Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
Omer Hadñiselimoviƒ
Snowy Domes and Gay Turbans: American Travelers on Bosnia, 1897--1941
"And where is Bosnia?"-That was the question posed in 1897 by Phebe Davis Natt, one of the first Americans to leave a travel account of that Balkan land. In her short article published in The Nation she speaks of Bosnia's "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 Bosnian land and 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 Phebe Davis Natt 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.
Most American travel accounts on Bosnia in this period appeared as articles in popular magazines or scholarly periodicals; a few of them are full-length books or parts of books dealing with the Balkans or Yugoslavia. Most texts appeared in the Travel magazine and the National Geographic Magazine, two publications which systematically informed Americans about other lands. In some texts, the traveler's impressions and experiences are presented as fresh and immediate, while in others the travel reads like a memory recollected in relative tranquility. Occasionally, a travelog comes across as a guidebook rather than a personal insight, although the reader is given reliable clues that the descriptions are based on actual travel. Following a customary practice in travel-writing tradition, several American authors refer to previous visitors to Bosnia, especially British, quote from their works or take over their photos.
During the period in question Bosnia and Herzegovina was first part of Austria-Hungary (1878--1918), and then of Yugoslavia (1918--1941). Significantly, a greater concentration of travel writing is noticeable at important junctures in its political history, particularly around 1908, the year of the Austro-Hungarian annexation, before 1914, the year of the Sarajevo assassination, and soon after the end of the First World War. These events generated a number of travel writings which sometimes combine political commentary with the traveler's actual impression.Interest in Bosnia seems to have waned during the 1930's and the number of travel pieces in that decade is relatively small.
The American travelers were a varied group of women and men that includes tourists, journalists, scholars, authors, Red Cross workers, and amateur and professional artists. The more familiar names among them are Emily Green Balch, who at the time of her trip to Bosnia in 1905 was a teacher at Wellesley College and who would later become a Nobel Peace Prize winner; Malvina Hoffman, sculptor and author; James T. Shotwell, a Columbia professor and writer, whose trip to the Balkans in 1925 was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and Louis Adamic, a Slovenian-born author, who gained recognition in America in the 1930's.
The travelers usually entered Bosnia and Herzegovina either from the north (by land) or the south by ship, down the Adriatic coast). Inside Bosnia, their modes of travel were the train, the car or the coach, usually a combination of the three. Horseback travel or travel on foot, still practiced by many native people, and a predominant way of traveling in the Balkan interior until the last decades of the nineteenth century, had no longer been necessary for foreign visitors. But travel in Bosnia could still be travail, especially by car. The motoring pioneers in early twenty-century Balkans had to travel on cart roads, carry cans of gasoline with them and deal with frequent breakdowns. "The road was as rough as a quarry road with holes filled with mud up to the hubs," writes James T. Shotwell of his ride from Mostar to Sarajevo in the fall of 1925," and our lights all but went out every time we slowed down." The American visitors generally traveled in company (with another person, a group or several family members), although the identity of the companions is usually omitted or suppressed, as is the case with much travel writing generally.
Most American travelers emphasize the intriguing strangeness of Bosnia, seeing in it something very different from both their everyday experience and their past journeys. Writing in 1912, Kenneth McKenzie, "of Yale University," cites Bosnia's attractions for the Westerner: "Picturesque old-time life, quaint towns, interesting and beautiful national costumes, and extraordinary scenery." For most travelers, whether they visited Bosnia during Austro-Hungarian rule or in the interwar period, that Balkan land was part of the Orient, or at least a land "where East meets West," to quote the title of Marian C. Coffin's article from 1908. Significantly, the words "East," "Near East," or "Orient," appear in the titles of several articles and frequently occur in almost every text. Some titles have other Eastern references, like a comparison of Sarajevo with Damascus: the Bosnian capital is called the Damascus of the North or the West, as it often has been by many other European travelers.
Furthermore, quite a few travelers read more "Orient" into Bosnia than the country's reality probably warranted, thus Orientalizing the land, to borrow Edward Said's concept, and archaizing its present. Even the coffee which Louis Adamic sips in Sarajevo in the early 1930's has, he feels, "a vague and delicate flavor I can describe only as Oriental." It is true that the Turkish heritage in Bosnia was very much visible, as it still is-in its architecture, religion, costumes-but Bosnia was also a European and Christian land. That aspect of Bosnia was much less represented in the travelers' texts. The travelers as a rule seek out the past in Bosnia and the elements of the old, Turkish regime-"a past full of strange stories and stranger suggestions," as Phebe D. Natt writes. 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 superimposed on Ottoman Bosnia. This archaizing vision may very well stem from a travel-writing convention which emphasizes the romantic and the old over the ordinary and the new. Paradoxically, in a kind of semantic inversion, the word "novel" as used by several travelers (Natt, Balch, Holland) comes across as meaning "old," and "quaint." For some rare visitors, on the other hand, 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 traveled to the post-First-World-War Yugoslavia in 1919. Though traveling with "pen and pencil" like some other artists, she sees, and draws, in Bosnia only starving orphans, refugees, and other people damaged by war.
