188 Lanterns
Civilization arrived as a humiliation. After the short-lived but bloody uprising against the occupying forces, just after the city had been abandoned by the last Turkish soldiers, Baron Josip Filipović received the surrendering delegation at Konak. “Then,” writes Archpriest Nedeljko in his memoir, “Baron Filipović soundly reprimanded the Muslim delegates with these words: ‘You, thieves and animals, good-for-nothings and cowards! You and your Sublime Porte, whose every trace stinks of such filth that one cannot walk down your streets. And why did you not declare war openly like heroes rather than like whore-mongering soundrels? I am amazed at how this wretched people could live under such criminals. I will show you the power of Austria, you rebellious animals.’ ” That was how the Archpriest Nedeljko put it, and knowing the bearing of the generals who brought and then deprived us of civilization by sword, I don’t suppose he rephrased or added much. There is, moreover, something in Filipović’s words from which you would learn yourself, living some twenty years in Zagreb, something about the nature of that people, small but strong in its provincial fury, which in the East, especially in Bosnia, has always found a real or imaginary space for unloading its anger and its Croatian frustrations. You would find that Bosnia served a unique role for metropolitan Croats and those who gravitated toward Zagreb in making them great, cultured, and civilized. You would for years travel down Zagreb’s Baron Filipović Street, passing the army barracks where all Croat males received their military training, and those words of his reported by Archpriest Nedeljko would pass through your head: “You, thieves and animals, good-for-nothings and cowards! You and your Sublime Porte…” And, being a cynic, you’d wonder what in the world those Croats were proud of and whether you too might be proud once you figured it out. But you could never get it into your head or quite sort it out. Over time, as your attitude toward Sarajevo changed and the city itself changed, becoming for you a distant, foreign land, your wonder at the eloquence of a Croatian baron would lose its native quality. At first you had clearly identified with the Muslim deputies castigated by this high representative of the occupying power, and it made you angry. But there’s no use being angry. Later that sense of identity was lost, your homeland sailed down the Miljacka, through Bosnia, along the Sava, the Danube, and there it is today at the Black Sea, last spotted somewhere near Odessa, and all that was left was the wonder of it all. As well as the attempt to understand both that Baron Josip Filipović – born in Gospić, frontiersman, inhabitant and fierce son of the Croatian borderlands, member of the always dubious Croatian nobility – and those who came to pay homage to him, the more astute of Sarajevo’s Muslims, melancholic and forever introverted, who understood well the logic of history and who, in their heads and hearts managed to perform a great mental, intellectual, and emotional transformation. By contrast to the rebels and heroes, who ended up in prisons or on the gallows, by contrast to Muhamed Hadžijamaković, the sixty-four-year-old leader of the armed opposition, they were able to encompass a long span of time in their thoughts, imagining its extension much further than the life of a man or family memory, and adapt themselves to the great changes taking place in the world. Baron Filipović’s insults did not concern them, for in a certain strange way they were the victors. Their imagination far surpassed those who offered futile resistance, or anything Josip Filipović could dream up. The difference between the limitations of the provincial Croat, who became an Austrian general, and Fadilpaša Šerifović, the leader of the Muslim delegates, to whom the baron had offered a seat because of his advanced age before beginning his speech, may be found in military and cultural power and in imagination. The former is on the side of the historical victors; the latter on the side of the defeated. There is often a special franchise in being the loser. Only the defeated, the humiliated, those reduced to despair can write history, and think in breadth and depth, the same way great novels are written. Great history and eternity are on their side, while on the baron’s is Croatian temporariness, the servility of the cleaning staff at Croatian summer beaches, the cruelty of the soldiers in Croatian military missions. Fadilpaša was a man from the most distant province of an empire, from the very edge of the Oriental world, an Easterner in the heart of the West, but his world, in contrast to that of Filipović, was far and wide.
