The story of the Ferhadija mosque begins with a doomed Hapsburg general, Herbard VIII von Auersperg, who, like so many in the Balkans before and since, got into a territorial dispute and lost his head. The year was 1575 and the victor, the Pasha Ferhat Sokolović, had lately become the first beylerbey of Ottoman Bosnia. The territory in question is sickle-shaped, curving along the present-day border of Bosnia and Croatia. It is still known as the Krajina, or Borderland, a term derived from the Slavic word meaning “edge,” or “to cut.” It is a territory that has always been at the limits of empires, the possession of one man and the object of another’s desire.
The Pasha took as his prizes the land, Auersperg’s son (a prisoner), and the general’s decapitated head, which, affixed to a spear, presided over the Pasha’s victory parade. (In response to this ignominy, the heads of two minor pashas were erected on pikes at the site of the next Auersperg victory, “to revenge Herbard’s highly esteemed head.”) Then, for 30,000 ducats, the Pasha ransomed the head and the son back to the Auerspergs. It was this money, according to legend, with which he commissioned a mosque for his new capital city, Banja Luka, deep in the heart of the Krajina. Designed in the studios of Mimar Sinan, known as the greatest architect of Ottoman reign, the Ferhadija was a mosque of legendary beauty, famous, like Helen of Troy, for its pallor, rare proportions, and the grace and slenderness of its minaret. “In the face of such beauty,” wrote a Croatian traveler five hundred years later, “was it possible, then, to stop the imagination?”
The people said that, jealous that no one else should possess something so beautiful, Ferhat Paşa locked the three master masons in the Ferhadija’s minaret. High in the tower, the masons fashioned wooden wings and leapt from the serefa and flew towards the river Vrbas, where they plummeted to their deaths. Ten years later, the Pasha died at the hands of a mutinous slave.
It is a joke in Bosnia that so many of its people have lived in three states — they were born in one, lived in another, and will die in a third — without ever leaving home. In this regard the Ferhadija is no different from the next citizen. In 1878, the Ferhadija mosque passed from the Ottomans into the hands of the Austro-Hungarians, from whom it was liberated by a Serbian king in 1918 and brought under the auspices of his new state, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was subsequently toppled by Hitler and the fascist Croatian Ustaše in 1941, an alliance which was, in turn, ousted four years later by Josip Broz Tito’s guerrilla band of communist Partisans. Tito, factory worker-turned-revolutionary, went on to found and lead the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was taken over by Serbian nationalists when Tito died in 1980, and from which a new coalition declared Bosnia independent on March 3, 1992, prompting the war which brought us the Serb nationalist Radovan Karadžić, who declared the Republika Srpska the ancestral homeland of the Serbs, himself as its president, and Banja Luka as its de facto capital. These last rulers, who did not like what the mosque represented, lined it with explosives, and, in 1993, blew the Ferhadija up.
In 2016, after twenty-three years of dismemberment, the mosque was resurrected in its eighth homeland: The Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the mosque that I have come to see.
The Krajina doesn’t so much open up before you as shear out from beneath, falling away in great limestone sheets. Where the bus crosses north from the Bosnian Federation and into the Republika Srpska, the road’s left edge cleaves to cliff face, its right plummets into ravine. The small towns at the edge of the Federation, concrete apartment buildings cratered by mortars and shrapnel, give way to forest and stony fields. Ancient Ottoman headstones surge haphazardly from medians, rose bushes, pastures, the undergrowth of the forests; the stiff white columns of newer gravestones close ranks in dense pens at the edges of towns and bus stations. This is what I’ll remember as the most startling thing about the Bosnian Krajina — the way the graves press in at the edges of your consciousness.