Those Americans visiting Bosnia during the first decade and a half of the century deplore the modernization brought about by the Austro-Hungarian administration which, although described as praiseworthy in a social and economic sense (Austrian mission civilisatrice), is seen as encroaching upon or doing away with the real Oriental essence of Bosnia. One visitor in 1912 openly asks if Bosnia under Austria will continue to be as interesting for travelers as it was before. Whatever in Bosnia lacks the magic of the East, which the bazaars of its towns in the central and southern mountains possess, for example, and appears more modern and "European," like the landscape of its flat north, which blends into less interesting, tame Croatia, is from the traveler's viewpoint less desirable and less attractive. This northern part of Bosnia is regularly described as "commonplace"-"back to commonplace Europe," writes Marian C. Coffin-while another woman traveler, Frances Kinsley Hutchinson, passing through the region with her family in 1908, is reminded of nothing more spectacular than Wisconsin countryside.
But Bosnia generally, and even the northern town of Banjaluka, is Oriental enough for the American travelers to deem a trip through it worthwhile, and that includes Frances Hutchinson herself, who travels through the land from south to north engaging in such non-Oriental pursuits as "motoring" and "kodaking." To her, even the word "Dalmatia" sounds "remote and Asiatic," let alone "Banjaluka," an otherwise etymologically innocent name in this connection (as is "Dalmatia," by the way). Still, after visiting Banjaluka, she soberly concludes that "the name is much more Oriental than the place" as it has "an aggravating air of prosperity."
Bosnia's chief town, on the other hand, retains its Oriental hold on the visitors' imagination. It is almost always the centerpiece of their texts. Sarajevo, writes Melville Chater in 1930, "creates the timeless mosaic of oriental life...the hodgepodge, lovable East, lying so strangely juxtaposed to Adriatic coasts of campanile and cathedral." There Chater meets a young merchant, Abdul, whom he characteristically describes as being "of the gazelle eyes and flutelike voice" and whose storehouse strikes him as "a kind of Ali Baba's cave, odorous of attar and aflash with gold." If Sarajevo's bazaar section warrants this kind of literary and Orientalist associations, so does Mostar in Emily Balch's description two and a half decades earlier. Although her trip to Bosnia was part of her study of the Slavic component in American immigration (which later produced a book, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens, 1910), her side trip to Herzegovina offered ample opportunity for romantic fantasy. After arriving in Mostar and seeing a fountain in a garden, she cannot resist recalling-and quoting, in German-from Heine's poem "Azra."
Orientalism as a mark of cultural distance between Bosnia and the West is also embedded in Hamilton Fish Armstrong's text from 1921. To Armstrong, who "flivvers" through Bosnia with his wife in an old Ford, a muezzin's call from a Sarajevo minaret "at twilight seems an echo of a day irrevocably remote" and "Europe seems ten days' journey distant." In another, and more dynamic, traveling experience, this time in northern Bosnia, the Armstrongs' car runs into an unexpected (and Oriental) obstacle-an old man praying on a rug in the middle of a deserted road. The basic elements of this crossrcultural encounter, in addition to the author's humorous style which exploits, as it were, the old man's panic, is revealed in the following statement: "It happened that I came along in a Ford, probably one of the few cars that had ever penetrated to that by-way, certainly the first seen there since the [First World] war." In another episode, also told with humor and self-irony, when their Ford gets stuck in a river they try to cross, the Americans receive helpful advice from another foreigner: "Strangely enough, there was in that remote spot an Italian with whom my wife could communicate."Here again, we learn what is "strange," what "remote," and which language stands a better chance as a vehicle of communication.
