[In the following excerpt, Mukerji finds that Andrić posits in The Travnik Chronicle that religion could not have secured the state of Yugoslavia in the midst of political upheaval.]

In antiquity, the frontier between the Greek and Roman worlds ran through the territory of modern Yugoslavia. The demarcation line between East and West was fixed and more sharply defined by the division of the Roman Empire in A.D. 390. Then came the eleventh-century schism when the Christian Church was divided between Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic creeds. In the fifteenth century the Turks invaded Europe and for more than four centuries these lands separated two worlds. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, great European statesmen demarcated their spheres of influence along the old lines.

—Vladimir Dedijer, The Beloved Land¹

A tenacious legacy of divided spiritual loyalties and ethnic identity absorbs Andrić in The Travnik Chronicle. The unfolding of the brief “consul years” in regional history show just how far-reaching its consequences are.

Chapter I of the Chronicle offers a perspective on the coexistence of mutually exclusive groups in the Bosnian heartland and their vested interests. The retraction of Turkish power from Hungary and neighboring Christian lands sets the Travnik Turks against anything Christian, while an oppressed raja is emboldened to heed “prospects unimaginable until then” (page 19). In the battle for their jeopardized or long-denied rights, both parties fight as best they can, Turkish overbearance contrasting with Christian “patience, shrewdness and conspiracy or readiness to conspire” (19). The characteristic alignment of Bosnian sympathies with imperial power rivalries—Turkey's protracted wars with Venice, Austria and Russia—is significant. Nettled by Karadjordje's insurrection, Napoleon's victories in Europe, the French military presence in Dalmatia and a francophile vizier in the seat of the Bosnian pashalic, the Travnik elite is apprehensive about the likelihood that Turkish defensive diplomacy will consent to penetration of its Bosnian stronghold by foreigners.

The Catholics, who constitute a majority among the raja, dream of an “influential Austrian consul who will bring the aid and protection of the powerful Catholic Emperor from Vienna” (21). Victims of incessant Muslim persecution since the Uprising in Serbia, Travnik's Orthodox Serbs regard the opening of consulates as a sign of weakening Ottoman supremacy in the region. Expecting little from the representatives of France and Austria, however, they are in no doubt that a Russian consul would be indispensable in the “good and redeeming rough times” (21) to come. The arrival of a French consul excites only the small community of Sephardic Jews, for whom the “great French Emperor Napoleon” is “good like a good father” (22).

Domiciled on the periphery of the European Christian West and the Turkish Islamic East, the Bosnian Muslims want no part of the progress of either. Insulated from any contact with Europe for centuries, they are basically blind to the reality of an internally disintegrating Eastern Empire that Sultan Selim III confronted on ascending the throne. With their hardened resistance to all innovation, deep-rooted reactionary prejudices and their own interpretation of Islam, these converted Slavs are strongly opposed to Selim's remedial Nizam-i-Jedid (New Order):

The Travnik čaršija, like the entire Bosnian begovat, had for years followed the attempts of Selim III to remodel the Turkish Empire on new foundations, according to the demands and needs of modern European life. It did not hide its distrust and its abhorrence of the Sultan's endeavors and it often expressed this in direct petitions that it sent to Stamboul as well as in its relations toward the Sultan's deputy, the Travnik vizier. It was clear to it that reforms are only supposed to serve foreigners, in order to undermine and destroy the Empire from within, and that they in their ultimate consequences signify for the Islamic world, and therefore also for each of them personally, the loss of faith, property, family and life in this world, and damnation for eternity.

[183]

The Bosnian Muslims have no concern with Turkish realpolitik. Their “animosity and fanatical delirium” (32) are palpable to Daville, the French consul, in the humiliating reception he gets as he rides through Travnik's main street, escorted by the vizier's Mamelukes. Proclamations of friendship issued by the French authorities in Dalmatia are characteristically rejected by the Travnik Turks:

… no one wanted to read them, and whoever read them could not understand them. Nothing helped against the innate distrust of the entire Muslim population that did not want to read nor to hear or see, but went by its deep instinct of self-defense and hatred toward the foreigner and infidel who approached the borders and was beginning to enter the land.

