by Ottoman Odyssey- Travels Through a Lost Empire (retail) (epub)
Much more so than Mostar, Sarajevo’s Old Town is a Little Turkey, at least in the heady months of summer. On every street in the Old City, I could hear the Turkish spoken by tourists flown in from Istanbul by the national carrier airline on heavily subsidized flights. The Turkish flag is ubiquitous, flying from half-restored monuments, tourist agencies, shops and 15th-century whirling dervish lodges. Near the airport are two major Turkish universities, the International University of Sarajevo (IUS), festooned with suspiciously eclectic strings of flag-bunting advertising its international status, and, just over the road, the Burch University.
The IUS was founded in 2004 by a group of businessmen close to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party, and then-Prime Minister Erdoğan himself opened the new campus in 2010. When I visited in July 2017, a large poster hung on the side of the main university building celebrated the upcoming anniversary of the defeated 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, in keeping with the fierce promotion of the anniversary by the Turkish government. I had coffee in the university’s drab cafeteria with Professor Mehmet Kovacevic, a softly spoken Bosnian man in his forties who pointed out to me the mountains behind the university where he fought as a young man during the 1992–1995 war. He was hired by the IUS science department a few years after its founding, a rare non-Turkish staff member. He tells me that when the university was founded, almost all the students were Turkish; these days, 65 per cent of the university’s students are Turk, and the remaining 35 per cent are mainly Bosnians, with a handful of Croatian, African and Indonesian students. Most of the students are Muslim; a mosque stands next to the central building, and when I visit the girls’ dormitories, posing as a prospective student, there is a mescit (prayer room) on every floor. There are no rooms with two beds; only three or more, in keeping with the Turkish government’s precautions against romantic relationships forming among students of either sex.
Kovacevic discussed the Ottoman-esque aspirations of the university’s founders with surprising candour.
‘It was very important for [the founders] that Turks were in charge,’ Kovacevic told me, candidly. ‘All these people looked romantically at the Ottoman Empire. But the irony is that they are very shaped by the secular period [of the Turkish Republic]. They are suspicious of non-Turks – it is extremely difficult to get their trust. The tribal culture is deep-rooted. Yet the Ottomans had a kind of confidence and trust, they trusted their subjects and allowed diversity.’
I agree only up to a point; the diversity Ottoman rulers allowed was closely supervised, and any trust they showed their Christian subjects was hard-won. Yet Kovacevic has a point about confidence – the Ottomans were secure in their own power and ability to control their subjects, at least during the 16th, 17th and even 18th centuries. The Republic of Turkey, on the other hand, has been roiled by coups and political in-fighting throughout its existence and is deeply paranoid as a result. Ironically, a republic which is largely homogenous is more politically tribal than an empire composed of myriad different peoples. At the same time, Ottoman rulers could not dream of the kind of control over their subjects that modern states command – the technology and the surveillance, in particular.
At the risk of creating awkwardness, I asked Kovacevic whether the university’s founders have shown the same appetite as the Ottomans for converting their subjects to Islam. Kovacevic, a non-practising Muslim ‘despite my name’, said he has never sensed any such zeal.
‘My Turkish colleagues are very religious, but they are tolerant and careful not to pressurize me to go to the cami [mosque]. IUS was started in 2004 to accommodate covered Turkish girls who couldn’t study in Turkey [the ban against headscarves in public institutions was overturned by the AKP in 2013] – it has religious beginnings. At first my colleagues were genuinely motivated as good Muslims. It was a pure sacrifice for teachers to come out here, no one had heard of it.’
This reminded me of the Ottoman courtiers sent out to colonize and run the empire; it was both a burden and a privilege, but also a chance to make one’s name, the hard way.
According to Kovacevic, Turkish expenditure on Bosnia-Herzegovina, unlike the Ottomans’, ‘is more emotional than strategic’.