The Bosnian War and the genocide committed by the forces of the Republika Srpska buried bodies in numbers too large and perplexing to conceive. According to the Red Cross, nearly one third of Bosnians reported the killing of a close family member during the war. After just a week in the country, everything in Bosnia begins to strike me as a body, metamorphosed by the insistent presence of the dead. Even the black trash bags duct-taped over the sign of a sacral building first call to mind not censorship but a body bag, though here it amounts to the same thing: the eradication of memory.
A fellow passenger, who introduces himself as Harris, remarks on the “treachery” of the road. Each summer, he returns to Banja Luka to visit family; most Muslim Banja Lukan refugees return to the city in the same manner — that is, temporarily, to visit family or to bury them, but not to live.
Harris’s uncle had been a mufti at the Ferhadija before the mosque’s destruction. He tells me that the reconstructed mosque is a precise replica, identical to the original in its appearance; it is built even with many of the same stones. But the city and the community in which it reappeared had been irrevocably changed by the war. “It’s like it was dropped from outer space,” he says. Like him, it simply “doesn’t belong anymore.”
The Ferhadija was reconstructed on its original site at the center of town, but around it, the old town has been superseded by cement towers with darkened windows. Across an expanse of roadway and parking lots squats a saucer-shaped shopping mall, shimmering darkly in the heat. Not far, across the river Vrbas, the old, traditional Bosnian houses, where Muslim families used to live, are falling down. A Serbian tourist pamphlet celebrates Banja Luka as “a classy and very neat town, with nothing Oriental in its appearance.”
I meet Armin Džindo, the engineer and managing architect of the mosque’s fifteen-year reconstruction, on a covered terrace overlooking the Ferhadija. Despite the heat, he is immaculate in a gray jacket and khakis. He takes me through records and snapshots of the reconstruction. “Look!” Džindo says in his only English, grinning and indicating a picture of himself in a crisp white shirt, examining the Ferhadija’s foundations sometime in the early aughts: “James Bond!” (Indeed, his ringtone is the franchise’s theme song.) Later, I’ll learn that during reconstruction, Džindo would occasionally be discovered alone in a storage shed, surrounded by mosque fragments and machinery, holding up a hand mirror and brushing his mustache. The mustache is white now, but still impeccably groomed.
Džindo and his wife had long been residents of Banja Luka when, in April of 1992, Karadžić declared himself president of the “Republika Srpska” and claimed Banja Luka as his command control for the war. Nationalist propaganda flowed out of Belgrade and Pale, airing on state-run television and radio and filling Glas Srpski, the state-sanctioned daily; any alternative news sources were blocked. Patently false conspiracy theories ignited the latent fears of the Bosnian Serb minority, who were still haunted by the genocide of their parents’ generation, at the hands of the Nazis and the Croatian Ustaše. Karadžić’s followers came to believe that they were the intended victims of a plot led by German imperialists and “Islamic fundamentalists.” From airstrips outside of Banja Luka, MIG fighter jets and tanks departed to “cleanse” nearby territories of Muslims and dissidents. Bosnians called the city “the heart of darkness.”
Before the war, most Bosnian Muslims, known as Bosniaks, were effectively secular. They were (and still are) ethnic Slavs — as are the Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Christian Serbs, and other Balkaners — whose ancestors converted to a syncretic Islam during Ottoman reign. But Serbian newspapers referred to Bosnian Muslims as “Turks” and “Mujahideen,” as if they were foreign invaders. They spread rumors that Bosniak mobs were castrating Serbs, feeding them to lions in the local zoo, roasting them on spits, drowning them in their own blood, and eating whole Serbian families. In retaliation, vigilante bands with carnivorous names like the Wolves of Vučjak and the White Eagles roamed the country around Banja Luka and did much of the raping, pillaging, and destruction that characterized the war. Congregations were burned alive inside of their mosques; Bosniak men were made to beat each other before being hanged from bridges; Bosniak women and girls were taken to “rape hotels,” beaten, and impregnated by Serbs soldiers.
