Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Snowy Domes and Gay Turbans: American Travelers on Bosnia, 1897-1941"
Omer Hadziselimovic
Indiana University East
hadziom@infocom.com
"And where is Bosnia?"--This was the question posed in 1897 by Phebe Davis Natt, one of the first Americans to leave a travel account of that Balkan country. In her short article published in The Nation she speaks of a land of "lofty mountains," "wild and picturesque valleys," "tall, white minarets and snowy domes," and "streets gay with turbans." Natt's pioneering question, her description of the land and the people, and her conclusion, in which she bids farewell to Sarajevo and its "picturesque and Oriental" aspects, foreshadows the kind of fascination Bosnia will hold for future American visitors, several of them women and artists like herself. Picturesqueness, Orientalism, and romance will dominate the American travelers' vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina and their writings on it during the following four and a half decades, although these writings also include important factual information and valuable cultural insights.
American travelers emphasize the intriguing strangeness of Bosnia, seeing in it something very different from both their everyday experience and their past journeys. Bosnia's many attractions for the Western visitor seem to be summed up by Kenneth McKenzie in his 1912 National Geographic article: "picturesque old-time life, quaint towns, interesting and beautiful national costumes, and extraordinary scenery." For most travelers, whether they visit Bosnia during the Austro-Hungarian era (1878-1918) or in the interwar period, Bosnia is a land of the Orient, or at least a land "where 'East meets West'," to quote the title of Marian C. Coffin's article from 1908. Furthermore, quite a few travelers read more Orient into Bosnia than the country's reality warranted, thus Orientalizing the land and archaizing its present. To Frances K. Hutchinson, engaged in such non-Oriental pursuits in Bosnia as "motoring" and "kodaking" in 1908, even the word "Dalmatia" sounds "remote and Asiatic," let alone "Banjaluka," the name of an etymologically innocent town in northern Bosnia. To Hamilton F. Armstrong (who 'flivvers' through Bosnia in 1921), a muezzin's call from a Sarajevo minaret "at twilight seems an echo of a day unreal and irrevocably remote" and "Europe seems ten days' journey distant." In several instances, this "pastness" coloring the travelers' perspective makes them move through the Bosnia of an era already gone by: in Austro-Hungarian Bosnia, they still see Turkish Bosnia; in Yugoslav Bosnia, they still see an Austrian province.
Seeing Bosnia as Oriental (sometimes more Oriental than Turkey itself, for instance) is for several travelers connected with their romantic sensibility and an expected, and accepted, travel-writing vocabulary. The travelers observe--or imagine--grandiose scenery, spectacular weather, pastoral and peasant life in Bosnian mountains and feel an atmosphere of unreality and mystery in Bosnian towns. This is especially true of some artists-travelers, like Lester G. Hornby and Clare Leighton, who experience Bosnia more visually than others. Hornby notices much that is extraordinary and mysterious during his trip in "the romantic kingdom" of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in the mid-1920's ("romantic" for him includes semi-amorous adventures like the one with a Russian woman in Sarajevo, an episode strongly reminiscent of Sterne), while Leighton, who traveled mostly in Dalmatia, writes in 1928: "I had to touch the stone-slabbed roofs and Turkish shops at Mostar to see that they were real."
The American travelers to Bosnia, who were a varied group of women and men and included tourists, journalists, scholars, Red Cross workers, amateur artists and artists by training, had also an interest in Bosnia spurred by the political events of the first two decades of our century, particularly the Austro-Hungarian annexation of the land in 1908 and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. These events, especially the annexation crisis, generated a number of travel writings which sometimes combined political commentary with actual traveler's impression. In some texts, the impression and the experience are presented as fresh and immediate, while in others the travel reads like a memory, as in Professor James T. Shotwell's 1949 book A Balkan Mission based on a trip undertaken in 1925. For some visitors, the dominant exotic and romantic perspective gives way to a description of the harsh reality of Balkan life, as in the 1920 account of the American Red Cross worker Malvina Hoffman, who writes about her visit to the post-First-World-War Yugoslavia (including Bosnia) in 1919. Though traveling with "pen and pencil" like some other artists, she sees, and draws, only starving orphans, refugees, and other people damaged by war.
Viewed as a whole, the examined American travel texts, which are scattered in popular magazines, scholarly periodicals, and book-length travelogs, offer not only interesting observations on Bosnia and the state of its culture during the first decades of this century but also a perspective, though partial, on the writers themselves, their tastes, motives, and attitudes. It is with both of these aspects that this paper proposes to deal, emphasizing the travel writers' preoccupation with capturing-- and promoting-- the old, the "curious," and the picturesque in what was for them a culturally very distant land. For American travelers, Bosnia and Herzegovina was truly, as Emily G. Balch remarked, "a world ... novel and far away." While describing it, some of them made that world even more novel and still farther away.
Omer Hadziselimovic
Indiana University East
hadziom@infocom.com
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