SOURCE: Krivak, Andrew. “Going Back Over ‘The Bridge on the Drina’.” America 172, no. 11 (1 April 1995): 24-7.

[In the following essay, Krivak discusses The Bridge on the Drina in light of the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.]

It was three years ago, in 1992, when the ethnic nations of the one-time Federation of Yugoslavia split, staked out their own independent national territories and began the bloodshed that we in the West now numbingly refer to as “the war in Bosnia.” The siege of Sarajevo, a city in Yugoslavia once held up as a model of culture and cosmopolitanism, a city in which Muslims, Serbs and Croats all lived and worked communally, became for us a constant mystery and frustration. Why and how could such a rage prevail in this late 20th-century period of seeming political enlightenment?

For 12 years now, I have had on my shelf a novel called The Bridge on the Drina (Univ. of Chicago Press), written in 1945 (in Serbo-Croatian) by the Yugoslavian writer, Ivo Andric, and translated by Lovett F. Edwards. In 1961, Andric received the Nobel Prize for Literature for the book that he himself described as a “chronicle” of historical fiction.

The Bridge on the Drina spans the life of a bridge built across the Drina River, which flows along the border of Bosnia and Serbia, from its construction in the 16th century until its temporary destruction at the outset of World War I. Woven within this history are the lives, legends and events that have been remembered and kept alive across five centuries in Andric's native town of Visegrad, the Bosnian town linked by the bridge to the East. Across the unbroken chain of time, Andric's cast of characters becomes vast in his small border town; and although he may re-shape their features and articulate their thoughts, he does not—cannot—alter history.

The history of the Balkans, like all the rivers that course through it, is too powerful to divert or change. Yet, while the people in Andric's story live and die in an historical struggle that dwarfs their lives, each has a connection to the bridge on the Drina. Each person gains a touch of immortality, as though made of part of the steadfast stone. Andric opens and closes each century in which the bridge stands by letting the silt of memory settle down and collect in the riverbed of the Bosnian conscience. We discover, along with this writer and historian, that there is more remembered in the course of time than there is forgotten.

I was a college student when a friend of mine, who knew I had an interest in regional Slavic writers, gave me a copy of The Bridge on the Drina. At that time, I read the book for its details, for the descriptions of characters, the record of isolated events, the exchange of dialogue between different people of the same land. But it was—and still is—a much larger history and anthropology of the place and the people of Bosnia. In the fall of this past year, troubled by an article in The New York Times on another failed cease-fire in the war, I took The Bridge on the Drina down from my bookshelf and began to re-read it. I was looking for a door through which I might pass and emerge with a broader vantage point from which to view this war; not of one side or the other, but of why there are, and always have been, such fierce, separate sides in the history of Bosnia. This is what I found.

The Ottoman Turks occupied the Balkans from the 15th to the late 19th century, and due to Muslim rule Christians of Serbia and Bosnia had to bow to an emperor of another land, one who listened to a God other than their own. But the tension between Christians and Muslims, placed in its larger historical context, can be traced back to the 10th century. In 960 Bosnia broke away from the Kingdom of Serbia in order to become its own independent land. Unlike Serbia, however, Bosnia was not unanimously Christian. Prior to the rise of Islam in the 14th century, roughly a third of Bosnia's population was made up of the Bogomils who adhered to a faith similar to the Manichaeans of St. Augustine's time, who posited equal power to the forces of good and evil in the world.

In the 12th century, the king of Bosnia became a Bogomil, making him a heretic in the eyes of both Eastern and Western Christianity, and he persuaded those Bosnians who were not already Christians to follow him in his faith. In 1386, the Turkish conquest began in Bosnia and lasted from 1386 to 1463, at which time the Turks prevailed. Rather than resist and turn to the Christians who had considered them heretics, the Bosnian Bogomils became Muslims. Religion and politics would inevitably clash as time went on, and the Bosnian frontier, like mountains trapping low-lying storm clouds, would be the battle ground.

That is the pre-history necessary for Andric's story. As a novelist, Andric's concern in The Bridge on the Drina is only with the town of Visegrad, and how it was affected by the events of the outside world. He gives no background concerning the Turks or Slavs entering the area of the Balkans, and references to the past come only from the mouths and memories of characters who find it in their own stories to remember such events. The novel begins in the 16th century, accepts the presence of Islam and Christianity as a given, with the bridge the only structure yet to be built.