In Banja Luka, imams, Bosniak intellectuals, and even Croats and Serbs who resisted the regime began to disappear in the night. The Serbian Defense Force set up control points and inaugurated a reign of terror which included theft and harassment, and late-night attacks on Muslim and Croat houses and businesses with rocket launchers and explosives, and the deportation, beating, torture, rape, and murder of unwanted populations. Smuggling and profiteering exacerbated wartime famine, and Serbian Orthodox refugees fleeing war in nearby Croatia arrived on the doorsteps of Muslim-owned homes, announcing that the house was theirs now.
Džindo is Muslim, but because his wife is Serbian Orthodox, they were spared eviction and torture. Instead, he joined the other remaining, able-bodied men in the work groups that labored unpaid, and sometimes died, for the Serbian army. “My group,” insists Džindo, a crew of educated construction workers and engineers, “had the best jobs.” Their first assignment was to dig graves for the Serbian dead, whose bodies arrived by the crateload. They dug while Serbian supervisors looked on, blaming the diggers for the war, blaming them for the dead as they buried them.
Most genocides are marked by the rewriting of history, but Serbian forces distinguished themselves by their efforts to unmake the landscape itself. They displayed, at the Ferhadija and thousands of other religious and cultural sites around the country, an unnerving obsession with erasure. At the front, the army destroyed the domes and minarets of mosques with mortars. When they moved through a town, the mosque would be dynamited, and if there was time, the stones removed, foundations bulldozed, and the site defiled with a slaughtered pig.
In Serb-controlled regions, the expurgation was more methodical. In Bijeljina, Serbs dug up the mosques’ foundations. In Prijedor and Foča, locations of some of the most infamous concentration camps, they trucked rubble from the mosques to mass graves and buried the stones with the bodies. Nearly fifty religious sites were bulldozed in Prijedor. There, the Bosnian Serb police chief, Simo Drljača, explained, “You must not just break the minarets. You’ve got to shake up the foundations, because that means they cannot build another. Do that, and they’ll want to go. They’ll just leave by themselves.”
At the height of the killing, the newly installed mayor of Zvornik, a Serb, told an American journalist that census records showing a prewar Muslim-majority population in a city now effectively emptied of Muslims had been falsified by Muslim nationalists. “There were never any mosques in Zvornik,” he said to journalists who had seen the mosques just months before.
On May 6, 1993, thirteen months into Karadžić’s entrenchment in Banja Luka, celebratory gunfire splintered the darkness. Stumble-drunk Serbian soldiers, celebrating the Orthodox feast of St. George, sang in the streets. At 3:02 a.m., the earth-shaking sound of an explosion rolled outwards from the city center. The force of the explosion shattered every window in a 400-yard radius—except for those of the Serb police headquarters, 100 yards away, where they had known, it is believed, to leave the windows open.
At six a.m., Bedrudin Gušić, then the leader of Bosnia’s Islamic Community, hurried to the mosque. Approaching the site, he saw pale piles of rubble through the mosque’s stripped poplar trees. The streets gleamed with broken glass. But he was struck most by the minaret, listing dangerously but still reaching skywards out of the rubble.
Police stood around the perimeter, preventing civilian entry. Gušić talked his way in and, standing amid drifts of pinkish sandstone and the lime-whitened shreds of oriental carpets, watched excavators and bulldozers break down the remains of the mosque. Soldiers and municipal workers loaded the stones — some the size of a dictionary, others the size of an office desk — onto trucks operated by the Serb-run water utility and drove them out of town.
At the time, Džindo was away, laying roads to connect the Manjača Serbian military base to a nearby concentration camp. They were staying in a formerly Croat village that had already been subjected to months of shelling — houses without walls and roofs reduced to blackened ribs. The engineering team had taken over a former living room with perforated walls and roof and an icy ceramic floor. After his wife called, crying, to tell him that the Ferhadija had been destroyed, he looked around at what was left of the pale blue walls, graffitied slogans left by the armies that had preceded him to this place: “God and Croats,” “Only Unity Saves the Serbs.”
