bosnia's Islamic tradition.

But it was sung by all and thus absorbed

and extended all kinds of influence.

One of the classics

known to every Bosnian, a kind of an

unofficial anthem of the city of Sarajevo,

is actually Sephardic Jewish song.

There was a large population

in Sarajevo and Bosnia before World

War II, before the Holocaust.

Before the most recent war in Bosnia,

[. . .] was not by any stretch of the

imagination, a young people's music.

Young people knew it and could

sing it if sufficiently drunk

at a party, but their bodies engaged

with other kinds of music.

But with the war in Bosnia, where Serb

genocide was intent on destroying

the bodies and the culture

in them, music included,

there was a significant upsurge

in young people's interest in it.

Indeed, after the war, there

emerged a whole new music scene

featuring updated sevdah idiom with acts

like the Mostar Sevdah Reunion.

New bodies, different music.

I believe that one of the factors

that enabled the success of sevdah

in the postwar period was the Bosnian

diaspora who sought, much like my family,

to retain connection, even if

imaginary, with the home space.

Their bodies were new by virtue

and by misfortune of displacement

and diasporic living.

But the modern Bosnian diaspora,

unlike my family, had an advantage

of digital communication.

They could experience the music,

at least the music, simultaneously

with the people in the home space.

Diaspora both contains and transforms

the culture they embody,

which then allows for the experience,

the dialect of displacement

of the diaspora to be absorbed

into the language and the culture

that originally constituted

their identity.

A banal example.

For a while after the war, you

could find American filtered coffee

in the cafés of Sarajevo,

where normally you would get

only Bosnian coffee or espresso.

The name for the filtered

coffee was the diaspora.

So the waiter would

deliver the order and

say: Two espressos, one

Bosnian coffee and one diaspora.

But the popularity of the diaspora

faded mainly, I think,

because the Bosnians abroad

found a way to make Bosnian coffee.

I know I did.

And the quality of espresso in America

has significantly improved in

the past 30 years.

All of which is to say

that the diasporic bodies can transform

the body politic, both of the homeland

and the host land, the cultural body

of the homeland and the host land.

Which is why the diaspora is crucial

not only on the preservation of home

culture, but also in its

inescapable transformation.

And I want to finish with one more song by

the Hemons.

This one is called [. . .] Carries

Water, and a young man

is following her like a periwinkle,

but is not helping for some reason.

And the water carrier,

a stick across the shoulder,

bends because it's heavy.

And he walks behind and wants

to seduce her without offering help.

Why that is interesting?

I don't know.

Thank you!