The following day, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl was in Sarajevo, to meet with the German SFOR contingent and the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. On the evening of that day, I came across a copy of Dzevad Karahasan's 'Diary of the Evacuation' and was struck by a passage on the city of Sarajevo, my home for the last twenty months. What I had seen, heard and felt here was captured in Karahasan's words. I quote here from Chapter 1, 'Sarajevo - A Portrait of the Inner City'.
SARAJEVO - the largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina and, at the same time, the country's capital, is a characteristic Bosnian city in every respect. Founded in 1440 by Isabeg Ishaovic in the valley of the Miljacka and surrounded by mountains which virtually fence it in and isolate it from the world outside, it is protected from external influences and focused entirely on itself. The city's commercial centre, the Carsija, extends along the valley plain (the city-centre of the modern European city would be its present-day equivalent). On the mountain slopes which point inwards and surround the basin are located the residential settlements known as Mahala. The city is thus cut off from the rest of the world in two ways - by the mountains that surround it and by the Mahala districts. Because of the lay of the land and the urban planning solutions focused on the city centre, the Mahala acts as a shell, proceeding from the inner city and protecting it from everything outside, in the same way as snails or mussels are afforded protection by their shells. Whether it was because of this twofold barrier against the outside world, which turns the city inwards and makes it concentrate on its inner self, or whether, indeed, there was another reason - in any event, very soon after its founding, Sarajevo became a symbol of the world, a place at where the different faces of the world all meet up at a single point, in the same way as the diffuse rays of light in a prism. Some hundred years after its founding, the city had gathered together people from all monotheistic religions and the cultures that derived from these religions, as well as a large number of different languages and the lifestyles contained in these languages. It became a microcosm, a centre of the world, taking in the world in its entirety, in the way in which a centre does, according to the teachings of esoterics. This is why Sarajevo is doubtless an inner city in precisely the sense in which esoterics uses this term. Everything that is feasible in the world, exists in Sarajevo - albeit on a small scale, reduced to its kernel, but it exists because Sarajevo is the inner centre of the world (the outside is always contained in the inside in its entirety, say the esoterics).
Even before the city was founded, people of three monotheistic religions settled there - the Islamic, Catholic and Orthodox religions and the languages spoken were Turkish, Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, Hungarian, German and Italian. Then, fifty years later, a number of the Jews expelled from the Spanish territories by the pious Ferdinand and Isabella took refuge in Sarajevo, bringing with them to the city a fourth monotheistic religion, together with a new culture that had evolved around this religion, including as a result of centuries of being on the move, as well as a number of new languages. Sarajevo thus became a new Babylon and, at the same time, a new Jerusalem - the city with a new mixture of languages and a city in which the places of worship of all the four book religions were visible at a glance.
This mixture of languages, religions, cultures, and nations who had to live together within such small confines generated a very specific culture - a culture system that became characteristic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and especially of Sarajevo, which gained its originality and particular character in this way. While there were no doubt many towns and cities in the multinational and multi-confessional Turkish Empire that accommodated a mixture of nations, languages and religions, there was scarcely a town in this gigantic empire in which such a mixture and such encounters were found within such a confined space.
The Bosnian culture system which, precisely in Sarajevo, has been realised in its purest form and realised most consistently of all the potential cultural systems, could appropriately be characterised by the attribute dramatic...
... In a dramatic culture system, each person necessarily serves as proof of their own identity for other people, because one's own special features only stand out and are only articulated as a function of the particular features of others. In a system built up according to idealistic dialectics, however, the other is only seemingly the other, and in reality, is a masked I, or another contained within myself, since strictly speaking, the contrasted entities are one. This is the fundamental difference between Sarajevo and the modern Babylonic mixtures in western cities.
© Dzevad Karahasan