The next day, at half-past nine, Banja Luka’s police opened their investigation into the mosque’s destruction by calling Bedrudin Gušić in for questioning. They demanded that he sign an admission that Muslims had destroyed their own mosque to frame Serb forces; he refused. Before he left, an interrogator informed him that they would have to destroy the minaret, because it “posed a danger to the community.” Sitting at home after his interrogation, at half-past midnight, he heard another explosion. By the end of the month, crushed beneath the steady insistence of the bulldozers and disappeared beneath the watchful eye of the police, all traces of the mosque were gone.
The day after Gušić’s first interrogation, Glas Srpske ran a story claiming that Muslims had destroyed the mosque as part of a plot against the Serb government. Other newspapers followed, accusing Bosnian Muslims of attempting to incite hatred for the Serbian people. But most Banja Lukan Muslims saw the rubble and recognized, with the quiet knowing of the heart, what it meant. The razing of the Ferhadija occasioned a mass exodus of Muslims from the city, just as Simo Drljača had predicted it would.
Nevertheless, amid the constant mechanical snore of the mosque’s erasure in the days following the explosion, a foolhardy urge to save its stones possessed assembled strangers. Behind the backs of guards and demolition teams they pulled fragments from the rubble, slipping them under sweaters and into bicycle baskets. At night, in spite of the curfew, Banja Lukans spirited large fragments of the mosque’s minbar and lintel across the street, laying them along the hallways of the Islamic Community building.
A Serbian journalist drove down from Belgrade, wrapped three carved fragments in red silk, and drove them west into Croatia. Two Croatian sculptors living in Dusseldorf dispatched a local friend to rescue a few stones on their behalf, and smuggle them across the front lines into Germany. Banja Lukan refugees carried fragments they had rescued to Sweden, Germany, and the United States, and so the mosque became part of Banja Luka’s diaspora. It was dangerous, acknowledged a Bosnian Croat at the time, “but what is a human life compared to the mosque?”
The razing of the Ferhadija was closely followed by the destruction of Banja Luka’s remaining mosques. But local police returned in particular to the site of Ferhadija, as if in ritual — they destroyed Ferhat Paşa’s mausoleum at the end of 1993 and paved the site in 1995; at the end of 1996, a year after peace had been declared, they cut down the old poplars and removed the mosque from municipal records. When a public utility company dug up the domed burial site, a Bosniak watched from his office window as a worker tossed a skull onto the rubble in the back of his truck.
The Harvard archivist András Riedlmayer has explained that Serb nationalists’ invention of an “ethnically ‘pure’ future” necessitated the erasure of Bosnia’s “‘impure’ past”; the mosques, by their existence, challenged the myth of Serbian legitimacy. Bedrudin Gušić, who was repeatedly tortured after his refusal to admit to Muslim responsibility for the Ferhadija’s destruction, recalls his interrogator demanding he admit that he was not a Muslim at all, but an Orthodox Serb. In 1994, an exhibition celebrating the “65th anniversary” of Banja Luka’s designation as the capital of the Serb Republic of Bosnia displayed dozens of old photographs of the city taken between 1929 and 1941. In the images, the domes and minarets of the mosques were meticulously expunged, as though they had never existed.
“Without the Ferhadija, Arnaudija, and so many other mosques,” lamented a Bosnian Croat professor in 1993, “Banja Luka isn’t any more the town we used to love….Large gaps are wide open in the Banja Luka we remember.” Out of their beloved city, he went on, the “Serbian extremists created a new town,” announcing not just a history but also a future of their own design.
