The Bridge on the Drina

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The man whom this niece was to marry was a rich speculator on the Bourse, but a Christian and a Calvinist, and he made it a condition that the girl should be converted to his faith. The relatives all opposed this but Lotte, with the interest of the whole family in mind, said that it was hard to keep afloat with so many people in the boat and that it was sometimes necessary to throw something overboard for the salvation of all the rest. She supported the girl and her word was decisive. In this masterpiece of historical fiction by the Nobel Prize-winning Yugoslavian author, a stone bridge in a small Bosnian town bears silent witness to three centuries of conflict. Mehmed Pasha Sokoli served the Ottoman Empire for 60 years and wanted to build the bridge. It took five years to build it. The actual building began in 1571. The bridge has 11 arches and still stands. It was at this school that Ivo Andrić met Gavrilo Princip. If Andrić came from modest circumstances, his Serb friend, two years younger, came from a positively primitive home as described by the Serb historian, Vladimir Dedijer:

Criterion (ii): Located in a position of geostrategic importance, the bridge bears witness to important cultural exchanges between the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire and the Mediterranean world, between Christianity and Islam, through the long course of history. The management of the bridge and repairs made it to have also involved different political and cultural powers: after the Ottomans came the Austro-Hungarians, the Yugoslav Federation, and the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

My Book Notes

The bridge takes a long time to build due to workers striking and protesting, but once it is built, it turns out to be a great unifying force in many ways. For one, it connects Bosnia with the rest of the Ottoman Empire. For another, it brings individual people from both sides together. Since the middle of the bridge was wider, people often stopped to chat and socialize there, which strengthened many relationships among people from different cultures. However in this relatively peaceful occupation by the Austrians everything about life had begun to change. Even the shift of the importance of the bridge and the place of Visegrad in local trade and travel was not the most significant source of this change. It was cultural. More and more Visegrad (as the rest of the region) became more westernized and Austrian. Politics shifted and became a widespread distraction. There were calls for the 8 hour day and lots of talk of Socialism. Finally came the gigantic shift: Austria formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Now little Visegrad was a town within AUSTRIA! The Austrians launched a propaganda campaign to tell people that nothing was really changing, and that Austria would treat them so well. Author Andric warns the reader:

But in Bosnia, this is where it started to get really complicated. Young Bosnia included members of all four confessions – Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Islam and Judaism – but the majority was Serb. United in their antipathy towards Habsburg rule, they were sometimes divided by different perceptions of where liberation from the Austrian overlord might lead. Yugoslavism had emerged both in Croatia and Serbia during the nineteenth century – the idea that you could unite all southern Slavs (excepting Bulgarians who already had their own state) in one country. But whereas Croatia and Bosnia were under foreign occupation, Serbia was an independent kingdom and the bulk of the Young Bosnians, who were Orthodox, i.e. Serbs, believed that Serbia would play the role that Piedmont had played in Italy.The Bridge on the Drina is a beautiful, white structure spanning a fast-flowing green ribbon of water. Over centuries, the bridge inspires folk tales. The bridge comes about when a kidnapped ten-year-old Christian boy grows up to be Grand Vezir and, recalling the misery of a ferry crossing, commissions a stone bridge. It and a matching caravanserai go up in 1567-71 under two overseers, one cruel and one just. The impalement of a saboteur is depicted graphically. By the late 18th century, the Stone Han grows decrepit, but the bridge withstands even a great flood. The Bridge on the Drina is, at its most surface level also on a much more profound one, just what the title says it is: a story about a bridge. This historical novel gives readers the history of the Mehmed Paša Sokolovic Bridge built in the 16th century in Višegrad, Bosnia. This bridge initially unified nations and became a symbol of the state of affairs in Yugoslavian society before ultimately being destroyed during World War I. But the bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world"

