HRVATSKI ROMANTIČARI OTKRIVAJU BOSNU
CROATIAN ROMANTICS DISCOVER BOSNIA

Summary/Abstract: This article focuses on the images of Bosnia that emerge from travelogues published by the Croatian Romantics, describing their experiences of the country during Ottoman times. The impressions of Matija Mažuranić, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski, Mihovil Pavlinović and two Franciscans working in Bosnia (Grgo Martić and Ivan Frano Jukić) are presented here. These Croats, much like travelers from Western Europe, describe Bosnia as a barbaric, stagnant, neglected country, for which faults they blame its residents, whose main vices are listed as laziness, sloppiness and moral decay. Croatian travel descriptions, however, observe many details of ethnic and religious diversity that would have been difficult to grasp by those who were unaware of the local reality, history and language. Croatian travelers who pursue this otherwise inaccessible knowledge sometimes disguise themselves as Turks, or secretly adopt the role of the tormented romantic hero, who is buffeted by gusts of the heart, as Enlightenment postulates. This also shows the confusion resulting from a collision between “ours” (Known/Countryman) and “the other” (Stranger/Foreign). Describing Bosnia as wild, uncivilized, conflcted, colonized, lacking its own voice, empty, dead and stinking, they see Europeanization as the only possible salvation for this stagnation, in a country that is unable to follow its own path.

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