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11
Women in Ottoman Bosnia
as Seen Through the Eyes of
Luka Botić, a Christian Poet
Mirna Šolić
for Frka
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Croatian literature was heavily
influenced by a long-standing folk tradition that had transformed centuries of
struggle against the neighboring Ottoman Empire, and the concomitant burdens
of life at the “bulwark of Christianity,” into the negative figure of “The Turk.”1
Indeed, the genre of “hayduk-Turkish” stories that first emerged during the 1850s
continued to draw a line between Christianity and Islam, exalting hayduk s.
Christian folk heroes who had been engaged in the fight against Turkish cruelty
became a symbol of Croatia’s historical importance as the defender of Christian
Europe. Indeed, as Antun Barac has argued, the literature of the 1850s had
nothing to offer except for stereotypical images of Turks. Fueled by canonized
patterns of hatred, it called for the extinction of everything Ottoman. And not
many authors, Barac concludes, succeeded in finding inspiration elsewhere, or in
freeing themselves from the literary fashion that was “red with Turkish blood.”2
The propagation of folk tradition, including the “hayduk-Turkish stories”
mentioned above, was a typical feature of the nineteenth-century Croatian
national, political, and cultural revival known as the Illyrian movement (1830–
60). Influenced by other similar national movements—especially those in Central
Europe—a young generation of intellectuals belonging to the emerging bourgeois
class (Ljudevit Gaj, Stanko Vraz, Ivan Kukuljević, Janko Drašković, and others)
relied on the populist character of the folk tradition in order to address all the
benefits of political and cultural unification for economically impoverished
Croatian lands, politically fragmented within the Habsburg Monarchy. To
substantiate the natural and political rights of Croats to unite, they based their
romantic nationalism on the pseudo-historical construct of “Illyria,” a mythical
land of indigenous pre-Slavic inhabitants (whom they falsely considered ancestors
to Slavs) existing on the territory of the Balkan Peninsula.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
This was not just a nineteenth-century phenomenon per se, however, but also
a continuation of a centuries-long tradition of Croatian and pan-Slavic political
thought3 focusing on the need to integrate Croatian lands: Dalmatia (which was
a Venetian colony until 1797, and then, briefly ruled by Napoleon, became an
“inherited” part of the Habsburg Monarchy separated from other Croatian lands);
“Vojna krajina,” a hinterland military region established by the Habsburgs in the
vicinity of the border with the Ottoman Empire; and finally Croatia proper (the
northern part of present-day Croatia) with Slavonia. Cultural unification was
primarily based on education—the creation of a national literary scene and the
fight against widespread illiteracy in order to raise national awareness. Another
crucial part of the Illyrian movement’s political and cultural program was the
establishment of a standard linguistic idiom that would mediate between people
separated by different dialects and also prevent further denationalization. In the
northern part, Hungarian authorities were persistently trying to impose Hungarian
as the official language, while in Dalmatia, political groups were lobbying for
a return to Italian cultural constructs reflecting centuries of Venetian colonial
influence.
The unification of the northern Croatian provinces with Dalmatia was crucial
for the development of a Croatian national consciousness. Dalmatia was known
for its rich cultural tradition which placed Croatia on the cultural map of Europe. In
opposition to its rural hinterland, Dalmatian coastal towns such as Zadar, Šibenik
and Split, and the islands, together with the Ragusan Republic (which was paying
dues to the Ottomans for its independence), had been the centers of flourishing
humanist, Renaissance, and Baroque culture from the fourteenth century to the
seventeenth—until disrupted by political changes in the eighteenth century. The
literary, philosophical, and artistic achievements of that period were considered
the highest Croatian contributions to European culture, and consequently proof
that Croatia belonged to the Christian and western Mediterranean cultural heritage.
Moreover, a bilingual literary tradition, the existence of a highly developed
linguistic norm, and a rich tradition in translation provided fertile ground for
further language standardization.
From the literary point of view, a need for cultural preservation was articulated
in the fifteenth-century works of Marko Marulić—considered the father of
Croatian literature—represented by the feminine notion of bašćina (heritage).
Bašćina is a translation of the Latin term patria (homeland), but in contrast to its
Latin equivalent (the neutral synonym of patria would be domovina) this word
was consciously chosen by Croatian authors for its semantic reference to the
cultural aspect of belonging, and refers to their perception of Croatian identity
and nationhood based on shared cultural (Christian and European), rather than
national and political, commonalities.
Croatian authors used the metaphor of bašćina not only to express their concern
for the cultural heritage that had been jeopardized during Ottoman rule or as the
result of the political fragmentation of the land, but also to criticize their fellow-
citizens who neglected their own language, history, and culture. Furthermore,
Šolić, Women in ottoman Bosnia
309
since this noun was grammatically feminine, bašćina was the point around
which traditional techniques of gendering in literature developed, especially in
territorial representations. As Annette Kolodny remarks, “gendering the land as
feminine was nothing new in the sixteenth century. Indo-European languages,
among others, have long maintained the habit of gendering the physical world
and imbuing it with human capacities.”4 In the Croatian context, for example, the
Renaissance poet Petar Zoranić—whose views I shall discuss in detail later on—
personified the mountains surrounding Split as feminine, paradisiacal landscapes
where the importance of heritage was revealed to him by naked nymphs dancing
and cavorting with each other. Another example of gendering the land can be
found in the whole tradition of Cr
oatian pastorals, which, in contrast to its Italian
literary counterpart (upon which it relied), is highly political. In the pastoral
entitled Dubravka (1628), for instance, the Baroque poet Ivan Gundulić created
Arcadia as an imaginary space of freedom in the hinterland of Dubrovnik in
order to stress the dire external (Turkish conquests) and internal (conflicts among
the city-state’s patriarchs and social classes) problems that could threaten the
independence of his town.
Returning to the folk tradition of the Illyrian movement, “hayduk-Turkish”
writings represented only one side of a two-fold approach to folk literature
written at the time, as Barac points out: “by the sweat of their brows,” Croatian
writers and philologists did their utmost “to establish the illusion of a Croatian
short story.”5 Carried by pan-Slavic idealism, intellectuals and writers of the
Illyrian movement intensified cultural links with other Slavs (especially Czechs,
Slovaks, and South Slavs) and embraced a new approach to folk poetry based on
ethnographic research, travel, and first-hand experience, rather than imitation of
already established canons.
In that pre-Romantic era, it was the cultural heritage—rather than the military
past—of the Dalmatian rural region that was re-discovered and praised by numerous
foreign travelers. Alberto Fortis, an Italian cleric with scholarly interests in biology
and other natural sciences, is perhaps the most famous among them. Fortis was the
first to portray the idyllic life of the Morlak highlanders, and to record the famous
Bosnian Muslim love poem Hasanaginica in his Viaggio in Dalmazia [Journey in
Dalmatia] (1774). Croatian intellectuals and clergy followed his example. During
the 1830s, the Croatian bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer called for the recording
of folk poetry as an attempt to preserve cultural and national identity. Animated
by the idea of cultural and political brotherhood with other Slavs, especially
those living under Ottoman rule, Croatian writers started traveling to Ottoman
Bosnia. They replaced established folk patterns with documentary accounts of the
life of the common people, their habits, traditions, and folk songs. The negative
image of “The Turk” slowly diminished, but at the same time Bosnia became an
exotic “other.” Indeed, it was romantically re-discovered by Croatian intellectuals
Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History Page 55
