Chapter 1
DEMNACIO MEMORIEM
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Excerpts from Abdul Hasan’s travelogue on Herceg-Bosna and Montenegro1
Biševica, July 14, 1632
Here we are in Biševica, a place surrounded by the high mountains of Golija. A small river with a strange, female name, Živana, flows through the town. Askeri2 stayed in an inn near the forest, and memuri 3, and I with them, are located in the beautiful house of Beg Amidžić, at the end of the village. Tomorrow we will start the search for cattle, which the Montenegrins stole from the local Turks during the spring months. That “sheep quarrel”, as it is
1 Abdul Hasan’s travelogue was found in August 1957 in Travnik. His inventor, Muharem Varešanović, a history professor at the Travnik high school, used to sit and read in the city library during the summer holidays. That year, special attention was drawn to a writing written in the Ottoman Turkish language, which he wore, tucked into a black, leather binding, on a high shelf, in the most remote corner of the library. How and why, only superficially knowing the ancient Turkish language and the Arabic letters even weaker, came to the conclusion that this writing should be translated and counter-tormented, is not known. But it is known so much that the rest of his life, and he died in Sarajevo in 1961, he devoted himself entirely to this work (he ordered dictionaries from acquaintances, a professor of linguistics from Istanbul, locked himself in a study at night, neglected school, students and family ). Despite the misfortunes that followed him, like a curse, after the discovery of this writing (he was fired, his wife left him and took her two children with him, his father died of a serious and incurable disease, and his mother committed suicide) he managed to complete the pre-platoon. However, the writing did not have the historical value that Muharrem expected. Disappointed and angry with himself, he burned the text of the original and most of the translation one stormy night when he returned drunk from the cafe to his empty, rented apartment. On the remnants of the Serbo-Croatian translation, he wrote in his own handwriting: “Libraries are mosques of knowledge. All the greatest secrets of heaven and earth are hidden in them ... But whoever finds out is cursed, because knowledge brings only suffering, pain and misfortune. It is better to live in ignorance for a hundred years, than to know for just a few minutes ... “He died three months later from pneumonia, caused by cirrhosis of the liver. Thus, the destiny of this man and the writings that enchanted him, in an unusual way, turned into a kind of apotheosis of ignorance and stupidity. 2 Soldiers.
3 Officers.
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here they call, it has slowly taken on the proportions of a real war. There are dozens of dead and wounded on both sides. There seem to be too many casualties due to the stolen marwa. Whether they kill themselves for that or for some other reason, only Allah knows!
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This is a land of beautiful, tall men and even more beautiful women, but you can rarely meet or see them on the street. Mostly at home or in the fields, they spend their days working and surviving. Only in the evening, when the sun sets over the mountains and the heat stops being unbearable, the town responds with voices, stories, laughter, songs ...
Older, married men, sitting in groups of three or four, on benches in front of the gates, serious and gloomy, discuss important issues of local and global importance, because here the news does not come on time, in fact late on Sundays, sometimes months, so there is always something to chat about. From all the women who visit the aga every day and what kind of jobs he finds and invents for their husbands, to the source of income of the sultan’s brother Selim, who fled to the Greek island of Chios last year. Young people gather under a tree, usually an oak, or in a plum grove, so they hang out, play and sing until late at night. After that, they each go home, go to bed, rest a little, and tomorrow to work again and so on, day after day. Looking at them and admiring them, one cannot help but think how beautiful this simple life really is in its purest, idyllic form, and how he too could live and live this life in the mutluluku4 of poverty, without passions that destroy it, destroy it. chest and darken the soul. But beneath that beautiful rug, beneath that colorful wafer, sleeps Satan, the beast that waits for its vacancy, its five minutes, and that will rise when we least expect it. “Rifles will sing instead of honey mouths, and sabers will sound instead of shargs!” So some wise old men told me, down on the river, while we were fishing, and I told them about the beauty of their place.
4 Happiness.
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