We are standing here in front of the Fethiye mosque
in Athens in Greece, Fethiye actually is a Turkish word
denoting and implying that this was a mosque of conquest.
And conquest was
a highly charged term during the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans
and during the Ottoman governance and administration of the region.
In a way, it implied the domination
of one group over the other who was subjugated
and there was always an idea, an essence and a will
to erase this Ottoman domination and turn the tables upside down.
And this was in the 19th century when the Eastern question began
gradually to unwrap the issue of Ottoman and Muslim
heritage became a prime of question what to do with it.
Then began
the process of de-Ottomanization in those countries and in those areas
that managed to rid themselves of the rule of the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman and Muslim heritage in the Balkans
have then been systematically erased for more than 100 years.
Bridges, mosques, tekes, waqfs, various
kinds of different administrative and religious buildings.
All that had an Islamic and Ottoman
character were either erased or repurposed.
Old mosques were turned back into churches and so on.
And this
de-Ottomanization process
affected almost all areas of the Balkans
and one of the countries and lands that was least affected by
it was Bosnia and Herzegovina. Throughout the 20th century
it retained quite a lot of its Muslim population and therefore
quite a lot of its Muslim and Ottoman buildings and heritage.
The dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was supposed to be one
final, brutal and bloody act of de-Ottomanization
in the Balkans,
especially targeting the Muslim community of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The local Bosnia and Herzegovinian Muslims were subjected
to genocide, ethnic displacement, mass rapes.
They were buried in mass graves.
But the particular target for destruction
was the heritage that they thought of as theirs.
This was the Ottoman Muslim heritage, such as bridges and in particular
the mosques.
Some of the most famous destroyed monuments
from the war of the 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina,
and the brutal aggression
was the mosque from Banja Luka, the Ferhadija mosque
that was erected in the 16th century by Ferhat Pasha Sokolović,
but also the beautiful, and larger mosque that was the pinnacle
of classical Ottoman architecture in Foča, in Eastern Herzegovina,
that was one of the beautiful painted Ottoman objects
it was completely razed to the ground.
And one of the other most important objects that was destroyed during
the war was the Bridge of Mostar that was built in the 16th century
by Mimar Hayruddin, who was an apprentice and
a pupil of the famed Mimar Sinan.