It was not enough that in the past decades, Croatian and Serbian nationalist practices were abundantly nourished by their own imperial pasts, for which purpose characters with murky biographies, such as King Tomislav, Zvonimir, Emperor Dušan, or someone else from the dynasty, were drawn from the dusty historical dustbin. Nemanjić, but recently the Bosniak side joined them in that work. Let us just note here that in the genre of inventing traditions, opaque pasts, murky biographies and unverifiable facts (where a prince, ban, despot, king or emperor was born and when, when he died, did he even exist, etc.), no they do not harm, but they are the load-bearing beams in the construction of modern national identity.
So, the Bosniak side finally found its horse for that race. As their foundational sovereignist myth, Bosniaks dug up the story of King Tvrtek I Kotromanić from the 14th century from the deep past. According to scanty historical accounts, he is the most successful and warlike Bosnian medieval ruler who, with his aggressiveness, expanded the borders of what was then Bosnia all the way to the east across the Drina, then south to some islands and all the most important Adriatic cities except Dubrovnik and far to the west. This, first the Bosnian ban, and then the king, took advantage of the weaknesses of the then neighboring dynasties in Serbia, Croatia and Hungary, and before they were all soon covered by the Ottoman Empire, he established a kind of Bosnian medieval Schengen.
In this context, a few weeks ago, a monument to Company I was unveiled in the center of Sarajevo, across from the BiH Presidency building, between a flower garden and a busy street. The mayor of Sarajevo, Benjamina Karić, that Bosnian-Herzegovinian pizza scandal, said that she promised the citizens of BiH and Sarajevo a monument, and that she is fulfilling that promise right now. On that occasion, the journalists made a short survey among the people of Sarajevo, and according to it, they are satisfied with the company, they are even somewhat sentimental towards it, they almost see it as some kind of guy who has been away from the city for a long time, and now he is back, and an important it is because such historical figures, as the respondents themselves said, fulfill the need for belonging. After all, the predominant position of those who approve of the mayor's action is that Bosniaks should also be allowed to use the past for the purpose of raising daily political patriotism, and that in their search for the national essence of Bosniakness, they have every right to refer to Kulina bana, Tvrtko and to stećci and thus oppose the onslaught of all those more or less fantasized Croatian višeslavs, trpimirs and krešimirs, as well as all those hallucinated Serbian mutimirs, stefans and uroš and similar individuals from the nebulous medieval personnel.
Identity theft
In any case, Bosniaks are now going through everything that the neighboring ethno-nationalisms have already gone through before them - they fabricate historical material for the needs of the pragmatic present, then they push the ideological baggage created in this way for the needs of confrontation with other ethno-communities and finally, a return to their roots and " to the heroic past" homogenize paradise and thus only further strengthen the current government and dampen any resistance within society. It is particularly important for all post-Yugoslav societies to forget the previous historical period, the Yugoslav and socialist one, and Bosnia is no exception. In order to avoid any connection with that historical stage in which, of course, Bosnia and Herzegovina probably enjoyed full sovereignty for the only time in modern times, one digs into the deeper past to see if the roots of some kind of authentic Bosnianness could not be found there and thus established some kind of historical continuity, of course, without the socialist stage.
However, you should know that mythical stories are basically promiscuous, they easily promise themselves to others, it is enough just to address them with nice words. The company's story can be told without major problems in Croatian, Serbian and Bosniak newsrooms. Well, in that sense, it's no wonder that these three irreconcilable identities clash with each other in this matter, each of which claims that it is he who has the monopoly over the Company. Thus, Croats think that the king with his symbolic encouragement can be appropriated exclusively by them, although recently they are somewhat less interested in this issue. After all, they have long thought that everything that is medieval in Bosnia is also Croatian, so, for example, in accordance with that, at the beginning of the last war, they named a Sarajevo brigade of the HVO after Tvrtko, just for the record.