‘They like to feel that they are a big brother to a country that needs their help. Turkey was a very attractive role model for countries in the Balkans – it also had a difficult past, but experienced huge economic growth and success. Now these things have changed but the soft power is still sitting on this outdated image. The Turkish tourists love coming to Bosnia because they feel national pride. They see the effects of Ottoman power – they made us all Muslims. We are their ex-subjects, after all.’
Just over the road from IUS is Burch University, affiliated to the US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen who is accused by the Turkish government of masterminding the failed 2016 coup. Burch University has lost many of its Turkish professors to prison cells in the purge that followed the coup attempt, according to Kovacevic. When I tried to visit the campus, the guard stopped me – peering through the gates, I saw weeds and a generally unkempt air. I wondered if it had enough funds and staff to reopen after the summer. Gülen-linked schools across the Balkans have suffered similar or worse fates; in 2018, I was relatively unsurprised to hear that six Turkish teachers in Kosovo had been kidnapped and forcibly extradited to Turkey to stand trial for treason as suspected Gülenists – Kosovan-Turkish diplomatic relations ranked second in importance to Turkey’s determination to weed out the enemy without, as well as within.38
At the IUS, I bade Kovacevic farewell, mentioning that I was off to Visegrad, home to the ‘Bridge on the Drina’.
‘Visegrad,’ repeated Kovacevic thoughtfully. Will you visit Andricgrad?’ I told him yes, and that I intended to interview its creator. The professor’s answer was unprintable.
The Art of War Zones
Andricgrad is a model village built as a film set within the town of Visegrad by Emir Kusturica, the film director as famous for his surreal Palme D’Or-winning art as for his political views. In early 2011, he announced he would be making a film adaptation of Ivo Andric’s book The Bridge on the Drina, and the project is mired in controversy. Sarajevo-born Kusturica is widely despised by his fellow Bosnians for apparently renouncing his heritage and embracing both the Serbian government and its attendant Russian patronage (he converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church on St George’s Day in 2005, and received the Order of Friendship from President Putin in 2016) – a bit like the backlash experienced by French actor Gérard Depardieu, so envied by my friend Ivan in Istanbul.
Andricgrad is as much of a political statement as a cultural project. It is first and foremost an homage to Ivo Andric, although his legacy has been twisted since his death. The Bridge on the Drina, contrary to popular belief, does not paint Muslims as unmitigated villains, but does begin with the building of the bridge in the mid-16th century and the cruelties perpetrated on the Christian locals forced into slave labour by the Ottoman authorities. Today, the bridge serves as a symbol of tension between Muslims and Christians, and this tension is utterly intertwined with nationalist violence. In 1992, Serbian paramilitaries massacred thousands of Bosniak men, women and children in the Visegrad region. Many of them were shot and then thrown from the bridge, and Bosniak women were systematically raped in nearby hotels. The bridge became a perverse symbol of the retribution of Christians against Muslims, supposedly righting the wrongs perpetrated against their Ottoman-subject forefathers hundreds of years ago on the same spot. In a horrible way, Ivo Andric’s book – while not a polemic in itself – can be said to have inspired these reciprocal 20th-century massacres, and Kusturica’s film project is a strange, silent seal of approval.
