APWR Central

The Tiny Little Bosnia Doctrine

A recurrent theme in the pyramid-believers' reasoning and one of the principal arguments in their staunch support of the Pyramid Project is – it's good for the Bosnian tourism and economy. Even when confronted with evidence that there are no pyramids, they reason: it doesn't matter, we'll make one, we should not let go this opportunity for prosperity that will come with rivers and rivers of tourists who will flock here to see our miracle.

Almost every media report, foreign and domestic, on this ongoing Bosnian phenomenon is stamped with this conviction. Every time you see a media-clip of Mr. Osmanagic in the Indiana Jones hat you can be sure that at some point he will repeat his mantra on „tiny little Bosnia“ and how the pyramids will transform it into a „giant“ of this or that sort. The recently released excerpt from a documentary – made as a commercial production, of which I wrote previously, see The building blocks of Osmanagic's pyramids – stretches it further, by introducing a very emotionally and patriotically charged issue of the recent war:

“This 46 minutes documentary film features exclusive footage covering the initial excavations surrounding Visocica hill, commented by the supervising archeologists, as well as interviews with locals, politicians, filmmakers, popstars and - last but not least - the forgotten families of the fallen soldiers of Visoko, who, for the very first time in a decade, have hope for better times ahead.”

And who would dare to take away such hope, but an utter unpatriotic s.o.b? Even the private e-mails that some pyramid-skeptics receive curse them for being so unhumane and unconcerned for the future of the hungry and the weak and the poor of Tiny Little Bosnia. It is as if the Pyramid Project is a magical bullet to all our post-war problems, which will somehow be solved without us having to face and bare-handedly deal with the corruption of our political system or collapsing of our cultural and scientific institutions or our failing and ethnic apartheid education or our inner nationalisms and chauvinisms, etc., etc. As Mr. Osmanagic said in one TV show in Bosnia this May: those who want well to Bosnia will support my project, those who do not wish well to Bosnia are against me. (One wonders where could have this Texas-based entrepreneur picked up on such a doctrine…)

Not only has Mr. Osmanagic become the sole saviour of Tiny Little Bosnia, but the Visoko pyramids have become the only tourist value and national pride that this country has to offer to the world. Ask any of the children from the special schools or orphanages that Mr. Osmanagic has been busy visiting this summer, giving away copyrights for his books as “humanitarian aid”. What do we have in Visoko? The biggest pyramids in the world!

The Visoko valley – History’s Treasure Chest

When a visitor comes to Visoko today, it’s because he or she wants to see the controversial hills. After touring the Visocica or the Pljesevica probes, the visitor will have a lunch of cevapcici, or a triangular pizza, a couple of drinks, possibly buy a pyramid-shaped trincket or a T-shirt with Uncle Sam on it, and go home, disappointed or convinced of the existence of “the biggest and oldest ever built complex on the face of this planet” that will be fully visible only after “decades and decades of excavation”. Maybe, during the sightseeing of the Visocica hill north flank probes, just maybe will the visitor turn around to appreciate the amazing panorama of the Visoko valley. But even then, the visitor would not know what he or she is looking at. Because, apart from the pyramid-related information, nobody really bothers to tell you more about the real historical and cultural content of this valley. So, let’s enlarge that panorama and have a brief overview.

The Serefudin White Mosque

Let me begin with number 3, my personal urbanistic and architectural favourite. It is the Serefudin or the White Mosque, designed in 1969 and built in 1979 by architect Zlatko Ugljen. In 1983 this project was awarded the prestigeous Aga Khan Award for Architecture. For more high quality photos and information about this building, please visit the Archnet Library entry. Only a grand-master can so skillfully incorporate a modern design of unquestionable visual monumentality into a tight existing old urbanistic texture determined by the Ottoman cemetery and neighboring quarters. Take a look at the Visoko panorama once again and you will see how this project synthesizes other traditional architectural forms and shapes that appear in the historically Ottoman urban tissue of Visoko, respecting its proportions while taking own place in it. The interior is designed with equal mastery, offering an atmosphere of spiritual seclusion from the nearby busy town center.

The Visoko Hotel

Mr. Ugljen designed two more projects in Visoko during the 70s and the 80s, the Post Office and the Hotel Visoko. The hotel – number 2 in our panorama – with its plan of elongated horseshoe shapes evoking the plan of the medieval fortress on top of the Visocica hill is designed as a contemporary donjon, raising above the plane of Visoko roofs and keeping the entrance to the town. As such, the hotel maintained the visual line with the top of the Visocica hill, creating a unique urbanistic-temporal axis with the remains of the medieval fortress. Mr. Ugljen once again managed to synthesize the historical heritage of the region without disrupting its overall context.

These urbanistic qualities have, however, been largely abandonned in the post-war construction. As visible from our panorama, the donjon quality and the visual line between the hotel Visoko and the Visocica hill medieval remains are disrupted by the green, pink and blue factory-like buildings in front of it. The blue building – number 1 in our panorama – is the famous Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun Motel, where all Pyramid Celebrities lodge at the expense of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian tax payer. Pay notice of how Visoko is described on the motel’s website. Also pay notice to how the motel snatched the view of the Visocica hill, now dubbed the Pyramid of the Sun.

The Visoko Hotel is currently out of business, rotting away awaiting its privatisation destiny.

