An Expedition that Lasts

Written for Kosovo Online by: Muharem Bazdulj

Josip Mlakic, one of the leading contemporary Croatian writers, published an intriguing novel this fall titled "Requiem." The novel is divided into two parts separated by more than three hundred years. Both parts are set in Bosnia. The first part thematizes the campaign of Eugene of Savoy on Bosnia and Sarajevo in 1689, and the second depicts the fading of the 'remnants of remnants' of the Bosnian Catholic Croatian community through the lens of a village on a summer night in 2018, when Croatia played in the FIFA World Cup final in Russia. The writer humorously compares the connection between these two parts to Marx's famous thesis about tragedy that turns into farce through repetition: events at the end of the seventeenth century were tragic, while today it has become an endless farce. Reminding us that the Catholic population in Bosnia welcomed Savoy as a liberator, and a large number subsequently left their ancestral homes along with his army, the writer in an interview also gives the following demographic estimate: "It is estimated that around 130,000 Catholics (Croats) lived in the areas of today's Bosnia and Herzegovina before Eugene of Savoy's invasion. According to some data, including migrations that continued for several decades from Herzegovina and Rama towards Dalmatia and the Sinj region, about 100,000 Catholics left Bosnia. From being the largest ethnic-religious group, they became the smallest overnight."

These Austrian incursions into the Balkans after the fall of the Second Siege of Vienna have left significant impacts that are felt to this day, not just in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Indeed, a contemporary Serbian writer could have conceived a similar book in which the first part depicts the Austrian army led by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini advancing through Nis and Kosovo to Skopje. Piccolomini encouraged local Serbs in Kosovo to take up arms and fight with him against the Turks. Perhaps the greatest success of this campaign was the capture of Skopje, which at that time was the largest and most developed Turkish city between Belgrade and Thessaloniki. At that time, Skopje had 60,000 inhabitants, roughly the same number as Vienna. Although the Turkish army in the Balkans was in disarray and despite advancing relatively easily southward after crossing the Sava, Piccolomini himself was surprised at how quickly they managed to conquer a large and important city like Skopje. It turned out that the Turks did not defend Skopje so fervently because the city was already being ravaged by a cholera epidemic. Piccolomini himself contracted cholera there. Whether wanting to stop the spread of the disease, to avenge the Siege of Vienna, or due to some personal motives, Piccolomini ordered that Skopje be burned. The fire started on October 26, 1689, and lasted a full two days. The city suffered so greatly that it lost five-sixths of its previous population. Practically overnight, it transformed from a city of 60,000 to one of 10,000 inhabitants, losing much of its strategic, geopolitical, and commercial significance. A large portion of the population that lost their homes moved to Istanbul. The part of the city where refugees from Skopje settled is still called Skopaljska Mahala in Istanbul today. Just two weeks after he burned Skopje, Piccolomini died of cholera in Prizren.

With the death of the Austrian commander, it seemed that military fortune turned to the Turkish side. Seeing that the Austrian army was retreating, Patriarch Arsenije III Carnojevic with a massive throng of people from Kosovo headed north, in migration. According to the patriarch himself, the number of Serbs who migrated to the territories of present-day Austria with him was between 30,000 and 40,000 souls. In the centuries-long demographic erosion of Serbs from the territory of Kosovo and Metohija, this was, presumably, the single greatest loss after which the previous ethnic landscape of that area could not even remotely be restored.

In a hypothetical Serbian variant of Mlakic's novel, the second part, of course, would not take place in a central Bosnian village during the 2018 FIFA World Cup final, but in one of the enclaves south of Ibar, in the summer of 2024, while a semifinal match of the Olympic basketball tournament between Serbia and the USA is played in Paris. A few older men intently watch the screen where Serbia is led by a young man from Sombor, from the regions to which the Serbs arrived under Patriarch Carnojevic. During halftime, they discuss history and politics, and in those conversations, Wesley Clark becomes the Piccolomini of modern times, the one leading the expedition eastward, without considering the people living on the itinerary of his campaign, who he coldly and routinely leaves without land and homeland.