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46 chaPTer 2 a failed dream of a Balkan community The words “Greece,” “mission,” and “duty” are meaningless. But it is beautiful to sacrifice ourselves, wilfully, for these nothings. I believe that there is no religion more in accord with man’s deepest hardihood than the cultivation of purposeless heroism. —Nikos Kazantzakis, quoted in Peter Bien, Politics of the Spirit The fact that the legend of immurement survives in many different forms and continues to be recognized as a cultural topos in the Balkans perhaps points to a conflicting dynamic of the region as a historically traumatized space and of its populations as a colorful, if occasionally explosive mix. The sacrificial myth itself, however, is frequently employed as a figure of speech in the self-description of ethnoreligious communities throughout the region, as well as depictions of the region by outside observers. During the Yugoslav wars of secession and succession in the 1990s, the period that many tendentiously referred to as “the Balkan wars,” the sacrificial aspect of the legend of immurement was resurrected and placed under the critical microscope of sociologists, cultural theorists, and amateurs alike. Reminiscent of the horror that Goethe expressed upon reading the Building of Skadar a couple of centuries ago, deeming the immurement motif utterly barbaric, the legend was once again scrutinized as “evidence” of inherent murderous inclinations of the Balkan populations that are inscribed in the deepest recesses of their culture.1 It seems that even some of the better attempts at cultural analysis produced in the climate of the Yugoslav tragedy could do little but perpetuate a failed dream of a Balkan community 47 the myth about the myth of the Balkans. However, one of the most suggestive and obvious aspects of the legend’s sacrificial motif that somehow escaped analysis lies in its dual meaning. Some recognize in it “an action of ambivalent semantics: on the one hand, it is the equivalent of separation; on the other, of integration, creation of something new—cosmos, family.”2 Critical engagement with it, however, tends to incline toward either its constructive or its destructive aspect, with rare attempts to reconcile them. Due to this ambiguity in semantics the legend opens interpretations that underline its destructive context but never abandon the equally important, if not more compelling, symbolism of death (of the human body) as a necessary prerequisite to the process of creation of something new—be it a new cosmogony, family, community, or ultimately the authority of the big Other itself.3 In the second half of the twentieth century the immurement legend reappears in historical and nation-inspired literary narratives written by some of the region’s most well-known authors. Such are, for example, the so-called bridge novels by Ivo Andrić and Ismail Kadare, as well as a relatively recent novel written by Aris Fakinos and published posthumously in 1998. A significant departure from the legendary narrative in these new texts lies in the type of the edifice in whose foundations the body expires, which is now fixed to a bridge. Given the variety of architectural structures in the many Balkan versions of the legend, it is interesting to analyze the process through which the bridge became the one edifice that continues to inspire the imagination of Balkan writers even today and, moreover, how it became a popular metaphor for the entire geopolitical region. The evolution of the edifice follows a trajectory from concrete material object to symbol, as Olga Augustinos states: “the bridge itself crossed the temporal frontier from epic time of foundational origins, now immobilized in legend, to historical processual time of crossings and passages, of shifting frontiers and transformed identities.”4 The bridge as a symbol carries a multitude of connotations that have gained currency in recent cultural, sociological, and even political discourse: it is both a very ancient and a very modern category that incorporates ancient bridges and modern technological marvels; a liminal construct spanning worlds, meanings, and historical periods; a metaphor for the fragility of the notion of national identity; a synonym for the equally indefinable geopolitical region of the Balkans—and the list is not exhausted. A bridge is primarily a distinctive crossing point, connecting or dividing the two banks/entities between which it is positioned; like the body immured within it, who is neither a stranger nor a fully integrated community member and therefore the most likely victim for the purpose, the bridge is a liminal edifice, fixed in a position of nonbelonging and in...

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