Battles and massacres can sear the subconscious of a people and shape future political narratives; their details can be augmented and twisted to fit nationalistic agendas centuries after the event. The Bosnian historian Edin Hajdarpasic has written about ‘authentic fantasies’ – grossly exaggerated
stories based in historical fact and purporting to carry a central ‘truth’, like a parable or fairy story – used by Balkan nationalists to fuel hatred of historical oppressors and bolster modern political narratives. Historical legend has been warped to portray the Ottoman rule of Balkan Christian subjects as a black-and-white story of ogre-like Turks terrorizing brave, blameless Christians. Hajdarpasic brilliantly compares the ‘authentic fantasies’ of the Balkan nationalists to the Trump administration’s sharing of Islamophobic fake news on social media (with the bogus justification that the message is true even if the story is not), and notes that ‘throughout the 19th century, many Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Greek nationalists developed extensive repertoires – diplomatic memorandums, poems, music, paintings – documenting their struggle for freedom and their suffering at the hands of “the Turks” (a label synonymous with Muslims). [...] Many decades after overthrowing the Turkish yoke, Serbian nationalists could revive narratives about Turk-like enemies even in the late 20th century – with catastrophic consequences.’39
The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was fought between the Ottomans and the Serbs; both armies were decimated, with a narrow but strategic win for the Ottomans that led to their conquest of the whole Serbian region. Hajdarpasic notes that the battle served as fodder for Serbian politicians like the notorious war criminal Slobodan Milosevic centuries later, who restaged the battle on its 600th anniversary in 1989, and thus turned it into a ‘rallying ground for fresh nationalist mobilization. Invoking the rhetoric of “revenge against the Turks”, Milosevic and fellow war criminals like Ratko Mladic then led genocidal campaigns against Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s.’40
President Erdoğan also dredges up ancient battles to glorify Muslim victories against Christian enemies and to bolster his own position as a Muslim strongman standing up to hostile Christians. His favourite is the Battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt near Turkey’s border with Armenia) in 1071, when the (Muslim) general Alp Arslan led an army of Seljuks, precursors to the Ottomans, in defeating an army of (Christian) Byzantines said to be twice its size. Its commemoration is used to suit whatever political narrative Erdoğan happens to be pushing. On 26 August 2017, the 946th anniversary of the battle, Erdoğan arrived with great fanfare in Malazgirt, accompanied by soldiers in reproduction Seljuk armour, and addressed a huge crowd: We faced an assault on July 15th [2016] that appeared to be a coup attempt but was actually aimed at enslaving us . .. [we] fought the same figures as Alp Arslan. [. . .].’ These ‘same figures’ is a reference to Erdoğan’s claim that the 2016 coup attempt was backed by Western (Christian) powers. With a Turkish flag in one hand and Islam’s green banner in the other, our victorious forebears entered Anatolia at Manzikert and marched to the middle of Europe with glory and honour.’ Alp Arslan’s march to Europe is historically inaccurate but no matter – this is what Hajdarpasic classes as an ‘authentic fantasy’ where the intrinsic ‘truth’ of the story is what is authentic: Muslim glory against Christian oppressors – the opposite of similarly tall legends utilized by Christian Balkan nationalists.
The film director Emir Kusturica could not have chosen a more dramatic setting for his most recent contribution to the creation of tangible authentic fantasy. The approach to Visegrad is utterly dominated by the magnificent 180-metre bridge, its eleven arches stretching from bank to bank of the Drina. Unlike the Stari Most, the bridge survived the 1992 war unscathed and stands in its original glory today. As I walked over it, an elderly fisherman stood in his wellies in the shallows below, a peaceful scene utterly at odds with the bridge’s bloody history. On the western bank, I turned left and walked on to the gates of Andricgrad, which may one day serve as a film set, but currently operates primarily as an unabashed tourist attraction, complete with a large cinema (showing The Emoji Movie and Planet of the Apes at the time of my visit), a prominent church, replica Ottoman houses functioning as cafés and a large central statue of Ivo Andric. Serbian tourists throng its streets and large murals of Putin and Communist leaders grace the walls of the cafés, alongside modern Serbian heroes like Novak Djokovic. There is no mention anywhere of the 1992 massacres; it is one of the most astonishing disavowals of history I have ever seen. The encompassing town of Visegrad, largely devoid of Muslims after the massacres, is equally bereft of signs of the conflict – the most infamous ‘rape hotel’, Vilina Vlas, is now a spa with some glowing online reviews (‘four stars – great place to relax’).
