Gyula Germanus or Hajji Julius Abdul-Karim Germanus, Hungarian Muslim Orientalist Professor (1884-1979) was a well-known scholar and popular figure in Hungary from the turn of the century until late ...seventies. He was an Arabist, teacher, professor, writer, traveller, literary historian as well MP in Hungary (1958-1966) and member of many academies abroad. He converted to Islam in Delhi in 1930, and he was the first Hungarian to make a pilgrimage to Mecca (Hajj) in 1935. In this paper, I would like to describe in more detail his first major trip abroad, which took him to Bosnia and Herzegovina in the summer of 1902. The 17-year-old Germanus, a newly graduated, well-informed, educated, multilingual and already interested in Eastern culture, had a lifetime of experiences on his journey. Based partly on one of his memoirs and partly on a radio play he wrote and found in the Germanus bequest, I will outline in detail a chronicle of his days in Bosnia. First he travelled by train from Budapest to Banja Luka, where he visited the only Trappist monastery in the Balkans, and then he wrote a brief history of the Trappist order in his book. He then travelled with his companions by coach along a wild and scenic road carved into the valley of the Vrbas river towards Jajce. He noted that the Hungarian soldiers who invaded Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878 had named the province “the land of curved mountains” for a reason. It is in Jajce that he had his greatest and most astonishing adventure, when he walked into a café in the evening, where he was greeted with great affection by the regular Bosniaks, especially after it turns out that he speaks Turkish. So he spends the evening in good company and is amply entertained. This first impression of the kindness and hospitality of the Muslim people of the East will stayed with him for the rest of his life. Jajca was followed by a journey by narrow-gauge railway to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. In addition to describing the city and its sights, Germanus also reported that he had made a new and very dear friend, the intelligent Ahmed Mustafa, a shariat law student. After meeting him, they talked about the Islamic religion, the Quran, shariat and visited the bazaar. Afterwards they had dinner and Germanus invited his new friend to visit Hungary, who accompanied him to Grazová and then to Raguza. They also discovered Raguza together and said goodbye to each other. From there Germanus travelled to Cattaro, then to Cetinje in Montenegro, where he had interesting and instructive adventures, and after a long and difficult ordeal, including two days of starvation, he arrived in Fiume, where he was helped by an acquaintance of his father’s, and was able to travel home in peace. In the conclusion, I will explain that six years after Germanus’ visit, the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Empire, and tensions between the peoples of the Balkans escalated, leading to the Sarajevo assassination attempt on 28 June 1914, which soon afterwards led to the outbreak of the First World War. Germanus never forgot his first trip and the positive experiences he had here. He had sympathy for the Bosniaks and helped them in Hungary when veteran soldiers and officers stranded in Hungary after the First World War founded an Islamic religious community in 1931 under the leadership of former Military Imam Husein Hilmi Durić . Germanus, who was already a Muslim, supported them, mobilised his network of contacts for them and took on the role of secretary-general of the so-called “Gül Baba Cultural Committee”. I believe that the teenager Germanus’ personality development was greatly influenced by his trip in 1902 and the friendly, welcoming atmosphere that surrounded him.
This work focuses on the Walny vs. Kajon copyright infringement case, showing the situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina within this field during the Austro-Hungarian rule. The author shows how ...copyright was legally regulated and how it could have led to infringement, through methods of (re)printing of Plan von Sarajevo und Umgebung. Participants of this legal case are well known to public, as writers, owners and editors of respectable journals and printing houses. For this reason, this case deserves some special attention.
The Sarajevo Canton Winter Field Campaign 2018 (SAFICA) was a project that took place in winter 2017–2018 with an aim to characterize the chemical composition of aerosol in the Sarajevo Canton, ...Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), which has one of the worst air qualities in Europe. This paper presents the first characterization of the metals in PM10 (particulate matter aerodynamic diameters ≤10 μm) from continuous filter samples collected during an extended two-months winter period at the urban background Sarajevo and remote Ivan Sedlo sites. We report the results of 18 metals detected by inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and electrothermal atomic absorption spectrometry (ETAAS). The average mass concentrations of metals were higher at the Sarajevo site than at Ivan Sedlo and ranged from 0.050 ng/m3 (Co) to 188 ng/m3 (Fe) and from 0.021 ng/m3 (Co) to 61.8 ng/m3 (Fe), respectively. The BenMAP-CE model was used for estimating the annual BiH health (50% decrease in PM2.5 would save 4760+ lives) and economic benefits (costs of $2.29B) of improving the air quality. Additionally, the integrated energy and health assessment with the ExternE model provided an initial estimate of the additional health cost of BiH’s energy system.
This paper presents the analysis results of syntactic and semantic features of constructions with the preposition po in The Woman from Sarajevo (Gospođica, 1945) and The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija, ...1954) by Ivo Andrić. The main goal of the research was to determine the meanings and functions of these constructions in the novels that form the corpus of the research, but also to try to expand and supplement, on the basis of selected examples, the previous syntactic and semantic analyses of the preposition po in our older and also more recent grammars and linguistic articles. By using both the theoretical framework of cognitive semantics and the theoretical foundations of more traditional approaches to the meaning of prepositions, 298 constructions (213 from The Woman from Sarajevo and 85 from The Damned Yard) were analysed, and it was concluded that the language of Andrić’s works, at least when it comes to constructions with the preposition po, is not different from the contemporary Serbian language. Namely, it was observed that there are more locative than accusative constructions with the preposition po, and that the most frequent are the spatial locative and the base/criterion locative. At the end of the paper, we pointed out the non-prepositional function of the word po.