The Regional Museum of Visoko

A lovely Austro-Hungarian building – marked M in our panorama – the work-place of Mr. Senad Hodovic, who, as his Wikipedia article says, “brought Mr. Osmanagic to Visoko”. It is this Museum that obtained all the excavating permits for Mr. Osmanagic and his Foundation. Mr. Osmanagic has on several occasions repeated that the Foundation is only the investor in the Pyramid Project and that the Museum is the actual executor of the project. However, Mr. Hodovic is no longer the member of the Foundation team, which leaves all kinds of legal questions wide open. Ironically, while the Foundation is harvesting 50.000 euros per month for this project, the ceiling in the Visoko Museum has recently collapsed for same reasons the same thing happened in the National Museum in Sarajevo. It’s good to have priorities, huh?

The Ottoman-Bosnian Architectural Heritage

Numbers 4, 6 and 7 in our panorama are the oldest Visoko mosques, historical gems of the Ottoman-Bosnian architectural heritage. Sadrvanska Mosque (no. 6) and Perutacka Mosque (no. 7) are obvious models for the White Mosque design. The Tabacica Mosque (no. 4), with its wooden minaret ellegantly appearing from the rich tree crowns at the bank of the Fojnica river, is one of the finest examples of the so-called Bosnian Style mosques. These sacral buildings with wooden minarets are an exclusive Bosnian feature and cannot be seen anywhere else in the Islamic historical architecture. Tabacica Mosque is also listed as the national monument of our country and for a detailed description of this cultural treasure, please visit the related entry in the database of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments (CPNM).

The Franciscan (Classical) Gymnasium

On the other side of the Fojnica river, across from the Tabacica Mosque and the Visoko Hotel, one can visit one of the oldest educational facilities in the Visoko valley, the Franciscan classical gymnasium - marked 5 in our panorama – a part of the Franciscan monastery. These Franciscan facilities in Visoko are successors of the earliest Franciscan presence in Bosnia, when this order settled in the Visoko valley in the early 14^th century. The present-day Gymnasium, with its building dating from 1900, is a home to a rich ethnographic collection, a lapidaruim with artefacts from all historical periods, a numismatic collection and a library of 60.000 volumes.

Not visible in our panorama is another valuable Visoko cultural asset, listed as the national monument of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Orthodox church of St. Procopius.

The Wider Visoko Area

Okoliste is in itself a real archaeological treat. This Europe’s most important Neolithic site is researched in a joint effort of the Deutsches Archaologisches Institut and the National Museum of Bosnia-Herzegovina. In September, in the Science Magazine article about the state of the Bosnian archaeology in the light of the pyramid-mania, John Bohannon wrote:

„Deeper in time, fundamental questions about Neolithic society have sustained one of the few remaining international collaborations in Bosnia. Over the past 4 years, a team led by Kujundzic-Vejzagic and Johannes Müller, an archaeologist at the University of Kiel, Germany, has been exploring a site near the town of Okoliste, 7 km away from the pyramid hunt. It has been identified as part of the Butmir culture, a source of richly decorated pottery and intricate statuettes discovered in 1893. Research on these artifacts and related 7000-year-old dwelling sites could help answer one of the central questions of prehistoric archaeology, says Müller: "How and why did we go from simple, egalitarian societies of small settlements to complex, hierarchical societies with big, dense settlements?"

Buried in the soil near Okoliste are the remains of the largest Neolithic settlement ever found in Europe: between 200 and 300 houses protected by a ring of three trenches and a raised bank. "I was astonished when I realized that this defended area alone could have been home to as many as 3000 people," Müller says. Settlements from contemporary Neolithic cultures in Europe were occupied by no more than 300.“

Yet, this truly internationally significant location has no place in the Bosnian public awareness. Even more strangely, it is completelly overlooked and ignored by the attention of the Visoko media. Mr. Hodovic, director of the Visoko Museum, according to a two years old report, is more concerned with who’s rubbing elbows with whom than with the actual significance of Okoliste:

“The German archeologists apparently chose the wrong partner when they teamed with the National Museum, according to the museum’s director, Sead Hodović. "They have to respect the Zenica-Doboj Cantonal law,” said Hodović. “This area is really under my jurisdiction and we should be their partners.””

And last, but not least of the Visoko valley historical treats, there is the medieval fortress and settlement on top of the Visocica hill… But these medieval remains will be treated in a separate post.

Conclusion

This is only a brief overview, a mapping out, of the cultural-archaeological-historical content of the Visoko valley. Just skimming over its rich and intertwined multicultural historical layers shows how superficial and ill-intended the propaganda of the Tiny Little Bosnia is. This content is more than enough to make an inhabitant of Visoko - or any Bosnian, for that matter - proud, and more than sufficient to provide for high-quality elitistic historical and cultural – read: expensive – tourism. Still, the majority of this content is actually rotting away because the public awareness and the political decision-making is directed elsewhere. It is obvious that Visoko is blessed with unique possibilites for development of tourism, research and economy. However, directing attention and funds to the alleged pyramids is not going to achieve this prosperity. Quite on the contrary from the widespread convictions of pyramid-believers, the Pyramid Project is sucking the oxygen out of any other touristic initiative directed at any other historical content of the Visoko valley.

We truly are throwing away our real historical and cultural heritage – and development opportunities! – to waste in exchange for Atlantis fairy tales. I for one would really like to know – once Mr. Semir Osmanagic puts a New Age pseudo-scientific stamp on the Visoko valley internationally, or even worse, turns it into a New Age Mecca – who is going to rehabilitate our real cultural and historical content for any serious international tourist or scientist alike? With all these cultural and historical riches, is Visoko going to be remembered only as that pyramid hoax from the tiny little Bosnia?