I tracked down Kusturica just over the Serbian border in his other film-set village, Drvengrad, originally built for his film Life Is a Miracle and since used as a venue for cultural festivals. (In 2005, he told the New York Times Magazine: ‘I’m fed up with democracy. In a democracy, people vote for the mayors. I wanted to build a city where I will choose the citizens.’ After meeting him I doubted this was said entirely in jest.) At the time of my visit in July, the village was hosting the Bolshoi Music Festival, sponsored by the giant energy company Gazprom, which is majority-owned by the Russian state and a byword for Russian power in the region. As I approached, a helicopter circled overhead; by the time I had parked, an excited crowd had gathered near a helipad, among them two young Chinese women who had travelled all the way from Beijing for a glimpse of their idol. ‘He’s here! He’s here!’ Another fan turned to us, her eyes shining with the euphoria of proximity to Greatness. ‘Did you see what he was carrying? A watermelon!’ Opinion was divided about the symbolic or pragmatic role of Kusturica’s watermelon, purchased that very afternoon in Belgrade, but he would have been furious to be associated with the legendary scene in Dirty Dancing that his entrance evoked.
Wandering around the fake village were journalists from Russia Today carrying cameras; the crowd seemed composed mainly of Russian press, the musicians themselves, and a few evangelical Kusturica fans like the Chinese women. I was handed a press card and told to stand by for my interview, but first there was a concert to attend: a ten-year-old girl in a puffy white dress, her feet barely touching the pedals, played Scott Joplin on a Steinway piano with great vivacity. The general effect of the fake film-set village, the high altitude, brutally strong Serbian wine and child prodigy made me feel slightly dizzy. In the interval, I was beckoned for my moment with the maestro. He stood in commanding fashion on stage as minions milled around him, a Balkan Quentin Tarantino, powerfully built in his shabby suit, with a shock of unruly grey hair. As his PR assistant announced my credentials, he scowled.
‘Why should I give you an interview?’ he demanded. ‘The fucking British press always make me look like a bastard – the Spectator called me a child murderer.’
I opted for compliance. ‘Mr Kusturica – what would you like to tell the British people?’
Momentarily disconcerted, he launched into a glowing account of the success of his cultural festivals, which continued for some time before I could interrupt to ask him about the legacy of war in the region he chooses to base himself.
‘I turn war zones into cultural events,’ he declared. ‘This is territory which we can say is no-man’s-land – as it was during World War One and World War Two. It is a borderline.’
It soon became apparent that Kusturica thinks of himself as the Andric of his time, transforming the legacy of war into art, and the legacy of art into a kind of hybrid homage both to himself and his idol, Andric.
‘Since the Drina has such a bloody past, Andric devoted himself to art. Therefore, I wanted to devote a town to Andric.’
But can you make a cultural space that does not acknowledge the past, or rather, which selectively acknowledges the past, as in the case of Andricgrad?
Kusturica frowned. We can’t forget the past. No – actually, we can. We have atrocities committed on both sides. We have the Sbrenica story, which is also terrible. The oil fields in the Middle East are also war zones. The list goes on.’
Kusturica is well known for his belief that the West is hypocritical in its criticism of Yugoslavian history, given the Western legacy of colonization a
nd violence. His whataboutery had a note of finality, so I turned to the issue of his reputation among Bosnia-Herzegovinians. While Kusturica is courted in international circles and lauded at Cannes, his countrymen reject him. How does that feel – does he feel any infinity with Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish Nobel Laureate, who is hated by many Turks for publicly acknowledging the Armenian genocide of 1915, and who needs a bodyguard while on Turkish soil?
‘Yes, I feel a great artistic affinity.’ But what about a political affinity?
‘Oh, you mean the threats against my life? I don’t care about them. I write, I play music, I get on with my life.’
As I noted this down, Kusturica reconsidered.
‘Actually, many Bosnians love me. You could stop a man in Gorazde [a region of eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina where there is a majority Christian, pro-Serbian population] and he would worship me. You don’t understand, it’s not just the elite who know me.’
As I drove away from this unsettling interview, I began to understand why Kusturica wants to see himself as the champion of the common man. It is a simpler form of popularity, a way of rejecting the complexities of current political discourse, and of his own life choices. Kusturica is still mourning a simpler time and place: Yugoslavia. In October 1992, just six months after its fall, he said: ‘I never wanted an independent Bosnia. I wanted Yugoslavia. That is my country.’41 He no longer has that country – but he does have a cult of personality, and two model villages in which to enjoy it.
