The Road to India via Kosovo

Written for Kosovo Online by Muharem Bazdulj

By some strange coincidence, around Vidovdan this year, news appeared on Sarajevo and Bosnian-Herzegovinian portals that the Republic of Austria had purchased the building in which the Austrian embassy has been located for about thirty years from the Centar municipality of Sarajevo. Until recently, rent was paid, but the property is now owned by Austria. It is a very beautiful building, located in the strict center of the city, on the edge of Veliki Park, directly across from the building of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the context of local daily politics, this sparked some minor interest, but the story of this building is much more interesting from a cultural than from a daily political perspective.

Namely, old Sarajevans still refer to this building as the Kutchera Villa. Hugo Freiherr von Kutchera was, during the first part of the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the right-hand man of Benjamin Kallay. The name Benjamin Kallay belongs to the general knowledge of the average educated Serb, while few have heard of Kutchera. But it shouldn't be that way. Because Kutchera has a very interesting connection, albeit somewhat indirect, to one of the most important themes of Serbian literature in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Milorad Pavic's "Dictionary of the Khazars" catapulted the theme of the Khazars into the context of the global art scene at the end of the twentieth century. In the context of history, Arthur Koestler had brought the Khazars back into the focus of the world’s attention years earlier with his book "The Thirteenth Tribe." In that book, Koestler presents a bold and somewhat radical hypothesis that the Ashkenazi Jews are not descendants of the Semites, but rather of the Khazars. He himself cites Kutchera as practically the only real predecessor of this theory.

Valerijan Zujo, perhaps the best contemporary expert on the history of Sarajevo, writes about Kutchera as follows: "He had an extremely successful career; he was an orientalist. He graduated from the Oriental Academy in Vienna and was an excellent connoisseur of Eastern languages. During his service in Sarajevo, he even fascinated our people with his knowledge of Oriental languages, as well as Sharia law, in which he was an expert. Our local ulema would hesitate when he began to interpret certain issues. Naturally, he somewhat flirted with the community in which he worked, especially the Bosniak one, and he was extremely skilled at it, but perhaps all of this was part of his diplomatic mission."

The time Kutchera spent in Bosnia and Sarajevo was also used to exert a strong influence on travelers from the West.

One of those travelers was the special correspondent for the London Times, Harry K. Thompson, who arrived in Sarajevo in the summer of 1896. On Kutchera's recommendation, he went to report from northwestern Bosnia, specifically from Banja Luka and the surrounding areas. There, he was fascinated by the fact that the Ottoman Empire, even before the Congress of Berlin, had laid the first railway tracks in Bosnia and Herzegovina between Banja Luka and the Sava River. Thompson was aware that this was part of a long-term goal to connect Europe with the Mediterranean via the Sanjak of Novi Pazar and Kosovo. Nearly 130 years ago, he wrote the following: “About 60 miles of track have been laid between Bosanski Novi and Banja Luka, and a similar section has been built in Macedonia, between Thessaloniki and Mitrovica on historic Kosovo, the field of blackbirds in Old Serbia. This railway was intended to be part of the Turkish railway system to be built by Baron Hirsch, but it was never completed. One day, we hope, the connection between Banja Luka and Mitrovica will be realized; it would be by far the shortest route to India.”

Let’s remember, this is 1897, this is a book published in London, where a prominent English author, from an English perspective, calls for the swift completion of a railway connection between Banja Luka and Mitrovica. It is the shortest route to India, and it is in the interest of the entire West.

Almost thirteen full decades have passed; what has changed? The land route to India remains very important, and it would still be the shortest if it followed the diagonal from Banja Luka to Mitrovica. At the time when the Ottoman Empire first conceived this route, there were no (international) borders between Banja Luka and Mitrovica. That’s always something that facilitates communication. Today, unfortunately, when planning a trip along that roughly 500-kilometer route, one must first consider the number of checkpoints where travel documents are inspected.

Still, it is possible to travel from Banja Luka to Mitrovica through areas predominantly inhabited by Serbs, and that, it seems, is a type of (symbolic) unity that bothers some. Be that as it may, some unities are more enduring and resilient than others. And the route that connects India and Europe also remains important, perhaps more so today than in the nineteenth century.