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Sarajevo — the 1957 book that turned the Ottoman house into modernism

The 1957 book that celebrated Bosnian traditional architecture as modernist did more than argue for design continuity. It intervened in a specific intellectual problem — the post-1878 stigma of the Ottoman legacy in a Christian-Slav Balkan imagination — and used modernism's claim to universal laws as the tool.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The twenty-first-century view of Bosnia’s Ottoman heritage, that the mosques, hans, hammams, and Ottoman townscapes are a cultural legacy to be preserved and shown to visitors, is recent. It was not the view of the Habsburg administrators who arrived in 1878 to tame what they saw as the residue of oppressive Ottoman rule. It was not the view of nineteenth-century Serbian and Croatian nationalist historians, who recoded Ottoman rule as foreign occupation and Bosnian Muslims as its residue. It was not the view of the interwar Yugoslav state. And as late as the 1940s, it was not the view of the Bosnian architectural profession itself, some of whose leading figures had, in 1942, proposed to demolish Baščaršija (see the previous story).

The shift happened in the fifteen years between 1942 and 1957. Grabrijan and Neidhardt published Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno in 1957 with a preface by Le Corbusier. The book argued that Bosnian traditional architecture was itself modernist in spirit, and that modern Bosnian architecture should build on the tradition rather than clear it away. It has been widely celebrated as the founding text of a Bosnian “regional modernism”.

A 2024 chapter by Lejla Džumhur and Aida Idrizbegović Zgonić, both at the University of Sarajevo Faculty of Architecture, in Docomomo Journal issue 72 argues that the book was more than a celebration. It was an intellectual operation. Its purpose was to lift a specific stigma, the post-1878 recoding of Bosnian Ottoman heritage as the Turk’s inheritance, a marker of backwardness and difference-from-Europe. This piece is a short digest of Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić’s argument. Read the Grabrijan and Neidhardt biography and the Baščaršija-was-dead story first if you have not.

The stigma the 1957 book had to lift

Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić open their chapter by naming the problem in precise terms. Ottoman rule in Bosnia, they write, produced a specific cultural trauma among the non-Muslim residents, a trauma that was, in the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander’s 2012 framework, collectivised into the group identities of Serbian and Croatian nationalism. Ottoman rule was recoded, retrospectively, and often centuries after the events, as foreign, religiously alien, oppressive, and incompatible with European civilisation. This was the operating cultural memory the Balkan national programmes carried into the nineteenth century.

In 1878, when Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and inherited a country that was still 39 percent Muslim by religion, that framework did not vanish. It was, in the Habsburg administration’s own operating discourse, complicated by a second framework, Benjamin von Kállay’s differential orientalism, discussed below, but the underlying stigma remained. As the historian Edin Hajdarpašić has argued in his 2019 book Whose Bosnia? (Cornell), the post-1878 Bosnian Muslim faced a “stubborn trend to conflate the labels Ottoman, Islam, and Muslims”, a framing that persisted throughout the interwar and socialist periods, and, Hajdarpašić writes, “ominously looms over the horizon of the 1992–95 conflict to burden the post-socialist reality today.”

This is the framework Grabrijan and Neidhardt’s 1957 book was pushing against. They did not name it explicitly. They performed the pushback in the structure of their argument. Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić’s analysis reads the book for how it did so.

The Džidžikovac ensemble, one of the postwar Sarajevan buildings that carries the Ottoman-mahala reference Grabrijan and Neidhardt argued should be liberated from stigma.
Džidžikovac — one of the buildings that put the Ottoman legacy back to work. Photograph: Milan Suvajac, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Move one: modernist scientific displacement

The first rhetorical move was to invoke modernism’s claim to universal, scientific, ahistorical architectural laws and to file Bosnian Ottoman architecture under those laws. Grabrijan and Neidhardt’s core theoretical claim in Architecture of Bosnia is that the traditional Ottoman-Bosnian house was governed by “unwritten laws”, proportional systems, spatial rhythms, resonance with terrain, that were the same laws modernism had rediscovered from scratch. They compare Ottoman houses to a car body (karoserija). They reduce Ottoman ornamental forms to cubic and domed architecture. They render the doksat bay window and the divanhana first-floor gallery as modernist archetypes.

The move is deliberate. As Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić argue, filing an architectural tradition under “universal laws” strips its particulars of their contested meaning. If Ottoman-Bosnian architecture is not Ottoman-Bosnian but a timeless expression of natural order, then it is no longer part of the Ottoman legacy that must be either accepted or rejected. It becomes a piece of universal architectural knowledge, to which nation-state politics does not apply. Grabrijan and Neidhardt did not need to argue for the Ottoman legacy’s political rehabilitation. They argued that the architecture was not, in its essence, Ottoman.

The intellectual genealogy Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić trace runs through Le Corbusier’s Purist manifesto Après le Cubisme (1918) and the L’Esprit Nouveau essays of the 1920s. Le Corbusier drew on the Genevan psychophysicist tradition, the study of universal aesthetic responses to geometric form, and translated it into an architectural project. When Grabrijan and Neidhardt describe Ottoman houses as harmonised, unified, and governed by “unwritten laws” of proportion, they are speaking Purist. Neidhardt had spent 1933-1935 in Le Corbusier’s Paris atelier, learning the language directly.

The maneuver worked. In post-war socialist Yugoslavia, where modernism was the state architectural doctrine, an Ottoman-Bosnian house that was actually a modernist archetype was ideologically clean. It could be preserved, celebrated, and taught in architecture schools. What could not be preserved was an Ottoman legacy in the old nationalist framing. Grabrijan and Neidhardt made the second reading unavailable.

