It seems almost too neat a symbol of the region’s identity crises: one of the Balkans’ most famous contemporary cultural figures building a town named after the most famous Balkan writer. But it’s not only a symbol, laden as it is with implications. The plans for Andrić Grad are real, located by Visegrad at the mouth of the Drina River, the setting of Ivo Andrić’s novel, The Bridge on the Drina. The main financial contributor to the project is film director Emir Kusturica, and it is expected that the project will take four years to complete, costing around 10-12 million Euros. The construction has already been met with resistance from victims of the wartime atrocities in Visegrad, and reignited Bosnia’s divisions.
The legacy of Ivo Andrić fragmented in the fifty years since he won the Nobel Prize during what was then Yugoslavia. Andrić lived, at different times, in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Zagreb, and is often taken to embody the Rubik’s cube of Yugoslavian identity: a Croat Catholic by birth, he favoured the (Serbian) Cyrillic script in his writing. While his historical novels are generally seen as embodying a Yugoslavian mosaic, after the breakup of Yugoslavia the successor states “inherited” his legacy in different ways, with Serbia most enthusiastically embracing Andrić as “theirs”.
Some have since argued that his novels’ portrayal of Bosnian Muslims contributed to the development of Serbian ultra-nationalism, while his juxtaposition of the Habsburg Empire as a more “civilised” occupier than the Ottomans denigrated the Balkans’ Muslim heritage.
Then there is the symbol of the bridge, which, between Mostar and The Bridge on the Drina, has become the dominating regional metaphor. Marina Antić has written on how the elevation of Andrić as the most celebrated Balkan writer is part of a quasi-colonial western European viewing of the region: that the book itself acts, for west Europeans, as a “bridge” linking “us” and “them”; the Balkans lazily positioned as “bridge” between east and west. All of this echoes through in the construction of Andrić Grad.
Perhaps the most curious part of the project is who’s behind it: Kusturica, the film director who’s been hailed everything from hero to traitor and Milošević sympathiser. The trajectory of Kusturica’s identity is well-documented, and a mirror to Andrić’s – after his childhood with secular Muslim parents in Bosnia, with the breakup of Yugoslavia Kusturica claimed a kind of “Yugoslav without Yugoslavia” identity that, by the end of the conflict, some read as an apology for Serbian nationalism. Underscoring what many saw as his gradual retreat from reality, after the war Kusturica moved into his specially-constructed “ethno-village” Drvengrad, built as a set for his film Life Is A Miracle, with streets named after his icons: Maradona, Che Guevara, Ivo Andrić.
Kusturica is funding the construction of Andrić Grad in collaboration with Milorad Dodik, the President of Republika Sprska, and this alliance is perhaps most disconcerting – the alignment of Kusturica’s vision with Dodik, the man who denies Srebrenica was a genocide, amongst his other nationalist statements. This fuels fears by Bosniaks in Visegrad that Andrić Grad is part of a Serbian nationalist plan to “finish off what they didn’t complete during the war”. What at first sounded like a quaint architectural reconstruction of a novel potentially becomes stitched to the concept of cultural cleansing.
Andrić’s tangled history, Kusturica’s fraught political position, and the violent history of Visegrad layer over one another in the construction of Andric Grad. But the flipside of ethno-politics is always economics, and the question remains: in what world would someone spend 12 million euros building a town dreamt up by a novelist?
Follow Heather McRobie on Twitter @heathermcrobie
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