Sarajevo, 1992. My mother’s uncle, Dobrivoje Beljkašić, or Dobri for short, was 68 when the siege of his hometown began. He was a landscape painter renowned for painting Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Ottoman bridges.
His magnificent studio was above the National Library in the old City Hall in Sarajevo. On August 25 that year, the iconic building was struck by incendiary shells. Row upon row of dry dusty books whooshed up in flames.
Over 1.5 million books and all Dobri’s paintings burned in the catastrophic fire. Sarajevans called the fluttering, charred pages that darkened the skies for days afterwards, “black butterflies.
” When Dobri visited the ruined library, he stared up through the blackened facade to an emptiness where his studio had once been. Experiencing the loss as a form of death, he thought he would never paint again. Like the men firing bombs from the surrounding hills, my great-uncle was a Bosnian Serb.
But he was not a nationalist. The Sarajevo he knew and loved was one where the different constituent groups—Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats—lived and worked peaceably side by side. Mixed marriage was common before the war.
My mother’s family was a mix of Bosnian Serbs, Bosniaks and, less usually, Slovenes. The image of billowing flames streaming through the library windows soon became a symbol of Sarajevo under siege. Of barbarism triumphing over civilization.
Of the calculated erasure of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s multicultural identity by the nationa.