Bridges (Mostovi): The Cultural Gap Between US and the Balkans

I once walked across the Latin Bridge in Sarajevo. This is the bridge where Gavril Princip fired the shot that started World War I. On this gray stone walkway, lined with green edgery, there were little semicircular areas where one could step off and view the river below. The river was beautiful, and the yellow brick quay that extended in perfect symmetry on both sides of the river for miles, had some of the most gorgeous buildings I had ever seen. In contrast to modern bridges which are huge monstrosities of asphalt, steel, and concrete, this was a simple small stone bridge that would be hard to see as a world changing place. Compared to my pre-mission speculations, it was not as huge as I thought it was going to be. I could span it in two big steps. What really got me as I was walking across it with an eerie sense of reverence was something my high school teacher once said to me. He stated that the armistice agreement of World War I was one of the most unsatisfactory agreements ever concluded, and was the singular cause of all the wars in the twentieth century and beyond. I thought about the many casualties in World War I. Then I thought about the casualties of the communist overthrow of Tsarist Russia. I thought of the blood drenched years of the Weimar Republic being converted into Nazi Germany, and the ensuing World War. Then after that, the Cold War began with all of its little intermittent conflicts, such as the Korean War, Vietnam, Afghanistan I,  the Persian Gulf War, the attempts to over throw Greece, Turkey, African nations, and on the flip side, the Hungarian Revolution. Then we have the fall of the Soviet Union into lots of little democracies, the rise of al Qaida, and the reemergence of Russia. We have the breakup of Yugoslavia into seven independent republics with lots of bloodshed, and we have to ask why? Why would someone do something that would lead to so much war and bloodshed. It is the defining act of the last one hundred and fifty years.

Its really smaller than it looks, its really a walking bridge that unfortunately managed to fit a car the size of a Model T car one hundred and three years ago.

The answer lies in his upbringing, culture, and environment. Many people do not speak Serbian or Croatian, and so it is hard to get an understanding because we are worlds apart from them. While many of the same patterns of human aggressiveness are within all of us, we cannot simply understand how far we are from the people in the Balkans. Some we have more in common with, but others we do not. The first big difference is that religion is their ethnicity. If one says they are Orthodox Christian, they are Serbian. The nomenclature is equivalent, even if the person does not believe in God at all. If one is Croat, they are Catholic, regardless of their actual belief in God. Even though the tribal identity of Hrvat (Croat) existed long before Christianity, to be Croat means that they are Catholic. To be Bosnian is to be a bit looser. Bosnians are a mix of Muslims, Serbs, and Croats, (or I should say Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Catholics), but sometimes and in general people use the word Bosnian to refer to the Muslims. I have been often told that there are three traditional religions from history, which are Catholic, Orthodox, and Islam. One of the two Christian religions is the original mother church, and then the Protestant and all future churches are sects (sekt) or breakaways from the mother church.

To sum it up: To be Serbian is Orthodox, to be Croat isCatholic, and to be Bosnian is a bit looser, but still can mean Muslim. In opposition to this,  American does not exclusively mean one religion.

 In America, we are all first Americans, and then we have our religious and political differences. I can be Mormon, you can be Presbyterian, Atheist, Catholic, or Orthodox, but we share in commonality the American ethnicity which rises above those differences. It is the glue that keeps us together. Our ethnicity unites rather than divides. These changes happened over five hundred years ago, when the Ottoman Turks came through and destroyed the Balkan kingdoms and their capital cities. Under threat of Islamization, the Serbian Orthodox church changed the meaning of the word Srbin (Serbeen), which means one who is a Serb, to mean one who is Orthodox, thus making all Orthodox Christian believers whether they were Croatian, Bosnian or Serbian to change their ethnicity overnight. At the same time, the Sabor or Croatian Parliament issued an edict stating that Catholicism was the only religion allowed to be practiced in the borders of Croatia. The Ottoman Turks, imposed their religion on the conquered, and many converted because of the benefits one would receive as a Muslim during this time. All these things allowed in the desperation of the times, prevented the Reformation from happening. In England, which broke away from the mother Catholic Church, the opposite happened. The Church of England was the official state church, sponsored by the king as an organization for defining the ethnicity of the English people. However, this separation from Catholicism and the idea of a pan European identity based on Catholicism allowed new groups of people to define themselves as loyal to the ethnic group, without violating their sacrosanct beliefs, which were different from the ruling class. Examples include our Puritan, Anabaptist, and Quaker ancestors. Separating religion from ethnicity was the ultimate act of the Reformation, and allowed people to be defined by the strength of their ideas, and not their showed professions of belief in the prevailing state church. It also allowed people to not be defined as heretics to their country, the church, the state, and their family. Individuals could believe differently without being punished, and move forward with the outward expression and action of those beliefs.

The second thing that the Ottoman invasions did was depending on location, begin and kill the nascent Renaissance, the renewal of ideas created by new contact with ancient Greek and Roman authors. The Ottomans conquered Anatolia (the big Turkish heartland) in the 13^th century, and then the Balkans in the 14^th and 15^th century. Serbia and the new Bosnian kingdom were some of the first to fall. Being Orthodox, and having just had a golden age where they almost conquered Constantinople, it was a really hard fall for the carstvo (tsarstvo=empire).  A lot of the anger that would have been directed at the corruption of the Orthodox church that hit the Catholic Church in the 16^th century was dissipated by the fact that it was the only organization that could effectively organize to preserve the memories of that time, and cause rebellions. So, they created the concept of Srbin, made Orthodoxy the requirement of being a Serb, and fled to the frontier regions of Austria-Hungary, to someday continue the fight and restore the Greater Serbian homeland/empire when the time was right. The Ottomans then in 1453 turned on Constantinople, the capitol of Orthodoxy for a thousand years. Before the fall, it was the most educated, wealthy, and sophisticated city of it’s time. When it fell, much of the books were burned, and scholars fled with those original Greek and Latin manuscripts to Sicily. Further attacks on Sicily from the Ottomans forced them to move to mainland Italy where they came in contact with the rising cities of Florence, Venice, Genoa, Rome, and Milan. People in those cities began to reread and study those old manuscripts, which they had lost so long ago, they remembered them like footnotes in this essay. These new sources of information made people think for themselves, and started a whole new fascination with the classical eras of time, birthing the roots of our modern intellectual society. At their expense of freedom of thought, we gained so much in being allowed to think. It will be noted that the closing of Constantinople as a route on the spice trade by the Ottomans, forced the Western European Powers to seek new ways to Asia, and thus America. As cataclysmic as the shooting in 1914 was the fall of Constantinople 1453, for in its fall was the birth of America, the opposite to the now burned out bombed out uneducated Byzantium, shorn of its previous glory. The same influences that destroyed Byzantium, and prevented the rise of education, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, are the principal influences on the lifestyle of the young Serbian Gavril. This is the context in which I want to raise as the beginning of the upbringing of Gavril Princip, and how it influenced him and the world over.

This is part one in a 3 part essay series. WE will return by talking about the contribution of Vladimir Dedar (Vladeemeer Daydar) in our understanding of the origins and upbringing of Gavril Princip.