Civilization came to Sarajevo as a humiliation. The truth is that each event has at least two versions. Hamdija Kreševljaković was a great collector and a wise archivist of Bosnian history, someone who avoided literary fictionalization, though it would occur occasionally. In Sarajevo in the Time of the Austro-Hungarian Administration, which he published in 1946, he cites a different version of Filipović’s speech before the Muslim delegates. Muhamed Enveri Efendi Kadić, a Sarajevo writer, was not one of the delegates but from them learned that Baron Filipović had said: “Even if you have seen that the Turkish authorities in the course of these three years have not been able to put down the uprising and establish order, that your roads and bridges are unsound, and that there is no justice, freedom, or equality, you should have welcomed the friendly forces of the great power of Austria, which came to put down the uprising and bring peace, but instead, you took up arms and inflicted great losses on their forces. That is terribly sad. Don’t you know – here he raised up his arm – that this iron fist would reach Mitrovica in just two weeks? Go with God!”
The truth is probably that Josip Filipović said both what Archpriest Nedeljko writes and what the Muslim delegates imparted to Effendi Kadić. Merely by relating the two declarations, by comparing the two opposing sets of emotions, we can imagine how things appeared on that twenty-third of August, 1878, just after the Friday prayers when, powerless before the future and preceded by Fadilpaša Šerifović, the Muslims accepted defeat in a war they had never fought. This event would be interpreted in a variety of ways in our school textbooks, depending on the needs of the regime in place, but its real social drama would not be told. The personal drama of Fadilpaša Šerifović, the seventy-year-old man who sat while Baron Filipović delivered his terrifying speech, would never be of interest to anyone, though this man had the experience of ages and generations. Sitting there, he represented a world that was disappearing, a world resigned to defeat.
The leader of the resistance Muhamed Hadžijamaković turned himself in to the Austrian authorities on Saturday, August 24, the day after Baron Filipović had received Sarajevo’s delegations. He had been staying in the attic of an accomplice and that day came down from the attic and set out into town. A military patrol intercepted him at the bridge and brought him to the Konak. He was in his most festive attire, already prepared for what was to take place.
He was tried before an Austrian military court and confessed to everything. He expressed no regret and was sentenced to hanging. The baron confirmed the sentence with an order that it be effective immediately. Hadžijamaković accepted it calmly, revealing no emotion. He was executed at the base of Gorica, where, as Kreševljaković writes, the Sarajevo-Pofalići road splits off from the one for Velešići. When they took off the handcuffs before the hanging, the old man leapt up, grabbed a revolver from one of the guards, and fired two shots. The soldiers bayoneted him, he was dead when they strung him up. They buried him in the field across the road from the gallows.
The difference between Fadilpaša Šerifović and Muhamed Hadžijamaković is in their way of thinking. Hadžijamaković could not imagine the world that had just come into being in Sarajevo. Though Fadilpaša could not live in such a world either, he chose self-imposed exile in Istanbul, while Hadžijamaković chose death in Sarajevo. He chose martyrdom, though he could count on future recognition. Fadilpaša could not count on such a thing. Calmly and without struggle he left his world to others, which makes him more interesting in a literary sense. It was according to this paradigm that the history of this city evolved, as did our own family’s history. We too are disappearing, while Hadžijamaković’s tragic mode belongs more to the g
enre of heroic poems and the burial monuments of victors, whoever they might be and whatever their faith. Perhaps poetry can only be found in a grave that’s no more, which was in a field that is no more, across the road from a gallows that is no more, covered by a layer of asphalt.
Baron Josip Filipović Filipsberški or Joseph Feiherr Philoppovich von Philippsberg left Sarajevo disappointed, for Vienna did not accept his proposal for the governing of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The baron was stubborn and would not let go of his ideas, which are of no interest to us here. Of interest here is that he left Sarajevo on December 2, 1878. Having passed through Mostar, he traveled to Kotor, from which he set out by ship for Trieste. From Trieste he made his way to Vienna. There in 1882 he was named commanding officer in Prague, where he remained until his death on August 6, 1889. Before his departure, by order of the city council, Josip Filipović was named the first honorary citizen in the history of Sarajevo.