In a book on the Balkans published some years later, Armstrong speaks, ironically and accurately, about the popular conception of the "Orient" in southeastern Europe. From a series of conversations he has with ordinary people in Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Sofia, and Constantinople sometime in the 1920's, Armstrong learns that none of his interlocutors sees himself as belonging to the East. The East for them is always somewhere farther to the east, becoming a kind of "moveable feast" in Balkan mental geography, with an implied "Oriental" pecking order of nations between Italy and Turkey. "This passionate longing 'to belong to Europe' is still driving back the Orient," concludes Armstrong. "Perhaps some day everyone here will acknowledge that it is safely lost in Asia."One is readily reminded here of those verses in J. L. Borges' autobiographical and self-ironic poem "That Man" referring to the poet's "fondness for the Orient, which peoples/of the miscellaneous Orient do not share."
Among the miscellaneous "Oriental" things that the American travelers never fail to notice-or imagine-in Bosnia are the variety and abundance of embroidery and color of the country's national costumes-Muslim, Serb, Croat and Jewish-and the veiling of Muslim women. In her 1919 article, Caroline Nye observes: "The costumes of Sarajevo we found to be the most varied and brilliant,"adding that "these different and picturesquely foreign-looking people appeared to us like characters from a play." (One naturally wonders how picturesque and foreign Caroline Nye herself must have looked to those people in Sarajevo's Baš...aršija?). In an accurate description of the predominant colors of Muslim women's dress, Emily G. Balch notes that "these trousered and slippered ladies make much use of turquoise blues, purple pinks, emerald greens and such tints." Clive Holland, visiting Sarajevo in 1911, notices that men in Bosnia's capital "wear garments which for color and new or shabby magnificence (as the case may be) rival the gayest attire of the Bosnian women." It seems that it was this "shabby magnificence" that in the Westerner's eyes added-perhaps because of its connotations of poverty and oldness-a special Oriental charm to the dressways of Bosnian men. In Marian C. Coffin's case, this attraction to Bosnian costumes makes her a mass buyer of them from the peasants (most probably Croatian) in the central town of Jajce in 1908, so when she and her companions leave the next day, they had their "plunder following in a second carriage."
In view of this obsession with Bosnia's national costumes it is perhaps understandable that the travelers as a rule refer to Bosnian Muslims as Turks (sometimes "Mohammedans," "Serbian Mohammedans," "Moslemized Serbs," and even "Ottomans"), the fez, the turban, and the veil being the most conspicuous signs of their non-Western dress. But the name "Turks" for Bosnian Muslims is at best confusing and at worst inaccurate and is an example of anachronism in American travelers' texts. In this as in some other cases, many American travel writers, inspired by previous reading, wished to see an older version of Bosnia's reality. They saw Turks rather than Bosnian Muslims. The Bosnians of the Islamic faith have usually called themselves "Muslims" during the last hundred years, using the word "Turkish" to describe only their religion. Interestingly, Western visitors persisted in using the word "Turks" well into the second half of this century. During the recent Bosnian war many Westerners were surprised to learn that Bosnia's Muslims were of Slavic and not Middle Eastern origin. So, once our American travelers encountered Islam in Europe, they couldn't fail to notice such unusual things as snow on the mosques (Natt), or blue-eyed and blond-haired Bosnians (Coffin, Christowe). Is this Orientalism turned upside down?
Sometimes the language of the travelers' descriptions inadvertently reflects cultural distance between the author and her/his subject, and meaning bounces back to the writer's own culture, often producing amusing incongruities. Thus Frederic Blair Jaekel, in his 1909 article "Sarajevo: The Spired City of the Near East," christens his Bosnian guide "Jim," calls the throng in the marketplace of Bosnia's capital "a grangers' meeting," names peasants "truck farmers," and elsewhere compares a dervish dance with the snake dance of the Hopi Indians. In a memorable description he likens the city's minarets to "the pencil-like pinnacles" which "rear themselves skyward, puncturing...the halo of garlicized atmosphere that hangs low over the city." This last image of Sarajevo, with its unusual blend of natural fog and alliuminous vapors seems like a prophesy of the city's infamous smog that will descend on the Miljacka valley after the Second World War. Caroline Nye also sees Sarajevo's minarets as "spires," while the lime water vender's cask reminds her of "the 'old oaken bucket'." Emily Balch observes that a Bosnian coffee service includes "a cup like an egg-cup and a little long-handled dipper-shaped pot." But the most frequent examples of this linguistic-cultural "translation" are the references to the small shops in Sarajevo's bazaar, which always catch the travelers' eyes. They are described-and somehow westernized in the process-as "wooden booths which look like big closets with the doors open" (Nye), "minute boxes, each box a shop," or "heaps of low, dust-coloured buildings like hives" (Ena Limebeer), or simply "business-sheds" (Adamic).