In 1995, the Dayton Peace Accords, a Byzantine treaty crafted by presidents and warlords, instituted a precarious peace. It split Bosnia into two entities: the “ethnically-cleansed” Republika Srpska to the north and east, now majority Bosnian Serb, and the Bosnian Federation to the southwest, principally Bosniak with a large Croat minority. The following year, Banja Luka’s Islamic Community — or what was left of it — brought their first suit for permission to reconstruct the Ferhadija. The Serb-run government of the new Republika Srpska opposed the mosque’s resuscitation: six times, lower courts granted the Islamic Community permission to rebuild Ferhadija, and each time, the government invalidated the decision on a technicality.
NATO sent mildly worded letters of admonishment to the Republika Srpska, and the Republic’s president replied, just as mildly, that he had no power over municipal land use in Banja Luka. Banja Luka’s mayor alone retained the full-blooded voice of conviction. “The international community,” he declaimed, “has to stop insulting Serbs and asking them to rebuild the monuments from the darkest days of slavery.” Rebuilding the mosque, he warned, “would be a poke in the eye of the Serbian people,” proving that if the Islamic Community were Odysseus, undertaking an arduous return to Ithaca, then the mayor’s nationalist electorate was the Cyclops, the one-eyed monster barring their return.
Twenty-four years after the destruction of the mosques, there is still no true acknowledgement by Republika Srpska’s officials — an alarming number of whom were key members of Karadžić’s genocidal government — about what happened to the Ferhadija. In 2010, at a trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Karadžić’s police chief testified that the mosque had probably been leveled accidentally by a hand grenade. In 1999, addressing the Islamic Community’s petition to rebuild the Ferhadija, Vitomir Popović, wartime deputy prime minister to Karadžić and now the dean of Banja Luka’s law school, described the “alleged” destruction of Banja Luka’s mosques. When I ask Popović about the results of the “investigation” into the mosque’s destruction — the one to which Bedrudin Gušić had been subjected — Popović tells me that there was not enough evidence to prove who destroyed what, adding, “there were instances during this unfortunate war when one side destroyed its own building, to present it to the world as their suffering.”
I meet Sredo Vučanović, the explosives expert who would have been in charge of the investigation, at a gas station cafe along the highway that winds south from Banja Luka. Vučanović, whose wartime nickname was The Terrorist, is big, with a blunt, square head. The Terrorist sips at a tiny espresso and lights a cigarette. A proper investigation, he tells me, would have been impossible to conduct in the middle of a war: “We had no supplies, we had nothing.” This is not entirely accurate. Karadžić’s government had airplanes, tanks, bulldozers, newspapers, television stations, the profits of black-market smuggling of liquor and weapons, and UN-supplied aid provisions which, in Serb-controlled territory, they distributed as they saw fit.
Another explanation for why the investigation yielded so little is that Vučanović hadn’t investigated the destruction of the Ferhadija; he had orchestrated it. In other ICTY trials, witnesses accused him of using his explosives knowledge to raze several mosques in Bijelina, and a Jewish cemetery and community center in Zagreb, Croatia. To me, he dismisses the allegations by explaining that in his antiterrorism capacity during the war, he was on TV a lot, talking about bombs. It is useless, he insists, to speculate about who was responsible for the destruction of these places.
There is a scene in a Bosnian war satire, No Man’s Land, in which a Bosnian Serb soldier and a Bosniak soldier are caught in a trench in between the lines, dodging shells being lobbed at them from both sides. They begin to accuse one another of starting the war (“You started it!”), and the argument continues through the whole movie (“No you did!”). I ask Vučanović who started the war. “America,” he says. You did. And I can’t tell if he believes it.
In early 2001, the Islamic Community commissioned an architect, Muhamed Hamidović, to begin the process of rebuilding. It was Hamidović who convinced them that they should find and use the destroyed mosque’s original stones, writing of them, remembers Džindo, “as if they had a prayer inside.”
