What a beautiful place. I remember how beautiful Sarajevo was during the olympics and then what was left after the war. So much history destroyed. Thank you for sharing these pictures
While strolling through MutualArtdotcom, I came across images of 17th c art coming up for auction. I was dismayed (being an Anglican Catholic, which is also Protestant) to be reminded, this time by great art rather than history books, that as recently as just 400 years
ago, Protestant (Calvinist) political powers were torturing and having representatives of the Roman Catholic faith tortured and executed (in 17th c Hungary).
(Yes, at my age, 400 years in history is not all that long ago. This happens when one realizes that one's very old or deceased parents were being born into the world, as newborn babes, a century into one's own past).
The clash of civilizations since the time of ancient Rome, empires and religious powers, remind me of extremes of violent vomiting when the human body tries to eliminate an invader or by neurological trauma called migraine. So much of the history of Europeans was traumatized by invasions from hordes from the East, Ghengis Khan, Mongols and Turks etc. Who is conscious of the ramifications for the modern and postmodern world? The Ottomans lost their empire as a result of WWI, but they were not the first horde of invaders to take over Eastern and Southeast Europe.
Political conversations about Christanity in the American cultural identity whirl around the subject as if it began in the 1770's, or during the AIDs eoidemic, on America's side of the Atlantic. These conversations are like the blind leading the blind with the resulting deaf shouting at the deaf.
Eastern and Southeastern European lands and histories, architecture, rivers and landscapes are places of extraordinary beauty and sorrow judging by paintings, photography, postcards and history books. The music of Franz Listz speaks with this beauty. I don't know if I will ever see the cathedrals, the Danube and the forests with my naked eyes but painters and composers offer a view and an ear into the extraordinary. People in the modern West/the Global North don't get beheaded and crucified but some wonder if we in the chaotic crime-driven USA are better off without state religions, churches and monarchies.
Science and technology have made our world almost immeasurably better, but one has to see the art that portrays the constant wars and battles of late medieval Europe, the grotesque dwarfs used for entertainment, to begin to realize how much worse things used to be. Historians can tell the stories but the artists of centuries past reveal the unimagined dreadfulness - the terrible vomiting with which empires resist invaders and peoples resist challenges to heart-held faiths.
Like everything else, this 'beauty' or 'nostalgia' is partly real and partly fictional, with the 'nostalgia', I think, being explainable by a kind of 'otherness' and what happened 'after 1913'.
I recommend Leigh Fermor's diaries of his trek from Amsterdam to Constantinople in his 20's in the 1930's. He transcribed what diaries had not been ruined or lost along with his memories into three books available through the publishing house of The New York Review of Books, NYRB. Centuries of leftover markers of Middle Europe to the Middle East, through the eyes of a fearless, very young explorer.
Love it! Thanks for helping us dive into a completely different world with these images that we would never have had a chance to see!!
Cheers! I'm very glad you like them (as do I and my Bosnian friends).
What a beautiful place. I remember how beautiful Sarajevo was during the olympics and then what was left after the war. So much history destroyed. Thank you for sharing these pictures
Sigh, you're right.
Stay tuned for more.
Scene outside the mosque is one actually in front of the Gazi Husrev bey's mosque (16th C). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazi_Husrev-beg_Mosque
Yep, it bears that name now (and I added the same link to the caption).
Cheers!
Re the imagined beauty of Easten Europe
While strolling through MutualArtdotcom, I came across images of 17th c art coming up for auction. I was dismayed (being an Anglican Catholic, which is also Protestant) to be reminded, this time by great art rather than history books, that as recently as just 400 years
ago, Protestant (Calvinist) political powers were torturing and having representatives of the Roman Catholic faith tortured and executed (in 17th c Hungary).
(Yes, at my age, 400 years in history is not all that long ago. This happens when one realizes that one's very old or deceased parents were being born into the world, as newborn babes, a century into one's own past).
https://www.executedtoday.com/tag/saints/
The clash of civilizations since the time of ancient Rome, empires and religious powers, remind me of extremes of violent vomiting when the human body tries to eliminate an invader or by neurological trauma called migraine. So much of the history of Europeans was traumatized by invasions from hordes from the East, Ghengis Khan, Mongols and Turks etc. Who is conscious of the ramifications for the modern and postmodern world? The Ottomans lost their empire as a result of WWI, but they were not the first horde of invaders to take over Eastern and Southeast Europe.
Political conversations about Christanity in the American cultural identity whirl around the subject as if it began in the 1770's, or during the AIDs eoidemic, on America's side of the Atlantic. These conversations are like the blind leading the blind with the resulting deaf shouting at the deaf.
Eastern and Southeastern European lands and histories, architecture, rivers and landscapes are places of extraordinary beauty and sorrow judging by paintings, photography, postcards and history books. The music of Franz Listz speaks with this beauty. I don't know if I will ever see the cathedrals, the Danube and the forests with my naked eyes but painters and composers offer a view and an ear into the extraordinary. People in the modern West/the Global North don't get beheaded and crucified but some wonder if we in the chaotic crime-driven USA are better off without state religions, churches and monarchies.
Science and technology have made our world almost immeasurably better, but one has to see the art that portrays the constant wars and battles of late medieval Europe, the grotesque dwarfs used for entertainment, to begin to realize how much worse things used to be. Historians can tell the stories but the artists of centuries past reveal the unimagined dreadfulness - the terrible vomiting with which empires resist invaders and peoples resist challenges to heart-held faiths.
Like everything else, this 'beauty' or 'nostalgia' is partly real and partly fictional, with the 'nostalgia', I think, being explainable by a kind of 'otherness' and what happened 'after 1913'.
I recommend Leigh Fermor's diaries of his trek from Amsterdam to Constantinople in his 20's in the 1930's. He transcribed what diaries had not been ruined or lost along with his memories into three books available through the publishing house of The New York Review of Books, NYRB. Centuries of leftover markers of Middle Europe to the Middle East, through the eyes of a fearless, very young explorer.
That's very interesting--and since I didn't know about him, thanks a lot for alerting me to his writings!
I felt they were truly beautiful.
I'll give it a go, from what I've seen so far, they look very interesting!