[51]

The prospect of a resident Austrian consul poses an even greater threat to the local Muslim community and its vested interests in the existing military and socioeconomic order in Bosnia-Hercegovina as the seat of power:

If Bonaparte was distant, mobile and somewhat fantastic as a force with whom it needed to reckon momentarily, Austria, on the contrary, was a near, actual and familiar danger. With the infallible instinct of a race which holds the land and already rules for centuries, exclusively on the basis of an established order, they sensed each and every danger which threatened that order and their rule. They knew well that every stranger who comes to Bosnia treads a narrow path between a hostile foreign country and them, and that a consul, with his special authorizations and resources, opens that path wide by which no sort of good can come for them and their interests and consecrated objects, but every evil can. Their bitterness against Stamboul and the Osmanlis, who were permitting this, was great.

[108]

Not surprisingly, Sultan Selim III's deposition is not mourned in Travnik. It occasions a clarion call to conservatism by Slavs who opine themselves the best Muslims:

“The Giaour-Sultan is dethroned,” said the Muslim priests … “and now the time is coming to cleanse all the mud that stuck to the pure faith in the last years and to act Turkish.”

[53]

These fundamentalist pronouncements are aggressively repeated by a Muslim rabble in the backward town.

Although Bosnian Muslim elements are instrumental in bringing about Vizier Husref Mehmed-Paša's recall from Travnik, he, however, prudently circumvents “the wrath of the čaršija” (181). This induces an “attack of collective madness” (185) precipitated by a “secondary and insignificant” (184) pretext. Defining the communal riot as a recurrent paradigm of life in this Balkan dominion of Turkey-in-Europe, Andrić interprets the syndrome that underlies it:

For some years the čaršija works and holds its silence, gets bored and vegetates, does business and calculates, compares one year with another, and in spite of all that keeps track of everything that happens, gets information, “buys” news and rumors, broadcasts them from shop to shop in a whisper, avoiding any conclusion and the expression of its personal opinion. In this way the common mind of the čaršija appears and forms slowly and imperceptibly. To begin with this is only a general and indefinite temper, which expresses itself in curt gestures and curses—it goes without saying to whom they refer; then it gradually turns into an opinion which it does not conceal; and finally it becomes a firm and definite conviction about which it is not necessary to speak any longer and which still only stands out in actions.

United and pervaded by that conviction, the čaršija whispers, prepares, waits, like bees wait for swarming time. It is impossible to see through the logic of those čaršija tumults, blind, rabid and normally fruitless, but they … have their own invisible technique, founded on tradition and instinct. It is only seen how they erupt, rage and die down.

Only one day, which dawns and begins as so many [had] in the past, the silence of long years breaks, the rattle of the wings of double doors and the hollow echo of doors and door-latches stops in the shops. Suddenly the men of the čaršija jump (one after the other) from their places in which for years they had sat motionless, calm, neat, chaste, with folded legs, proudly solicitous, in their cloth trousers, braided waistcoats and pale striped long-sleeved robes. That ritual movement of theirs and the deafening banging of doors and door wings are enough to spread the news around the entire town like lightning:

—The čaršija is closed.

Those are ominous and serious words; their meaning is clear to everyone.

Then women and the infirm descend into the basements. The respectable čaršija men retire to their houses, ready to defend them and die on the threshold. And from the little cafes and distant mahale the petty Turkish world rushes out, that which has nothing to lose and which can only gain something by riots and changes. (For even here, as with all movements and revolutions in the world, there are the ones who start and lead the affair, and the others who realize and execute it.) Before this mass one or two leaders jump out from somewhere. They are usually loud-voiced, violent, discontented, perfidious and abnormal people whom nobody knew or noticed until then and who will, when the stir calms down, get lost again in their anonymous poverty in the steep mahala from which they also came, or stay to languish in some jail.

And this lasts a day, two, three or five, depending on when and where, until something breaks, burns, until human blood falls, or until the riot does not simply die down and subside by itself.