The bridge on the Drina River serves both as a seed of mistrust and a vehicle for unity between the Christians and Muslims in Bosnia. During the rule of the Ottoman Turks in the early 16th century, the aga of the janissaries of the courts of Stambul would collect every sixth year a certain “necessary” number of Christian boys from the villages of Eastern Bosnia—the healthiest, brightest and best-looking boys between the ages of 10 and 15 years old. They were collected for what Andric calls the “blood tribute.” Mothers taught their sons to babble as though retarded, chopped off fingers to maim them or sent them off into the woods to wander until the aga had completed their search.

Eventually, however, the number would be collected, and the boys would be carried away to Stambul, “where they would be circumcised, become Turkish and pass their lives in the ranks of the janissaries or some other, higher, service of the Empire.” One of them, “a dark-skinned boy of about ten years old from the mountain village of Sokolovici,” would forget his faith, his country, his name and his former way of life. He would one day become the son-in-law of a Sultan; he would become the Great Admiral of the Fleet and a world renowned statesman. But he would never forget the day he was taken away from Bosnia across the Drina by ferry.

Andric writes: “He was to remember that stony bank overgrown with sparse, bare and dull grey willows, the surly ferryman and the dry watermill full of drafts and spiders' webs where they had to spend the night before it was possible to transport all of them across the troubled waters of the Drina. Somewhere within himself he felt a sharp stabbing pain, which, from time to time, seemed suddenly to cut his chest in two and hurt terribly; this pain was always associated with the memory of that place, where the road broke off, where desolation and despair were extinguished and remained on the stony banks of the river, across which the passage was so difficult, so expensive and so unsafe.” When this boy from Bosnia grew up in the Turkish courts to become Mehmed Pasha Sokolli, he ordered the building of the bridge on the Drina, to join “the two ends of the road which was broken by the Drina and thus link safely and forever Bosnia and the East, the place of his origin and the places of his life.”

The overseer whom the Grand Vizier sends to Visegrad to carry out the construction of the bridge is a tyrant, and work is carried out on the basis of fear alone. All workers are persecuted, but it is the Christian rayah or serfs who are virtually enslaved to keep up with the pace of the Vizier's timetable for completion.

To the recently converted Muslims of Visegrad (the Turkish conquest was not quite a century old), an enterprise of such magnitude, and under the command of the Vizier, brought a certain amount of pride to their ranks. The bridge on the Drina was a sign of Allah's favor. But Christians sentiments ran contrary. The physicai realities of forced labor and brutal treatment were only externals. God himself would not allow any venture commissioned by infidels to come to fruition, they believed. The bridge had to be sabotaged. So Andric sets in motion the conflict between the will of Allah and the will of God, each fueled by a people paying with their lives to fulfill their diety's plan.

In the first year of construction, a rumor is spread throughout the town that a fairy who does not want to see the bridge built has set out to destroy it. Since the first stages of any construction site are largely scaffolding and mud, even the already disillusioned Turks of Visegrad had a hand in spreading the rumors. Yet Abidaga, the overseer, who fears losing respect and his head more than peasants fear fairies, sets out with a ruthlessness bordering on frenzy to find the saboteur. After several nights of heightened security on the shores of the river, an admired though brooding young man of the Christian rayah of Visegrad, named Radisav, is discovered attacking the scaffolding with an axe. Abidaga has him tortured until he confesses his plan, then impales him alive on the bridge as an example to the entire town that the divine order of the Vizier will not be undermined.

Through his noble suffering and slow death on the stake, however, Radisav emerges as a martyr among the rayah, and their hatred toward the Turks and Abidaga is only heightened. “As long as you live,” mothers tell their curious sons as they stare at Radisav's bloated, impaled body on the scaffolding, “keep away from those accursed Turks.”

With another year and another spring, the continued construction on the bridge brings about a feeling of forgiveness between the town and the all-consuming project of the bridge. Reports of Abidaga's brutality toward the rayah and his habit of pocketing money meant for the workers find their way back to the Vizier, who, unable to bear the thought that anyone would despise what he had deemed to order, exiles the former overseer to the Turkish empire's equivalent of Siberia.

