Rescuing the Cultural Heritage
Nermin Zukic
B O S N E T Nov. 23, 1993
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- RESCUING BOSNIA'S CULTURAL HERITAGE
- LONDON CONFERENCE - Effects on the Cultural Heritage (11/25/93)
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Contributed by Andras R.
From: THE ART NEWSPAPER (LONDON), no. 32, November 1993:
EYE WITNESS IN SARAJEVO
OUR SISTER AND BROTHER CURATORS AND ART HISTORIANS:
HOW DO ORDINARY PEOPLE LIVE IN EXTRAORDINARY AND TERRIBLE TIMES?
SARAJEVO -- The Sarajevo to Split "Hop" as the UNHCR air link between
Split and Sarajevo is called, has been named by UNPROFOR forces at the
Sarajevo end, "Maybe Airlines". As they describe it -- and a Tarzan-type
Canadian with very white teeth will describe it to you at length -- "Maybe
you fly, maybe you don't. Maybe you get shot, maybe you don't. Maybe you
go mad, maybe you don't". And your passport is stamped with a UNPROFOR stamp
with the UN logo and another, red stamp reading "'MAYBE AIRLINES', Sarajevo".
As an expert on Bosnian monuments, and secretary-general of the foundation
Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue, I arrived at Sarajevo airport in the
company of Roger C. Shrimplin, chairman of the Royal Institute of British
Architects Eastern European Committee. We were invited both by the Bosnian
government and by the Soros Foundation's Open Society Fund based in Sarajevo,
and together we formed the very first mission to Sarajevo concerned with
cultural heritage.
Life in Sarajevo -- and here I speak of the cultural and intellectural
life -- is a tribute to the continuation of peace. As Tony Land, of UNHCR
Sarajevo, said, "One kilometre from War is Peace. War is the abnormality
which we artificially sustain. Peace is normality".
Sarajevans meet daily, conversing intently and producing publications about
their culture, insofar as they can find paper on which to print. Cultural
organisations include two Institutes for the Protection of Monuments, one
town and one nation-wide (formerly, Federal); the Cultural Society of
Muslims (Preporod, meaning "renaissance"); the Cultural Society of
Catholics (Napredak, meaning "progress"); the Jewish Society (Benevolencia),
and the Women's Group (MAK "Bosanka"). Many members of these organisations
were formerly in the University.
Recent congresses they have held include ones on medicine in Bosnia, in
memory of a library of medical books which was destroyed, and one on an
analysis of their personal tragedy -- the cruel and massive destruction
of Bosnia's Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim monuments and books. At first,
only Muslim heritage was destroyed. Then reprisal destruction began and
eventually no class of monument was free from loss. As a brave counter-
gesture to this massive destruction, a project has been prepared by
artists and cultural workers of the city of Sarajevo and the Direction
of the Sarajevo Biennial of Contemporary Art, to found a Museum of
Contemporary Art in the former headquarters of the old Jugoslav National
Army, to be opened in the year 2000.
We all know that in this war, adherents to different religions have been
metamorphosed into "ethnic groups", which have then been led to attack
each other, or to be attacked. In Sarajevo's town government, however, and
cultural societies, those of different religions work together, as do those
of different religions in London and New York, and as did everyone in Bosnia,
before the start of this strange war.
Neither shells nor snipers (and snipers, it is said, are often Ukrainian
soldiers formerly working for the UN) regard ethnic differences in selecting
those whom they kill. Svetozar Pudaric, a Serbian architect with the town's
Institute for Protection of Monuments, and his Muslim art-historian fiancee,
both lost legs in a mortar blast. They married in hospital; she has now
given birth.
Among those still active in Sarajevo's surviving cultural core are Azra Begic
and Enver Imamovic, both of Muslim background and both accustomed to their
European-style lives. Both are art historians; Enver is an archaeologist
as well. Azra's concern is Bosnian-Herzegovinian twentieth-century art; she
is a museums advisor and vice-director of the Art Gallery in Sarajevo;
she has held administrative posts in the AICA, the International Society
of Art Critics. She is president of the Sarajevo women's organisation MAK
"Bosanka", and the author of many exhibition catalogues and books on modern
art.
Imamovic is Professor of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University
of Sarajevo, and a traveller to remote archaeological sites in the Middle
and Far East. Azra Begic is in her fifties; Imamovic is younger, with
children that are still small.
