: Vladislav Bajac
: Hamam Balkania
: Istros Books
: 9781908236579
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 320
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Vladislav Bajac's novel Hamam Balkania has won five awards, been printed in seven bestselling editions, and has finally come to the UK. In the tradition of great modern Serbian novelists, Bajac twists and weaves a tale between old and new, modern and rusted, East and West, water and fire. This is a book that lives in two parts - one set in the Ottoman empire of the 16th century, and the other in our own 21st century reality. Here we have the story of two friends, both taken as children from their homes and inducted into the Turkish Sultan's private guard: Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Serbian shepherd boy who rose to the position of Grand Vizier and Koca Mimar Sinan, the'Michelangelo of the East'. Between them they represent both destruction and creation, while at the same time providing us with a harrowing insight into the heart of religion and identity. Back in our own time, we hear the voice of the author, sharing with us his experiences in the modern world, and his musings on faith, identity and nation. This is a truly ambitious book that rewards the reader with insights into some of the great questions of our time. The author's home country of Serbia is fascinated with its Ottoman roots, and this novel is no exception. Bajac takes the lives of ancient figures and weaves them together with flashing, real, and dirty characters from Western society's recent past - his stories at times dipping their pen into the well of memoir. Bajac has rubbed elbows with Leonard Cohen, and shared words and stages with literary greats - none of that is lost on the reader here. Two stories collide in the reader's mind, not on the pages, as if learning two different histories from two separate professors. This is at once a story of friendship, and a book of warning: do we really know that which we believe we know so well?

Višegrad, like any other place, has its own daily life. Yet, like few others, it also has its own abstract life. My experience with the metaphysics of Višegrad began in April, 1977, on approaching the town, before I ever saw the famed bridge on the Drina, which has fixed the town’s place in history forever. In my little haiku notebook, which I still have, I noted down a geo-poetic commentary ‘on the gravel of Višegrad’ with the poem that I saw through the window of the bus:

A stone between them
two sunbathed firs, a parting
made in the forest.

My host and friend from my university days, Žarko Čigoja, thought that the bridge of Mehmed-pasha Sokollu (as it is written in Turkish) from 1571 – the bridge Andrić wrote about – was enough of a prize and a pleasure, for that occasion, so that he did not even show me the other attractions of his hometown. He could not even imagine how selfish I was, actually even unhappy, that I had to share this magnificent bridge with others. I did not know then, that deeper knowledge of the secrets of the environs of Višegrad would have to be earned by future experience. Once again, a secret brotherhood was in question and I would have to wait twenty-six whole years to enter that brotherhood. It was worth it. It was actually Ivo Andrić who taught me to wait; through reading him again. During my literature studies I was not yet able to connect his masterpiece with real life: too flippantly had I passed over his notes on the beginnings of the bridge’s construction – on its very essence – on the “transportation of stones from the quarries that were opened in the hills near Banja, an hour’s walk from the town”. What is more, the two most important literary bridges in all of Bosnia – this one on the River Drina and the other on the River Žepa – were built of the very same white stone mentioned in my haiku poem: with the love and money of Mehmed-pasha Sokolović and Jusuf Ibrahim, both Turkified or Islamised Serbs, made eternal in the humble and wise words of Andrić, the man who attributed his own life’s motto to his literary hero:there is safety in silence.

When I complained to a friend that I had perhaps dried up in my writing, he told me not to worry in the slightest. He had a certain cure for that illness. He was, actually, expecting the arrival of the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, with the same diagnosis, so that the two of us could be cured at the same time with his prescription.

The only thing I knew aboutBanja, about Sokollu’s Spa, the Spa of Višegrad, as everyone called it, besides being the source of crystalline calcium carbonate used to build the bridge in Višegrad, was that there was a medicinal spring in this place three miles from the town. It was here that Mehmed-pasha Sokollu, in his waning years in 1575, built a domed Turkish bath, wanting to give something (more) to his birthplace. In a brochure from 1934, I read that the radioactive waters (at an altitude of more than 1200 feet) treated rheumatism, neuralgia and ‘women’s disorders’. The brochure further claimed that the spa waters have an especially beneficial effect on barren women. ‘When a barren wife hails at the spa, and then begets a child, the village round doth shake its head, saying: By God, if she hadn’t hailed at the spa and her incantations said, she never ever would have bred…’

So it was that I also travelled through the thick forest to