Over the next six years, the team found stones buried beneath two municipal garbage dumps and at the bottom of a reservoir eight miles to the north. From those sites, graduate students drove stone fragments along the pot-holed roads to a field in Vrbanja, the Banja Luka suburb where the city slips into farmland. Here, the fragments of three mosques and mausoleums accumulated over a period of eight years, laid out across the field like beached creatures of prehistory. Student volunteers walked among them with clipboards and power-hoses, abrading years of accumulated dirt.
“It was very emotional,” said Adisa Džino Šuta, who had been one of the student volunteers working at Verbanja and is now the director of Bosnia’s Cultural Heritage without Borders. She had lived in an apartment across the street from the Vrbanja field. Each morning she woke and looked out of her window at that field of stones, “like a graveyard of cultural heritage.”
At Verbanja, “every stone had its own dossier,” says Džindo, as though each was a murder victim undergoing autopsy — they were identified, numbered, organized in long rows. Banja Lukans who visited the field helped to identify which stones belonged to which mosques by their coloring. In a makeshift laboratory, students in sweaters and work boots placed each fragment, one by one, on a rotating table beneath a starburst of fluorescent lights and a scanner that resembled an inflated pencil sharpener. As the table turned, the scanner created a three-dimensional image of the stone, which Džindo’s team then used to locate its place in the building, until the whole mosque had coalesced in pixels. Slowly, the fragments began to constellate back into walls. Piles of like-sized stones reached upwards until some grew as high as thirteen feet. Stones from the minarets, volcanic tuffa light as air, traced circles on plywood beds. Beneath temporary shelters, shelves housed the painted crown of a mihrab, a copper candleholder, or a gold-plated copper ornament. “It felt,” said Džino Šuta, “like we were making it alive again.”
Once word spread that the reconstruction was finally underway, more lost stones began materializing, summoned from the basements and dresser drawers of longtime guardians. People brought stones from where they had fled, from Sarajevo and from the diaspora. A particularly large block, which the explosion had deposited in a tree in a neighbor’s back yard, was finally shaken loose from the branches. “I’d just never been able to get it out before now,” the owner of the tree told Džindo, as if the tree, too, had been waiting. In the end, 65 percent of the Ferhadija was built with the original stones.
Reconstruction is the work of synthesizing memory with material, and Hamidović and Džindo generated the design for their replica mosque from an eccentric amalgam of what chance had preserved, including snapshots in the photo albums of local Banja Lukans, oral histories and accounts, the outline formed by the foundation stones, the size of a single, whole column that had been pulled from the lake, what remained of the mihrab, the architectural drawings that Hamidović had done as a student at university, the sacral proportions favored at the time, and the other buildings designed in the studios of Mimar Sinan, the original architects.
Banja Lukans say that the new mosque is identical to the original, which, of course, is impossible; it is, like all history, part real and part imagined. The goal was primarily to achieve the feeling of the original, around which the local community, or what’s left of it, can wind the threads of their prewar lives. “In the approach to reconstruction, give preference to principles aimed at repairing active space for prayer and not for passive museological use,” reads Hamidović’s technical study, and the builders began praying in the mosque as the walls rose up around them. It began to feel, Džino Šuta remembers, that “it was less about the building than about communities — young people, development, how it will be for generations in the future.”
But because it is Bosnia, the reconstruction was also inevitably about the dead. Džino Šuta believes that every building “contains the stories of the people” who’d lived in and with it. For Hamidović, the reconstruction was “a question of identity…of those craftsmen who built it.” Džindo tells me that “an artifact is that which has signs of human carving,” and, after listening to people talking about Ferhadija for a week, I got the sense that this carving hand of Džindo’s, by some occult osmosis, seemed to have been subsumed into the destroyed mosque. In his words, the reconstruction was a “resurrection.”