Azra's forebears -- a Herzegovinian noble family called Radojevic in the
later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, before they dopted Islam --
owned Pocitelj on the River Neretva, south of Mostar. Pocitelj is a complex
of castellated medieval and early Islamic buildings which was destroyed by
Croats in mid-September. When Azra and her two sisters were small, after
the war and under communism, they were ordered through their school to
decide and declare whether they were Croats, Muslims or Serbs. Azra decided
she would be what there weren't too many of in the class, and became Serb.
Jasminka chose Croat. Abasa stuck to being Muslim because she wanted to
study law, and there were fewer Muslim girls wanting to be lawyers and so
more places were available to them. In fact, the forebears of the Begic
family, as West-Herzegovinian nobility, could have been either Croat or
Serb; their territory ran along the Catholic/Orthodox fault-line of
change in religion, that only distinguishing factor for what is now called
"ethnicity". They are not now practising Muslims.
Azra joined others, such as Enver Imamovic who, with the help of young
people, packed away movable art treasures and books from libraries and
museums, insofar as they were not already by then destroyed, and within
the mandate of the Commission for Saving the Cultural Heritage of Sarajevo,
founded 14 May 1992, under the direction of Mrs Mevlida Serdarevic. Azra
and Enver discovered then that some Serbian colleagues and sympathisers in
various institutions had already removed items of great value or interest
to their regime. Azra's art gallery lost icons in this way, and a collec-
tion of paintings by the Austrian-period painter Hodler, much admired
in Belgrade.
Both Azra and Enver participated in caring for the contents of the Territorial
Museum (Zemaljski Muzej), across "Sniper's Alley" from the Holiday Inn. The
atmosphere of the time, and the winter which followed it, is presented in
a letter from Enver to a friend in Zagreb: "Never before in my life could
I have imagined that this, what we are now going through in such a terrible
manner, could happen. How many times have I passed by when a shell has
fallen either in front of me, or behind my back, and killed a few passers-by
who happened to be there. They hit even in my immediate vicinity; it is better
if I don't tell you what happens and how it looks. It suffices to tell you
that the house I live in has so far twice remained roofless, and that the flat
above me has been devastated. The other day the front wall of our house was
hit, just at dusk, just as the entire day had passed quietly, and there were
ten children on sledges all around. I am bearing all this relatively well,
physically as well. My accumulated fitness and everything I went through
during my travels have made me tough enough and I have no problems. On the
contrary, I work enormously. At the moment I am working on a large manuscript
and at the same time I write quite a lot for the newspapers, the radio, the
TV, etc., because you can fight as much and defend your country with the
written word. We organise scientific gatherings, round tables, because
there is so much about everything that is happening to us that you must
explain to your own people and to the world and to point out the roots
of this evil.
"The situation at the Territorial Museum is desperate as well. Of all our
colleagues, only a few have remained; everybody else fled a long time ago.
The building itself has received some sixty mortar shots. By the way, a
foreign lady reporter at the Sarajevo hotel housing all the foreigners
was furious at the constant shelling of the hotel, got in her car, drove
herself to the Serbian headquarters and made a scene there. The brave
Serbian soldiers said they were so sorry, but that they were trying to hit
the museum! The hotel is across the street from it.
"I can be thanked for everything that we have succeeded in saving, not only
in the archaeological, but also in the other departments of the Museum,
because I rescued them under heaviest fire. Everything now stands ruined,
ajar; there are niether doors nor windows; snow, rain and humidity entering.
It is a real sorrow. One does as much as one can. In the same way I look
after my faculty at the University, because there is nobody who dares to
go there, because at several points you have to run because of snipers
who constantly keep these passages under fire. I am not afraid, and so far
everything has been OK. You cannot imagine how one becomes immune to every-
thing; the fear disappears and instead an anger and spite appears within
everybody. We thank our existence only to hope for better times, because
with this belief you can endure everything more easily, the cold as much
as the hunger and fear.
"I, too, could have left Sarajevo, but my conscience makes me remain here,
in our town and country, and to contribute as much as I can. It is patriotism
one suddenly feels strongly and it is much stronger than we are."
When I met this heroic man, he wanted to conduct me across Sniper's Alley
to the museum. To my shame, I took a taxi from the Holiday Inn across the
street. However, I fled with him away from the museum, parallel to Sniper's
Alley, across threatened streets and past the blackened cadaver of the
University, while he told me of his rescue of Sarajevo's revered treasure,
the Sarajevo Haggadah, a thirteenth-fourteenth century manuscript brought
to Sarajevo by refugees from the Spanish Inquisition.