This paper considers art works made by the author over a gap of twenty years in response to the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1996). The first works were inspired by the then BBC War Correspondent, Martin ...Bell in his radio broadcast of 1996 in which he reflected on the tragedy of the Bosnian War. The second group of works were made as part of the AHRC funded project Art & Reconciliation and were the result of visiting Sarajevo for the first time in 2018. For this the author drew upon his experience of using collections and archives as source material, here drawing from the collection of the Museum of History in Sarajevo where the final exhibition was staged. The author reflects on the role of the artist in tackling issues of conflict when not an eyewitness and draws parallels with examples such as Michael Tippet's oratorio A Child of Our Time and Bob Dylan's The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. The paper also considers how knitting can be used to construct a form of alternative memorial and how his own personal experiences and memories can form the foundations for new work.
•Multispectral imaging for study of the Sarajevo Haggadah.•Non-invasive scientific analysis of medieval illuminated Hebrew manuscripts.•Application of image processing techniques to recover erased ...text.
Over the last two decades, multispectral imaging (MSI) has established itself as the most important tool in recovering illegible text in erased or damaged manuscripts, and to a lesser extent as an aid to the codicological study of manuscript supports and media. Rarely, however, have spectral imaging initiatives involved Hebrew illuminated manuscripts. In 2022, an international team of scholars, imaging scientists, and conservators from the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Lazarus Project of the University of Rochester imaged the Sarajevo Haggadah multispectrally. Produced for a Jewish commissioner and housed at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, this 14th-century illuminated manuscript contains, inter alia, a partially erased text of a sale contract on folio 106v* that is now newly legible. Codicological details of the manuscript – ink, stains, type of animal used for parchment – have also benefitted from material analysis via MSI.
Herein, we describe the MSI process of the Sarajevo Haggadah and the application of image processing algorithms to recover the erased text on folio 106v*. A complete text of a sale contract is revealed for the first time, providing significant information about the ownership and provenance of the Sarajevo Haggadah at the beginning of the 16th century.
Nenad Veličkovićs Der Vater meiner Tochter verhandelt die Schwierigkeit, im Angesicht übermächtiger historischer Ereignisse eigene Geschichten zu erzählen. Der 2016 von der Autorin Marija Ivanovic ...ins Deutsche übersetzte Roman reflektiert zugleich auch die Möglichkeiten und Limits narrativer Konzepte. Simon Nagy hat den Text für die MEDIENIMPULSE einer eingehenden Analyse unterzogen.
Within the interdisciplinary field of urban geomorphology, scholars have recently paid attention to the increasing vulnerability of landscapes, due principally to the construction of housing and ...infrastructure. With regard to the case of Sarajevo and more specifically the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, historically, its particular geographic setting has maintained a central role in the spatial distribution of its population, with residential areas exposed to potential geomorphological hazards. Urbanisation on the slopes of Sarajevo was resumed after the Bosnian War (1992–1995) in areas with steep slope gradients. This was a consequence of the impossibility or unwillingness of those internally displaced, sheltered in Sarajevo during the conflict, to return to pre-war homes. Thus, this paper explores the political, social and economic factors that have influenced both the historical process of urbanisation on the slopes, surrounding the central areas of the city, and its subsequent reproduction during the post-war period. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the exposition of these urbanised slopes to potential geomorphological hazards. Moreover, the extent of urbanisation on the slopes will be quantified in five study areas for periods between 1987–2003 and 2003–2015. It precedes the evaluation of the geomorphological vulnerabilities of constructions developed in these sites. Finally, corrective measures are proposed in the current process of elaboration of the new Urban and Strategic Plans.
•Urbanisation on slopes is an epiphenomenal process of urban development.•Repossession of pre-war homes did not turn into returns.•Intense post-war urbanisation was identified on steep slopes.•There was rise of potential geomorphological hazards in these newly developed areas.
Dr Bogdan Milankovic was one of the key figures in the musical life of
Sarajevo between two world wars. A doctor of Romance philology who spent his
working life as a high school teacher, Milankovic ...also served as director
and teacher of the District School of Music, president of the Sarajevo
Philharmonic, music writer, and violin maker. The article is a contribution
to the biography of Bogdan Milankovic based on archival sources and
historical press, while trying to determine his influence to the development
of musical culture in Sarajevo in the interwar period.
The siege of Sarajevo has altered the experience of ethnicity, reconfiguring ethnic categories into moral boundaries. From 1992 to 1995, the city was held under siege by the Army of Republika Srpska, ...and many Sarajevan Serbs still grapple today with the feeling that others view them as aggressors. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with Serb women of the pre-war generations, I describe how they intentionally make small alterations in gesture and body language in order to perform ethnic ambiguity, and avoid being read by others as Serb. While anthropological accounts have tended to use performativity to emphasize the constructed and situational nature of ethnicity, here I focus on the anxiety that drives Serb women’s performances in order to capture the inherent and inescapable feeling of ethnicity in a post-war space. I also discuss the difficulty of capturing this anxiety through empirical methods, navigating the discrepancy between Serb women’s narrative accounts of ethnic stigmatization compared to the apparently unproblematic flow of everyday social life. Through this discrepancy, I demonstrate how the embodied and ever-accumulating feeling of ethnic anxiety can conjure threats where there may be none, and how it can charge even the most (seemingly) mundane encounters.