The Serbs, on the other hand, presented their first counter-step on the issue of nationalist plastic. The ambitious, but under-capacitated Banja Luka mayor Draško Stanivuković announced that they will soon build their own Tvrtko (of course, with changed heraldry, without lilies and with a cross on the shield), and place it in the center of Banja Luka, because he was actually a Serbian king, because he was partly from the Nemanjić family, and he was crowned in the Mileševa monastery, so this Tvrtko in Sarajevo is an example, as Stanivuković says, of "identity theft". For this purpose, the said mayor first planned to rename Banja Luka's Gajeva Street to Kotromanićeva Street (because what that Gaj did for our people, Stanivuković will notice), and then to plant a monument at the end of the renamed promenade that should rival the Sarajevo version.
Company and Artur
There is already a monument to the Company. One, for example, was built in Tuzla ten years ago. And at that time, the mayor of that city, Jasmin Imamović, was in charge of that initiative. He thinks that such historical figures with a strong symbolic charge should be used more and more. "Everyone knows everything about Arthur, the King of England because of all those feature films, but few know anything about the Company. Artur did not exist, he is a figment of the imagination, and Tvrtko existed", will conclude the Tuzla potestat, who wrote a historical novel about him in order to popularize Tvrtko.
Although Tvrtko himself, if only he hadn't been struck by the polarizing political situation currently prevailing in Bosnia, would have given his soul for some integrative political version. Like, more or less, every medieval nobleman, this Bosnian's genealogy is more colorful than any carpet. On his father's side, he is from the Bosnian Kotromanić family, and on his mother's side, he is from two lineages - Croatian Šubić and Serbian Nemanjić. If you delve even deeper into his genealogy, you will see that his pedigree is made up of Neapolitan Angevins, and there are also Hungarian princesses and daughters of chiefs from the Turkish Kuman tribe. He immodestly titled himself the king of Serbia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Rama, Usora and all other then-known and less-known countries, so he was the head of that kind of Balkan commonwealth.
Also, in Tvrtko's case, the myth of glorious days and a kind of golden age is being revived, because in his time Bosnia was not only the largest territorially, but also the most prosperous country. Of course, there is not too much information about this, as is most of the other information about Tvrtko's unstable character (the exact date of his birth is not known, just as it is not known whether he was killed by his rivals in some kind of revenge action, it has not been determined either the right place of his coronation, as far as the descendants are concerned, it is not known exactly who was the faćuk and who was the legitimate child, etc.). It can only be repeated that at that time trade and mining flourished in Bosnia and that the stingy citizens of Dubrovnik regularly paid the Company a racket, which was no small matter at that time.
My people are hungry and bloody / And the glorious past is a lie
However, all that today's scuttling with the unfortunate Company is meaningless gibberish and plain bullshit. In his text a few years ago on this same topic, Ivan Lovrenović reminded us that here at one time all this mythomania, nationalist propaganda and all these collective delusions were not given a single penny. In that text, Lovrenović talks about the company as a local maharaja and an ordinary expansionist. But easy for that. What is more important is how we used to write and talk about the dynastic past. Lovrenović says: "...we could use the fierce anti-feudal and anti-traditionalist, completely Krležian invective of Antun Radić, when he addressed the Croatian peasants in 1903: 'People, don't be crazy! You have no past, because only kings and great men, your masters, have a past and a history. The dust of your grandfathers would only tell you about torment, slavery and captivity, and not about any glory. You have nothing in the past, only the future is yours, if you have any sense. Look at the present, look around you, how many of you are suffering the same pain, then you will look cheerfully into the future!'
Or, as the young Crnjanski sang, just after the slaughterhouses first of the Balkans and then of the First World War: 'I am not for silver or gold, / nor for Dušan's brilliance. / I wouldn't reach for imperial palaces, / for that harlot's paradise. // My soul does not ache for churches, / for the mighty king's home. / For Greek icons half-naked / in my slave temple.' (Soldier's song), and: 'Slave, and armor-bearers, let the song be silent. / May the despotic of the saints disappear. / My people are hungry and bloody. / And the glorious past is a lie.' (Memorial to Princip).
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