[181-183]

The second riot Andrić focuses on is in reality a continuation of the previous one in which a mob of 200-300 peripheral individuals, children and young men demonstrated the Bosnian Muslim contempt for the central administration in Stamboul. This time the secondary inducement is provided by the coup d'état in the Turkish capital, in which Mustafa Barjaktar—the independent Paša of Rustchuk on the Danube—tried to restore Selim III to the throne. The “fear, discontent, poverty and rage” (335) of the Bosnian Muslims, who consider themselves “betrayed from inside and menaced from outside” (335), seek an outlet in riots:

The instinct of survival and self-defense drove them to movement and action, but circumstances deprived them of the means and blocked all the paths. That is why their energies whirled and were wasted in the air. And in crowded market towns, amidst the high hills, where, different faiths and opposite interests prevailed, mahala to mahala, an excitable and oppressive atmosphere developed, in which anything was not impossible and in which blind forces clashed and furious riots succeeded each other.

[335]

With the departure of the Vizier Ibrahim Paša and his deputy, Suleiman Paša, for the Drina, the čaršija closes down. The Travnik Muslims seek out Serbian citizens and priests but “peasants most of all” (337) from the Drina or the Bosnian Krajina. Suspecting them of having links with the insurgents in Serbia and preparing a similar uprising in Bosnia, they bring them “in ones or twos, then in crowds, in scores” (337). The more well-to-do Turks succumb to “the morbid irritability of a menaced class” (337), revealing in Cvijićean terms, a Dinaric sensitivity and pride cultivated to the highest degree, qualities which have hardened into the kind of overbearance and conceit that sustain their sense of separateness from the Orthodox Slavs.² Taking advantage of an effete government in Travnik, they assert their autonomy by revenging themselves on the consanguineous raja for daring to escape Muslim domination with the intention of gaining freedom and becoming their equals. The city's poor—even that lowest stratum which “had nothing to lose” (337)—side with them. In the middle of the cattle market, “without interrogation and a court of law” (337), Orthodox Serbs are put to death by Gypsies adept in the methods of torture. “The logic of blood and warped instincts” (345) yields to “the contagious madness” (345) of a fratricidal tragedy in which adults and little children participate:

On a cleared plateau, between the inn and the Austrian General Consulate, a new place of execution is made. Here the vizier's hangman Ekrem cut off heads, which were then impaled. … The same evening to that square were brought ten Krajina Serbs, peasants, and they were executed by the light of lanterns and kindling wood, close to the shrieking and shouting, the rushing and dancing of blood-thirsty Turks. The heads of the slain men were stuck on poles. For an entire night the growling of hungry pariah dogs that had immediately collected reached as far as the Consulate. In the moonlight it could be seen how the dogs were leaping up a pole and tearing pieces of flesh from the severed heads. … Total anarchy reigned in Travnik for ten of the most beautiful July days. … The zeal of that mob was strange. Each person burned with a desire to contribute to the defense of religion and good order and with the best conviction and holy bitterness each wanted to take part not only with his own eyes but also with his hands in the killing and torture of traitors and malefactors who are to blame for all the great ills in the land and for every personal misfortune and agony of each one of them. People went to the execution place as they go to a holy object near which a miraculous recovery and certain relief for every torment lies. … Tiny tots hailed each other, ran breathlessly … in order to dip their small knives in the blood of the executed and in order to wave them later and scare younger ones than themselves around the mahala. … And both day and night the bloody carnival went on in which all wanted the same thing but no one could understand anyone or recognize his own self.

[343-346]

The Orthodox Serbs are victimized outside Travnik as well. Suleiman Paša's trophies of war, allegedly captured from a Russian “clothed and commanded” (236) Serbian detachment, are for the most part evidence of a vicious, vengeful slaughter of the Bosnian raja by an “embittered and idle army” (239) not far from Zvornik, during a church festival:

… severed human ears and noses in considerable numbers, an indescribable mass of wretched human flesh, salted and blackened with congealed blood … some hats, belts and bandoliers with metal eagles on them … red and yellowish standards, narrow and gold-fringed, with a picture of a saint in the center.