Sarajevo fell under Austrian military rule on August 18, 1878. Just four days later the order went out through the town criers that the shops in the bazaars should be opened and that everyone should get back to work. The shop owners did not know what to do, especially those who had participated in the movement against the occupation – perhaps it would be shameful to return to work, a mark of betrayal; would they lose face before their neighbors? And of course they wanted to see what others would do. This was the way of life in Sarajevo: you look to see what others are doing and adjust your behavior accordingly. And so the city’s shopkeepers, on August 22, 1878, sent their children to open the shops, with the intention of doing something contrary to rebellion but for which no word can define. On that Thursday, only then and never again, Sarajevo’s businesses were run by children. Serious and preoccupied ten-year-olds, their foreheads creased with worry, sat at the shop doors and windows, biding their time…Kreševljaković writes: “Thus were the shops permanently opened, never again to be closed as a sign of protest.”
One of the first orders of the new authorities regarded public lighting – after the post-sunset prayers no one was to leave home without a lantern. Years later Austria would invest a great deal of energy and money in streetlights for Sarajevo and Bosnia. Along with the railroad and the postal service, this would be the largest civilizing enterprise undertaken and completed. Light was a metaphor for the West and for Western Christendom, a metaphor for the Europe that in 1878 took the place of an older, long since decrepit Europe, which had been in decline in Bosnia for the last three hundred years. Nothing quite characterized the greatness of the Ottoman empire as its drawn-out demise. Nothing in the history of humanity declined for so long as the Ottoman empire, and this decline was felt nowhere so palpably as in Bosnia. “The mentality of that land, its culture, and its song were constructed upon a downfall.” That was Ivo Andrić, and therein lay his literary oeuvre.
In 1878 the streets were lit by kerosene lamps.
From a survey of street lamps conducted by the municipal guard, it was determined that on April 9, 1880, Sarajevo had 188 lamps. Fifteen years later streetlights were introduced. This unheard-of civilizational leap, a transformation unacceptable to people of the old mold such as Fadilpaša and Hadžijamaković, of course had a practical function that today’s people are prepared to accept as an absolute. It is in fact hard to imagine the Sarajevo of a hundred fifty years ago, upon which complete darkness would descend every evening, when on its nighttime streets and alleys only crazy people and thieves prowled, and lights only burned where people were busy or unhappy, in the homes of scholars (those few literate imams, rabbis, Catholic monks, or Orthodox priests) or in the homes of the dying. But what else did one need light for? The answer to this question would come from the West, and before long the entire world would be lit up, and Sarajevo with it. Light both real and metaphorical distances us from dreams. And the disappearance of dreams leads to insanity.
The first electric power station of the city was built in 1894, and during the night between the third and the fourth day of April the first light bulbs in Sarajevo flickered to life, “though,” writes Kreševljaković, “for a full six years (until April of 1901) the main city streets were served by eighteen bow lamps.” Several months before the outbreak of the First World War, gas lighting was introduced, and in Sarajevsko polje, near Čengić vila, the first gasworks were constructed. By then the first members of your family had begun to settle in town, which would soon be overtaken by yet another great upheaval, accompanied by a new misfortune, in which the roles assigned to them by the destinies of one Croatian nobleman and two local Muslims would change little.
Members of the Karivan family arrived, followed soon after by the Stublers and Rejcs. Although the Karivans first came from Kreševo, their journey was the longest. From Kreševo to Sarajevo, in the Bosnia of that time, one had to cross half the world and take leave of a way of life that had lasted for hundreds of years, if not an entire millenium. One had to accept, in the end, a form of humiliation by civilization that was not unlike the humiliation Fadilpaša Šerifović had faced. No matter how hard you might try, you could never describe the Karivans’ journey from Kreševo to Sarajevo. It is a secret to you, lost, for they could not tell you stories about it, by contrast to the journeys of the Stublers from Bosowicz and the Rejcs from Kneža, about which you know almost everything. Between those rooted in place and those who have remained eternally uprooted lies your family’s history. Any attempt to make sense of it is hopeless.