In their efforts to articulate the stakes of both the loss and the reconstruction, native Banja Lukans, restorers, preservationists, and even Radovic’s government agreed on the body as a metaphor. To a Muslim witness of the bombed Ferhadija, “it is as though they have torn our heart out.” Recounting the feeling of reconstruction, Hamidović likens “her” to a “patient” undergoing surgery. To Džindo, “her” stones were filled in “like teeth,” and he describes the waterproof tent, specially made to allow construction to continue during the rainy season, as a bespoke raincoat. The Serb forces’ practice of dumping the mosques’ stones in mass graves, the calcium white of the limestone columns, the sheepskins in the plaster of the walls and goats’ hair in the window frames — all are unexpected allies in the comparison between cultural heritage and a breathing, chimeric body. Even NATO, suddenly curious to discover what had happened to all of Bosnia’s cultural heritage during the war, sent in forensics specialists in the aftermath, as though the bulldozed foundations were chalk outlines on a sidewalk. Perhaps the metaphor is a testament to the mosque’s importance; the bodies of our beloveds are among the most precious structures we know, here in this world of forms.
A witness to the mosque’s destruction and onetime guardian of several of its fragments, Miso Vidović, invites me to join him for a morning on the Vrbas. Wooden platforms with sunny yellow awnings hang over a sheer drop to cold, clear water, probably not far from where the wood-winged masons fell from the sky. This cafe is known for small prices and huge portions; people come, my translator tells me, “when they want to eat themselves out.” Despite the hour, families sit around long tables lined with heaping dishes out of which fruit, meat, and vegetable kebabs burst like plumage.
Vidović and his friends are seventy-something Banja Lukans with skin tanned to a leathery terra cotta. They pass the morning laughing at one another, chain-smoking, reminiscing, and drinking remarkably large beers. One of Vidović’s friends shows me a large portrait of Tito tattooed on his bicep; another has a portrait of Tito stamped on his left breast. (Most Yugoslavs remember Tito for the liberalization of central government, peaceful coexistence, and considerable economic and industrial expansion.) Vidović pats his heart approvingly: “It was love.”
Perhaps the extraordinary efforts to purge Bosnia’s memory explains the breadth of the nation’s attachment to the past. A peculiar plague of reminiscence swept the former Yugoslavia following its breakup, known by a menagerie of terms including normal-nostalgia, Titostalgia, and, most commonly, Yugonostalgia. It regards the last period of “normalcy” experienced by former Yugoslavs as an ideal world, one which could never really have existed as it does in the brilliant technicolor of memory. The cultural critic Svetlana Boym has identified two forms of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia emphasizes nóstos, the return home. This is the nostalgia of fanatic nationalists, the impossible desire to reconstruct a lost world exactly as they imagine it had been. Reflective nostalgia emphasizes algos, the longing; it is the nostalgia of Romantics, content to gaze upon the lost past from a distance, allowing it seep into the present and inform the future. Yugonostalgia, writes Columbia professor Aleksandar Bošković, “is an affirmation that recent history could have been different, that the path taken was not the only possible one.”
Sitting by the Vrbas, listening to these old men speaking about the mosque, I hear pride in the Ferhadija not only for her beauty but also as evidence of a distinct people with a distinct past; a kind of heart in the borderland. The morning feels mercifully simple; they had been friends since Yugoslavia’s heyday, and neither identify themselves by ethnicity, that tricksome fairy tale, nor by faith. They represent a generation of Bosnians who remember what it felt like to have a homeland, and are therefore not tempted by the new nationalisms. They are Bosnian Yugoslavs, stranded in a foreign country without ever leaving home.
They tell me that the Ferhadija’s reconstruction is ultimately no more than the pursuit of a phantom past. The war and its losses cannot be undone. Speaking of the mass exodus of Muslims from the city following the Ferhadija’s destruction, Vidović says, “The city lost its soul when they left.” He is one of many Banja Lukans who describe the new Ferhadija as “an illusion.” People say it will be empty within fifty years, as the Muslim community in Banja Luka shrinks by the day. Their generation, who drink beer and loved Tito, are dying. The young are leaving. Those who left no longer dream of coming back.