A more diplomatic, almost creatively aloof overseer replaces Abidaga, pays the Christians and Turks according to their labor, and the work of masons, architects and laborers from every end of the empire finally shape the bridge, looking as though it were effortlessly sculpted, “all its eleven arches perfect and wondrous in their beauty.” All the townspeople, Christian and Muslim alike, admire the Vizier's work, astounded as they are that such architecture could reach to the far end of the Bosnian frontier.

The harsh disparity and the resulting unity that the bridge on the Drina brings about in Visegrad is, I believe, the ultimate symbol of Andric's fictional vision. Having constructed the bridge, the Vizier, a practicing Muslim in a Christian body, creates an historical reality that spans the two peoples and the waters of time. The people of Bosnia have known something transcendent in this land, Andric seems to say, that will accept all of their stories and customs and still express the pains of each side. What the object signifies is the will of the two sides to bring to fruition something greater than themselves.

The heart and soul of the book lies in the characters Andric resurrects from the obscurity of history as he places them among the stuff of legend.

During the “great flood” of the 17th century, three patriarchal figures of Visegrad hold the moral fiber of the community intact through prudence, prayer and a good sense of humor: an Orthodox priest, a Muslim hodja and a Jewish rabbi. There are stories of a gambler who sells his soul to the devil, and an unhappily betrothed daughter of a wealthy Muslim who leaps to her death from the bridge at the moment she is to be given away to the groom. There is Lotte, the Jewess innkeeper, who is something of a diplomat to drunkards, spiritual director to the weary and financial bedrock of her family. And there is the slivovitz-addicted Turk named Corkan, whose unrequited love nearly devours his heart and soul. As the centuries pass, the bridge stands. Life goes on in its shadow: “[Life] was an incomprehensible marvel, since it was incessantly wasted and spent, yet none the less it lasted and endured like the bridge on the Drina.”

In the early 19th century, the Serbs rose in revolt against the Turks, and when the Turks responded to the revolt, more and more Bosnians were called across the border from Visegrad to fight. As the Serbs began aggressively to push the fighting to the border of Bosnia, the signal fires and camp fires of the insurrectionist Serb armies could be seen from Visegrad in the hills along the border. Christians and Muslims in the town had their own prayers for and against these fires of war. “The Serbs prayed to God that these saving flames, like those they had always carried in their hearts and carefully concealed, should spread to these mountains, while the Turks prayed to Allah to halt their progress and extinguish them, to frustrate the seditious designs of the infidel and restore the old order and the peace of the true faith.”

The Turkish army in Visegrad began to suspect, fine and persecute the Serbians who lived there. The army set up camp on the bridge and questioned those who might be suspected of being insurrectionists. Fearing the advancing Serbian revolt and the power that legends of revolution had already begun to acquire, the Turks sought to set an example for would-be Serbian revolutionaries of the town. In a bizarre scene of misunderstanding and malice, the guards stationed on the bridge execute two men who could not have been further removed from the efforts of the revolt. One is a wandering Orthodox pilgrim whose metaphysical ramblings on the day of resurrection and the eschaton is confused through an interpreter to sound like anti-Turk messages of revolution. The other is a simple-minded young woodsman whose song to his lover is a popular folk song that has been adopted and changed by the revolutionary armies. The two were the first of many Bosnian Serbs whose blood would stain the bridge. Even the Visegrad parish priest, Pop Mihailo, for years a moral authority of the district and an inspiration in times of trouble, was executed and his head displayed on a stake for any one passing over the bridge to see.

It must be said that Andric is not outlining a legacy of Muslim war atrocities. At the heart of the narrative is a clear polemic against the greatest evil in Andric's eyes, regardless of religion, and in any state of war: the fear a dominating power has of its people. No characters are more reprehensible in Andric's eyes than subordinates left to make decisions, not of authority, but of power, which are ultimately based on ignorance, fear and a lack of trust. It is a microcosm of the imperialistic attitude of the 19th and early 20th centuries that Andric saw so much of and, later in his life, stood against.