On a Poem of Mine
Aunt Branka, the daughter of Aunt Lola and Uncle Andrija, lived in Germany and worked as an anesthesiologist. She married a German man, also a doctor, and gave birth to Katarina. She died suddenly in the fall of 1979 from an aneurysm. Without suffering or sickness, without words, she went away.
Aunt Branka’s older brother Željko was a royal, then Croatian, then British pilot. He died a little after the Second World War, after taking off drunk from the Borongaj military airbase. Her other brother was Šiško, whom Aunt Lola and Uncle Andrija adopted years after the war to help them forget about the son they’d lost. When I was three Šiško would take me to the Dubrovnik aquarium, the beach at Porporela, and the harbor. He lifted me up and put me on a high, smooth bollard for a picture. I was terrified of falling into the sea but did not dare cry. Šiško was a sailor. Once he had a fight with his foster mother, Aunt Lola, and left the house, never to be heard from again.
Aunt Branka studied medicine in Zagreb. She was a striking woman with an unusual, natural sort of authority. She was deliberate and calm, settling our arguments and solving our problems. And she was funny. Should any of our elderly get really sick, we’d say, Branka will take care of them in Germany. As a child I was particularly impressed by the fact that she put people to sleep before their operations, guiding them into dream, and maybe into death.
In her youth in Zagreb Aunt Branka had been married to the actor Jovan Ličina. Ah, Jovan, dear Jovan, she would say tenderly, sighing. Branka had lived a brisk, stormy life with Jovan. It was filled with celebration and carousing, the years passing quickly as she exchanged them like big banknotes, with no regret or caution, as if preparing for the end of the world. In the end, all that was left was tenderness, and it seemed that she parted from Jovan out of pure tenderness. All around them were horrible divorces and collapses, bloody abortions, and gloom, while her past love shone with pure light and protected her youth against all evil. This was Aunt Branka.
I never met Jovan Ličina, a retired member of Zagreb’s Croatian National Theater, though I saw him on the street several times in the nineties. One early morning in one of those years I ran into him on Ilica. We were approaching each other and – had he looked at me, had he recognized me…? But how could he recognize me? He could not know that Branka Ćurlin was my mother’s first cousin or that at the mention of his name our Sunday table in Dubrovnik would sigh.
The news of his death shook me. He died on December 18, 2002, in Zadar.
I came across an obituary in a newspaper, at the bottom of which was a woman’s name, Lada, I think. The text was full of love and adoration. Or at least so it seemed so to me. This unknown woman had loved Jovan Ličina as much as Aunt Branka had. Oh, Jovan, dear Jovan.
There was no mention of his death in the Zagreb papers.
Death of an Actor
For R.Š.
Let those whom the Zagreb actor
Jovan Ličina did harm step forward
Let the floret in the architecture of the HNK, the gala gown
of Franz Joseph I
And his mallet and trowel, let the cornerstone
And the Theater Café – both of them – the underground passage
The clock on the square and the parking clocks step forward
Let those whom the Zagreb actor
Jovan Ličina did harm step forward
Let the fire equipment and the health inspection certificate
The coal in case of poisoning, the bullet in the revolver
of the basement gamblers
The placards, posters, the men’s and women’s hats above the bathrooms
and the white hands of the ticket woman and the entrance woman with the stamp
step forward
Let those whom the Zagreb actor
Jovan Ličina did harm step forward
Let the beggar woman on the street invoking Christ, who has never
been in the theater
Though she has always begged at the main entrance, step forward
if she ever met him
Let the young man with the shaven head getting out of the black Mercedes
Kin Page 49