On my first visit to the mosque, Džindo walked me to the cemetery that lies alongside it. Many of the remains had continued to rest there during the site’s fourteen-year stint as a municipal parking lot, and a third of those bodies have received headstones. (Džindo hasn’t yet aligned all of the original headstones with their original heads, so who got whose memorial is an open question.) But the graves are important, he explains, because Banja Luka borders Christian lands, and the bodies prove a territorial claim.
Broadly, Bosnians agree that the reconstruction is a question of territory, in time as well as space. “It’s a pissing contest,” is the explanation I hear most often from journalists, preservationists, and others, unable to resist a final anatomical analogy. Into the vacuum left by NATO rushed a new set of foreign interests — Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Russia — all of whom are welcomed by the politicians they can enrich. They promise new monuments that are “even bigger, even older” than the originals, and these grandiloquent buildings mar the countryside. Double-minareted, glass-domed, and neon-lit mosques in the Wahhabist style of Saudi Arabia find their match in disfigured “reconstructions” of Orthodox and Catholic churches with monstrously elongated bell towers. The promotion of these alternative motherlands can only intensify the sense of homelessness that already dogs so many Bosnians — a displacement not just of the home but of the heart.
For days I examine the Ferhadija, wondering about its legendary beauty. It is elegant and well-proportioned. The arches of its portico gesture in long, languid arcs, and cupolas float above them, drawing the eye upward. Inside, the great dome rises into a sunburst of red arabesques, and the floors are thick with overlapping oriental carpets — the gifts of kings, presidents, and the ambassador of Azerbaijan. A variety of muftis’ hats are stored in plastic crates under the restored minbar; along the walls, plastic deck chairs and folding stools with tiger-striped cushions await the older worshipers who can no longer kneel. It feels informal, intimate. After two weeks in central Banja Luka, I observe its slender, pencil-shaped minaret with growing affection. Still, it is a building. A very elegant, very old building.
When I ask Banja Lukans what makes it beautiful, they respond with their own, quotidian memories, which circle the Ferhadija like small moons. It was the geographic and social center of the city: in the evenings young men stood by its fountain, waiting for their dates; girls passed it each day on their way to school, and to the market, and to the Vrbas. Hamidović remembers playing soccer as a boy at the back of a mosque, where there was a high window through which they could see the women praying on the balcony. Džindo remembers juggling apples to distract a fruit vendor while his friends stole a watermelon. Then they ran to the Ferhadija, where they hid from the angry fruit seller behind the mufti’s robes.
I attend a Tuesday afternoon prayer and sit alone on the women’s balcony, hovering high above a web of chandeliers. Vibrant, intertwining strands of yellow and blue unfurl from the crown of the dome; sliding down its sides are great dollops of red — that dark, iron brilliance of a sun draining from the horizon. At the edge of the balcony, a white plastic box with a winking light sighs delicate sighs as it sprays air freshener over the congregation.
They are not so many down there — seven old men and the mufti, and for some time the space contains only the faint human sounds of breathing and swishing clothes as the prayerful rise and kneel in turns. Facing the mihrab, in a black robe and what looks like a black fez encased in styrofoam, the mufti begins to call on god. During the reconstruction, recreating the acoustics of the space was Hamidović and Džindo’s greatest concern; it was for the sound that the builders laid sheepskin beneath the plaster of the walls, mixed goat hair into the plaster of the window frames, and carved out seventeen hollow caves where the pillars meet the balcony. The sound is profound, encompassing, deep as a desert well. Perhaps this is what the Ferhadija is for — a great organ of stone.
Then the quiet returns, rising on the congregation’s collected breath. Church bells chime a quarter-past, and a breeze blows through the window that looks out over the poplar trees. A sniffle, a cough, a motorcycle going by outside. The click of prayer beads as worshipers slide the tespih across the carpets. The old men leave, the Mufti of Banja Luka takes off his hat, and one by one, the suspended chandeliers go out.