The property, principally consisting of the bridge, the access ramp and the two river banks upstream and downstream, is protected by its buffer zone on each bank of the Drina river. The integrity of the bridge is vulnerable but is now adequately protected by the buffer zone and appropriately expresses the values it embodies. In 1961, people awarded him "for the epic force with which he has traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from the history of his country." He donated the money to libraries in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The town of Visegrad was long caught between the warring Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, but its sixteenth-century bridge survived unscathed–until 1914 when tensions in the Balkans triggered the first World War.Spanning generations, nationalities, and creeds, The Bridge on the Drina brilliantly illuminates a succession of lives that swirl around the majestic stone arches. All of a sudden he felt himself light and skilful as a man sometimes in dreams. His heavy and exhausted body felt without weight. The drunken Ćorkan danced and floated above the depths as if on wings. [...] His dance bore him onward where his walk would never have borne him- No longer thinking of the danger of the possibility of a fall, he leapt from one leg to the other and sang with outstretched arms as accompanying himself on a drum.”Nonetheless Visegrad is like a tiny town all to itself, and until after the Austrian Occupation of 1878 the townspeople hardly even knew or cared that there was a world outside the village. And in no time major changes began to occur. The Austrians mined the bridge as a defensive measure much to the horror of the residents. Prices began to rise. Soldiers abounded in the town and money was scarce. Newspapers became popular and people learned to read selectively. Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia wrote novels, dealing with the history of the Balkans, and won the Nobel Prize of 1961 for literature. Norris, David A. (1999). In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity. New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-230-28653-5. After some four years of occupation the people begin a sort of passive resistance. They see the nature of life in the world is changing and they don’t like it. But, not knowing what else to do they begin to react. They give false information to the officials, trash signs and other “improvements” and the like. But unlike periods of Turkish occupation, in the main the Austrians just turn a blind eye to the “resistance,” and just keep on slowly making the town over in their own manner.

The central historical outcome of Visegrad is changed with the Austrians and most especially with the coming of the railroad. The railroad came into Visegrad from the west, but didn’t cross the bridge, rather it then veered south and continued its easterly route much to the south. Thus there was no longer much reason to cross the bridge except to get from one section of Visegrad to the other. For hundreds of years it had been an extremely important route between Bosnia and Serbia and on toward Turkey (to the southeast). Now there was no reason to use this famous Bridge on the Drina except to get into the tiny and relatively uninteresting east Visegrad section of town. Andrić recognizes this great symbolic break. ‘The year 1908,’ he wrote in The Bridge on the Drina, ‘brought with it great uneasiness and a sort of obscure threat which thenceforward never ceased to weigh upon the town.’ Yet for Andrić Habsburg rule had already had a profound impact on Bosnia, especially on its economic and social life. This is an extraordinary novel, a true epic of 400 years of Bosnian history. Ivo Andric centers his story in the central eastern village of Visegrad on the Drina River. The bridge spans the river Drina and links Bosnia and Serbia making Visegrad the central transportation route from Sarajevo in central Bosnia with Serbia to the east. This bridge, village and positioning made Visegrad a successful city with a respectable economy for all living there. The Turks were gratified that the revolt was now far away from them and hoped that it would be entirely extinguished and would end there where all godless and evil enterprises ended.”

Develop

The spirit of the young intellectuals, now studying at universities all over the Austrian empire was: Sells, Michael Anthony (1998). The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-92209-9. The universal value of the bridge at Višegrad is unquestionable for all the historical reasons and in view of the architectural values it has. It represents a major stage in the history of civil engineering and bridge architecture, erected by one of the most celebrated builders of the Ottoman Empire. Despite these historical events, authenticity has generally been maintained through the course of the bridge's successive restorations. It remains fragile, its foundations being particularly threatened by the use of the two hydro-electric power stations, one in Bosnia and one in Serbia, that affect the water levels of the river. It is for this reason that some events in the novel acquire greater value and some—less picturesque ones—vanish in oblivion. In this way general history meets an altered history in Andrić’s novel: The historical records are refracted through and even censored by the unrecorded history of personal or local events, of legends, anecdotes, and stories. The perseverance of the story—bridge-as-a story—brings to the fore the very act of narration. It is through this activity, according to Andrić, that the human suffering and toil may still acquire an intrinsic value.