[237]

Significantly, the high Serbian expectations in regard to Russia relate to that nation's appearance as a united, nationalistic power such as the rest of Christian Europe with its disparate religious, political and national interests had never succeeded in being. Inspired by Karadjordje, the Serbs are inclined to petition for support from the Russians as fellow Christians of the Orthodox Church. Travnik's suffragan bishop, Jaonikije, clearly expresses the general Serbian sentiment in his disclosures to Consul Daville:

—You would like to know whether I am for the Russians, and I tell you that we are for that one who helps us to stay alive and in time we shall be free. … The Christian States fight among themselves, instead of agreeing and working jointly to end this misery finally. And that has already gone on for centuries, but you would like to know whom we are for. … We are for Russia, Sir, and for the liberation of the Orthodox Christians from the non-Christians. We are for that, and anyone who tells you otherwise, do not believe him.

[422-423]

The Bosnian Catholic clergy assists Austrian interests by becoming involved in the Viennese Court's expansionist rivalry with Napoleon's Grand Empire. Austrian Consul Colonel von Mitterer's influence grows with Travnik's clergy and laity. His wife, Anna Maria, visits local chapels and churches, making donations on his instructions. Over Christmas Day lunch at the consulate, the friars from Guča Gora speak frankly about the Turks, penalties, persecution, the course of history and their own fate, “with that peculiar and typical relish with which every Bosnian loves to talk about serious and hopeless matters” (295). The Frairs at Livno³ are extremely useful to the colonel: as he tries to impede General Marmont's advance through Lika and Croatia in every way, they are his intermediaries for communicating news and declarations to French-occupied Dalmatia; they also enable him to maintain contact with their clergymen in northern Dalmatia in helping to organize resistance against the French. With time the Bosnian friars cease seeing anyone from the French consulate, even though Madame Daville, “the Jacobin consul's wife,” is a devout Catholic. In their monasteries, prayers are said “for the victory of Austrian arms over the Jacobin armies and their godless Emperor Napoleon” (320).

The informal exchanges between Daville's junior colleague des Fossés and the young vicar of Guča Gora, Fra Julijan Pašalić, center on vital issues of Bosnian life—past and present backwardness, and future progress in the region involving its inhabitants as a collective whole. Des Fossés' rationalistic, free-thinking views contrast starkly with the Franciscan's stolid adherence to the broadly conservative politics of the Catholic Church.

Both Fra Julijan and des Fossés concur that life in Bosnia “is unusually hard and the people of all faiths poor and backward in every respect” (295-296). The friar, however, attributes this solely to Turkish domination, and visualizes no scope for improvement until a Christian power replaces Ottoman rule. Des Fossés, on the other hand, pins some of the responsibility for retrogression on the Bosnians themselves:

Turkish rule has produced … certain characteristic qualities in its Christian subjects, like secretiveness, obstinacy, mistrust, tardiness of thought and fear of any innovation and all work and movement. Those qualities, originated in the centuries of unequal struggle … passed into the grain of the local man and became enduring traits in his character. Having sprung from necessity and under pressure, they are today, and will be even in the future, great impediments to progress, the baneful inheritance of a difficult past and serious shortcomings that would need to be rooted out. … [N]ot only the Turks in Bosnia but also people of all the other faiths guard against any influence, even the best, resist any innovation, all progress, even that which is possible both under the present conditions and depending on them alone.

[296]

Speaking out as a product of a France that had ended feudalism as a legal and economic system and not allowed the claims of the Church to stand in the way of reorganization, des Fossés suggests how the process of change could be initiated in Bosnia to benefit the masses:

For this land schools, roads, doctors, contact with the world, work and movement would be necessary. I know that while Turkish control lasts and until a link between Bosnia and Europe is not established you cannot strive toward nor realize any of that. But you would, as the only educated people in the land, have to prepare your people for this and instruct them in that direction. Instead of that you support the feudal, conservative politics of reactionary European powers and want to unite with that part of Europe which is doomed. And this is incomprehensible, because your people are burdened with neither traditions nor class prejudices and according to everything their place would be on the side of the free and enlightened States and forces of Europe. … Be careful lest upon you, friars, lies the historical sin that you did not comprehend this and that you led your people in the wrong direction and that you did not prepare them in time for what inevitably awaits them. Among the Christians of the Turkish Empire are frequently, and more and more often, heard rumors about freedom and liberation. And indeed, one day freedom will and must come to these regions. But it was said long ago that it is not enough to gain freedom, rather it is much more important to become worthy of freedom. Without a more modern education and liberal understanding, nothing will help you because you shall get rid of Osmanli rule. In the course of the centuries your people have assimilated so much together with their oppressors that it will not be much good to them if the Turks abandon them one day but leave them, besides their raja-like faults, their vices too: idleness, intolerance, the spirit of violence and the cult of brute force. That, in fact, would not be liberation, for you would not be worthy of freedom nor know how to enjoy it and, just like the Turks, you would not know anything else than to be slaves or to enslave others. There is no doubt that even your land will enter the European structure one day, but it may happen that she enters divided and hereditarily burdened with ideas, habits and instincts that get nowhere anymore and that will, like ghosts, thwart her normal development and make her an antiquated phenomenon and everybody's prey as she is Turkey's today.