Sometimes, cultural distance and difference are more consciously articulated and this kind of awareness occasionally finds interesting expression in American travel writings on Bosnia. In her impressionistic article from the mid-twenties, Ena Limebeer emphasizes Bosnia's strangeness, seeing romance and mystery at every step while visiting Sarajevo. A group of Serbs playing and dancing in the marketplace seems to her like a scene out of this world, the music's "circular fluting utterance repeating itself, revolving on itself for ever," while its "sounds, complicated, unfathomable, break the air." The city's veiled Muslim women pass equally mysteriously by, "marking with their unseen faces the points of some hieroglyphic."The visitor, unable to read the Arabic message in the dome of Sarajevo's main mosque, concludes: "You are without key, without understanding."
Emily Balch and her companion's visit to the Muslim women's quarters in a Sarajevo house, in spite of an interpreter, ends up "being somewhat meagre and embarrassing. I think that we were glad to have seen one another and relieved to part." Balch is also one of the rare travelers who mentions the native language as a barrier for cultural communication: "Our driver was a Mohammedan, turbaned and inaccessible, for we had no language in common," she remarks in one place. Her embarrassment in the Muslim house is echoed by Louis Adamic after a similar visit some decades later:
Hospitality in a Sarajevo Moslem home...is not the spontaneous, almost orgiastic business that it is in Christian homes in Yugoslavia, but extremely formal and restrained. ... Neither Stella [Adamic's wife] nor I were exactly comfortable; the restless, free, dynamic West was too strong in us; so we did not stay long. Our parting was as formal
as our arrival.
In spite of this communication failure, the Adamics relish their experience of Sarajevo and Bosnia, including their chief travelers' attraction to what they see as the country's Oriental features. Yet, they also observe-and Adamic captures that well in his travelog-important elements of Bosnia's contemporary political and social life within Yugoslavia.
Whereas Adamic's article is a blend of sober journalistic reporting and subdued romantic suggestions, Lester G. Hornby's book Balkan Sketches (1926), much of it devoted to Bosnia, reads like an exercise in unbridled romantic writing accompanied by somewhat confused and subjective political commentary. Hornby's romanticism manifests itself not only in his artistic attention to Bosnia's landscape, pastoral scenery and an exaggerated descriptive language but also in experiential letting-go, as in semi-amorous adventures like the one with a Russian woman in Sarajevo, a sentimental episode strongly reminiscent of Sterne. In the latter domain, that of political awareness, Hornby comes across as pro-Serbian and speaks of the Yugoslav state (a "romantic kingdom," he calls it) as deservedly governed by the Serb dynasty. His remarks on Serbs as a noble race of brave warriors, their heroic patriotism, and even on beer as a "Serbian drink," may today sound amusing or anachronistic as thought and formulation, but his conviction that "Serbia's future importance is assured" as "the guiding parent of Yugo-Slavia" is sadly ironic in light of subsequent history. All this is not to say, though, that Hornby's text lacks interesting details and more objective information, some of which is also contained in the "sketches" he creates along the way. One of these details is the vivid episode (not a drawing, unfortunately) in which the author and his Bosnian companion take shelter from a mountain storm in the house of "a grizzly turbaned Turk"who, to accommodate his guests, puts his womenfolk in the cow shed.
In James T. Shotwell's description of his trip to the Balkans undertaken about the same time as Hornby's there are no individual grizzly Turks (there is a little mountain weather) but there are excellent insights into the region's politics and human geography. His book is interesting insofar as it was published a quarter of a century after the travel experience and, although based on the notes taken and letters written at the time-the mid-1920's-it is clear that he was also writing from the vantage point of the late 1940's. Shotwell observes that the Balkan nations "are still living largely in their own past," and are obsessed by "the rigid contemplation of themselves. This is especially true of the Serbs." Paradoxically, "this persistence of the past" in the consciousness of the Balkan peoples is the more strange since there are few remaining monuments from antiquity and the Middle Ages anywhere in the region. In another statement that also rings true, Shotwell notes that the Balkan "wars of liberation...far from bringing peace, had acted as a spur of nationalism."
On the whole, American travel writers on Bosnia and Herzegovina between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Second World War provide an interesting though modest body of literature. The authors, using some of the popular conventions and vocabulary of travel literature, insist on the picturesque, the exotic, the romantic, and-suitably in Bosnia's case-the "Oriental" elements of the subject under observation. But in trying to capture the old, curious and quaint, the American writers also promote these ingredients of a culture that for them was very strange and appealingly distant. For American travelers, Bosnia was truly, as Emily Balch remarked, "a world ... novel and far away." While describing it, some of them made that world even more novel and still farther away.