Move two: the “close-to-home Orient”

The second rhetorical move drew on a specific piece of Central European orientalist writing, Benjamin Kállay’s 1883 book Ungarn an den Grenzen des Orients und des Occidents (Hungary at the Borders of the Orient and the Occident).

Kállay had led the Austro-Hungarian civil administration of Bosnia from 1882 to 1903 and was the operative architect of the Habsburg building programme in the country (see the Vijećnica siblings story and the Moser story for the practical results). His 1883 book proposed an idea that would structure Habsburg policy for the following twenty years: the East-West border, Kállay argued, did not run along the Bosphorus, as the European nineteenth-century imagination had it, but along the western edge of the Hungarian plain. Everything east of that line was transitional: not fully Western, not fully Eastern, but sharing features of both. Hungary itself was the paradigm of this transitional identity. Bosnia, with its Slavic population, its Christian majority, and its Ottoman-inflected culture, was similarly transitional.

This produced a differential orientalism, a distinction between the “distant Orient” (the Ottomans and the Turks, the empire that had besieged Vienna in 1683 and was still the enemy in Kállay’s operating cultural memory) and the “close-to-home Orient” (the Bosnian Slavs, both Christian and Muslim, who were “of the Orient” only in the transitional sense). Bosnia’s Muslims were, in Kállay’s framing, “good Orientals”, worthy of the Habsburg civilising mission precisely because they were not really Ottomans, but Slavs whose culture had been temporarily “Ottomanised” and could be reformed toward European standards.

The framing was politically useful for the Habsburg administration, it justified the occupation as a civilising mission rather than as a conquest, and it filtered down into the intellectual culture of Habsburg Sarajevo. When Grabrijan and Neidhardt, in 1957, described the Bosnian Ottoman house as “peripheral”, “simple and straightforward”, “succulent”, and “unlived”, they were writing in a vocabulary that Kállay’s differential orientalism had, seven decades earlier, made available.

Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić are careful about this. They do not accuse Grabrijan and Neidhardt of being colonial administrators. They read the 1957 book as using the Kállay framework, deploying the “close-to-home” identification of Bosnian tradition as near, understandable, related-by-blood, to do the intellectual work of separating the tradition from its Ottoman-imperial framing. If Bosnian traditional architecture is Slavic-with-Ottoman-influence rather than Ottoman-with-Slavic-inhabitants, it can be inherited by a Yugoslav socialist state. The “close-to-home” framing did that.

The two rhetorical moves, modernist scientific displacement and Kállay’s differential orientalism, do the same work through different vocabularies. Together, Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić argue, they “decentralize” Grabrijan and Neidhardt from the dominant nineteenth-century negative framing of the Ottoman legacy. This “double decentralization” is the chapter’s core analytical claim.

What the maneuver produced

The 1957 book produced two things.

First, it made Bosnia’s Ottoman architectural heritage speakable in socialist Yugoslavia. Before 1957, an architectural profession trying to preserve the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque or the Baščaršija fabric faced the question of why, why preserve the residue of Ottoman rule in a country whose new state ideology was, at best, ambivalent about the empire that had ruled it for four centuries? After 1957, the answer was ready: preserve it because it is modernist, because it obeys universal laws, because it is Slavic architecture in Ottoman clothes, because it is our tradition, not theirs.

Second, it produced a built architectural project, the Marijin Dvor plan of 1960 (see Grabrijan and Neidhardt), the horizontal Parliament complex of 1974–82, and the Ciglane housing of 1976–79 (see the mahala-in-concrete story), that translated the 1957 argument into actual buildings. If the 1957 book was the intellectual liberation of the Ottoman legacy, the Ciglane housing was its ratification: a new socialist neighbourhood built to reproduce, in concrete, the geometry of the Ottoman mahala it was one hundred metres uphill from.

The trick that worked

The 1957 book’s maneuver worked. The received view of Sarajevo’s Ottoman heritage today, that the mosques, the hans, the avlije, the çarşı are ours, worth preserving, worth celebrating, is roughly the view Grabrijan and Neidhardt proposed. What Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić’s chapter adds is that the maneuver was not innocent. It succeeded by borrowing tools from Kállay’s Habsburg civilising mission and from Le Corbusier’s universalising Purism, both of which strip particular meanings from particular architectural traditions. The chapter is careful. It does not accuse anyone of dishonesty. It asks you to see the 1957 book as a piece of intellectual work in a specific context, a work that solved one problem (the Ottoman legacy’s stigma) by drawing on another problem (colonial-era orientalism) whose politics are, and remain, not settled.

Any serious reading of Sarajevo’s Ottoman fabric now has to reckon with that. The heritage does not become less valuable. The 1957 book does not become wrong to write. The whole story simply becomes more legible.

Džumhur and Idrizbegović Zgonić’s chapter is 8 pages, open access, in the Docomomo Journal 72 (2024/3). Read alongside Alić’s chapter (see the Baščaršija-was-dead story), the two together are the fullest account of the 1942-to-1957 intellectual movement that saved Baščaršija by rewriting what it was.

Sources

  • Lejla Džumhur and Aida Idrizbegović Zgonić, “Authority to Liberate the Ottoman Legacy: Double Decentralization in Dušan Grabrijan’s and Juraj Neidhardt’s Theoretical Narrative”, in The Way Towards Regional Modernities, Docomomo Journal 72 (2024/3), 16–23. Open access. Journal issue
  • Dušan Grabrijan and Juraj Neidhardt, Arhitektura Bosne i put u savremeno (Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1957).
  • Benjamin Kállay, Ungarn an den Grenzen des Orients und des Occidents (Budapest: Khór & Wein, 1883).
  • Edin Hajdarpašić, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Cornell University Press, 2019).
  • Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
  • Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of the Former Yugoslavia”, Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (1995), 917–931.
  • Jeffrey C. Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

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