"That day 6 June was the most hellish ever in Sarajevo," Enver recalls. "That
was the day the barracks burned, the biggest barracks in town and right near
the museum, in the first war zone. All the fighting and artillery attacks
taking place then were at their height near the museum. In these circumstances,
our action took place. We entered the museum unnoticed. For six hours we hunted
for the Haggadah in all the places we thought it might be. We forced open every
museum safe and found it in none. Finally, we came to the basement. It was
completely dark. We had a little torch, which lasted only two hours. We had
to grope in the dark, and that way we found it ...
"The basement itself was under water, which was rising fast because projectiles
had punctured the central heating pipes. The height of the floor where the book
lay was just a little higher than the height the water had then reached. Had we
found the Haggadah only a few hours later than we did, water would already have
reached it, and it would have been destroyed."
True to his scholarly principles, Imamovic wrote his report about the discovery
of the Haggadah at its findspot, crouching on the floor for safety, in water
and in the dark.
Sarajevo is a European city, former host to the Olympic games. Sarajevans
are pained that they are not depicted as Europeans by the foreign press. The
Western press, they told us, likes to picture them in ethnic costumes, or else
dying or dead, like victims of gladiatorial combat, rather than as the well-
dressed Europeans, who can be seen engaged in a remarkable variety of urban
or cultural pursuits (as well as carrying their own water) on any and all
Sarajevan streets. The West refuses to allow them the dignity of considering
they need aid to culture as well as aid in the form of food. They need the
advice of foreign experts, such as emerge from UNESCO to other lands in less
terrible circumstances, to show them how to safeguard their wounded monuments.
This they do not get, because the West has decided for them, monuments must
come last.
Sarajevo's historic centre looks at first, or even second, glance, much as
before. Probably most buildings are damaged in some way, but most damage
is not total. Exteriors remain looking much as they did, even when the
interiors are burnt out. The Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish sacred buildings
look little affected by war. The much-photographed, fifteenth-century
Sheikh Magribija Mosque is the only seriously damaged mosque I saw in central
Sarajevo; most other major mosques have at least retained their minarets.
Jewish monuments look as before; even the ancient Jewish cemetery, sacri-
legiously used as a Serbian gun emplacement, from the far distance appears
intact.
Austrian and Ottoman buildings withstand missiles well, in contrast to
buildings made of steel, concrete and cement. For this reason, the historic
buildings in the city centre, as well as the large, more isolated, Austrian-
built Territorial Museum, remain basically unchanged against a backdrop of
huge blackened and opalescent cadavers of high-rise structures such as the
UNIS building or the University. Buildings with architectural elements of
steel fare much worse, such as the Oslobodjenje Newspaper building which
boasts steel elements that have melted under high temperature, producing
Gaudi- or Dali-like effects. Steel window frames with many glass panels
have sagged, the panes hanging from them like items of laundry on a
clothes line.
The Territorial Museum has been under constant fire from the time of Enver's
adventure there. This, the principal museum of Bosnian archaeology, historical
monuments and natural history, sits on "Sniper's Alley." Behind it, along the
Miljacka River, is the present front line, from where devastating projectiles
of varying sorts are intermittently hurled into its back wall and its court-
yard, within which mainly unprotected Roman and medieval monuments wait to
be destroyed. The interior ceilings are painted daintily on a white ground
in Pompeian style, crossed by water stains from where the cupola sky-lights
are broken. No one risks death to cover the holes in the roof.
Only a stuffed falcon, suspended with wings widespread under the skylight
in the Natural History Department, offer futile protection. Beneath him,
a large hole is punched through the wall.
Marian WENZEL
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LONDON CONFERENCE - Effects on the Cultural Heritage
On 25 November 1993 Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue and the Courtauld
Institute of Art are jointly organising a seminar to be held at the Institute
to evaluate the effects of the present conflict on the cultural heritage
of Bosnia-Herzegovina and to discuss proposals for future restoration and
conservation.
For more information contact:
Dr Anthea Brook, Witt Library,
Courtauld Institute,
Somerset House, The Strand,
London WC2,
United Kingdom,
tel. (71) 873-2726, or
Dr Wenzel,
Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue UK,
9 Canterbury Mansions, Lymington Road,
London NW6 1SE,
tel. (71) 433-1142.
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