[368-369]

Des Fossés sums up the Bosnian Gordian knot in a nutshell:

The four faiths live on this narrow, mountainous and poor piece of land. Each of them is exclusive and rigidly separate from the others. You all live under one sky and by the same land, but each of those four groups has the center of its spiritual life far away, in an alien world, in Rome, in Moscow, in Constantinople, Mecca, Jerusalem or God alone knows where, only not where it is born and dies. And each of them thinks that her well being and her profit are conditioned by the losses and backwardness of each of the other three faiths and that their progress can only be to her disadvantage. And each of them has made of intolerance the highest virtue and each expects salvation from somewhere outside, and each from an opposite direction.

[296-297]

Des Fosséan logic, however, is wasted on Fra Julijan. He dismisses the exigency of a concerted Bosnian effort to evolve “a broader, better, more rational and humaner formula” (370) for coexistence. The irony of his simplistic, complacent and parochial affirmation could not be more incriminating:

—We Catholics have long possessed this formula. The formula is the Credo of the Roman Catholic Church. We need no better.

[370]

Consul Daville's departure saddens the old Sephardi, Salomon Atijas. As he takes leave of the Frenchman, who had been considerate to the Travnik Jews during his seven-year consulship, the strong emotions of belonging to a minority without blood, religious and linguistic ties with other Bosnians overwhelm Salomon:

We live between the Turks and the raja, the wretched raja and the monstrous Turks. Totally cut off from even our own near ones, we try to preserve all that is Spanish, the songs and the cuisine and the customs, but we feel how everything in us is changing, being corrupted and forgotten. We remember the language of our country, the one we took with us three centuries ago and which is not even spoken there anymore, but comically we mangle the language of the raja with whom we suffer and the Turks who rule over us. … Lonely like this and small in numbers, we marry among ourselves and see how our blood thins and turns pale. We bend and hide before everybody, we have a hard time before finding a way out; it is said that we light a fire on ice, working, acquiring, saving and it is not only for ourselves and our children but for all those who are stronger and more arrogant than we and impose upon our lives, honor, and purses. That is how we protected the religion on account of which we had to leave our beautiful country, but lost almost everything else. Fortunately, but to our torment, we did not lose the memory of that dear country of ours, as she had once been, before she drove us out stepmotherlike—just as the desire for a better world will also never die in us, a world of order and humanity in which justice works, watching calmly and speaking openly. We cannot free ourselves of this nor the feeling that, in spite of everything, we belong to such a world, although, exiled and unhappy, we live in an opposite one.

[522-523]

The privilege of hindsight and an analytical historical percipience enable Andrić to imbue The Travnik Chronicle with a powerful suggestive quality. The tableaux vivants of a complex Bosnian past stand in edifying relief to a future nationhood. Religion, they suffice to show, could not be the cement of a viable multinational modern Southern Slav state.

Notes

1. Vladimir Dedijer, The Beloved Land (London: Macgibbon and Kee 1961), pp. 14-15.

2. See Jovan Cvijić, Balkansko poluostrvo (Belgrade: Zavod za Izdavanje Udžbenike SR Srbije, 1966), pp. 408-417.

3. The fertile plain of Livno, located between the parallel ranges of the Dinaric Alps, was part of the territory incorporated into the expanding medieval Bosnian State. Even to this day it is settled by Roman Catholic Croats.