Thus, the lives of the Turkish guards on the bridge are washed away as certainly as the blood of innocent and not-so-innocent Serbs. In the course of time, the Austrians take their place on the bridge and their display of elusive power is no different from that of the Turks before them. The bridge, however, is Andric's abiding symbol of what it means to accept and let go, to fight and forgive. It provides the perspective of history that is lost with each successive generation. As the Serbian revolt died down in that century, the Ottoman Turks simultaneously began to lose control of their entire empire. But Andric's refrain, from the silence of the bridge, returns: “The generations renewed themselves beside the bridge and the bridge shook from itself, like dust, all the traces which transient human events had left on it and remained, when all was over, unchanged and unchangeable.”

By the close of the 19th century, the political climate in Europe had begun entirely to reshape the Balkans. By 1878, Turkish rule had effectively ended and Bosnia (as Bosnia and Hercegovina) was placed under Austrian protectorate. In 1908, the two provinces were annexed to Hungary, and thus to the Austro-Hungarian empire. Although the Serbs always seemed to be fighting the Turks for nationalist ends, it was at this time, in the late 19th century, that talk of a pure, separate southern Slavic state took on such influential political portent. The reasons—and Andric points to this in his portrayal of the young Bosnian intelligentsia who adopted the bridge as their place for discussion—were the scientific, political and philosophical revolutions of this period, combined with the greater access that Central Europeans had to universities in Germany, Prague and Paris. German schools in particular, steeped in Hegelian idealism and the Marxist materialism that followed, were especially attractive to students desperate to replace old politics and religion with something new. Never isolated, though always selfishly intact, the town on the Drina and its triumphant bridge finally felt the weight of the outside world closing in.

In 1914, Archduke Ferdinand, traveling through Bosnia, was assassinated by Bosnian separatists who supported an alliance with Serbia, hoping the two republics could become one. As World War I broke out, the Austrians marched to the town of Visegrad because of its strategic position on the Bosnian frontier, and the town and bridge became targets for German artillery fire. Regardless of where Bosnian Serbs or Turks may have stood politically, the artillery claimed them as a common enemy. “The Turks,” Andric writes, “went to the Turkish houses and the Serbs, as if plague-stricken, only to the Serbian homes. But even though thus divided and separated they lived more or less similarly … in fear of their lives and in uncertainty about their property.” For months the bombardment continued, while the Serbian and Austrian armies traded salvos in a position not unlike the revolts of old, with the Serbs taking the mountainous high ground and the Austrians positioned in the town. The whole town was eventually evacuated, soldiers and civilians alike. Then, as all but a few Austrian soldiers left Visegrad, the bridge was dynamited, crippled so that advancing Serbian forces could not pass over it.

Ivo Andric was born in the Bosnian town of Travnik in 1892. Although Andric was baptized a Catholic, his father died when he was very young, and thus he was sent to live with his mother's Orthodox parents in Visegrad. Due to the character of the town and the nature of ethnic diversity in Bosnia, Andric knew well the customs and traditions of his Muslim neighbors. In fact, if we had only The Bridge on the Drina to go by, it would seem that something in the nature of Andric the storyteller drew him more strongly to the Muslim characters of Visegrad than to the Christians with whom he worshiped. Even the height of Slavic nationalism (which he supported as a young man, then renounced) could not shake his conviction that Bosnia was and will always remain a place of diversity. Andric, as writer and historian, was a man with a divided soul: the soul of the Muslim and the soul of the Slav, much like the Grand Vizier, Mehmed Pasha, whose experience of love and pain on the Bosnian frontier drove him to build the bridge on the Drina.

Andric is not the only historian to have chronicled the troubled centuries of the Balkans; he is not the only writer to have put history in his own words, and for that reason he may not even be considered by some to be a trustworthy voice on Bosnia as we know it today. But The Bridge on the Drina is neither a story of historical justification, nor a literary means of denying aggression or assessing blame. There is in this novel, for those of us hoping to find one, no bad guy. It is the story of a bridge's history that, seemingly both by accident and design, unravels the history of a people's story, the same people we have watched fight for the past three years, Muslims and Serbs alike.

Ethnicity, economics, politics, religion, human will—all are keys to the many locks on the many doors that open and close in the corridor of the Balkans, century after century. Going back over The Bridge on the Drina, the motifs that emerge are timely: one generation does not make a people; the first war will not be the last; neither commerce nor culture crosses a river only once, and no bridge stands forever.