DYING OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM IN SARAJEVO
OBLITERATION OF OUR EXISTENCE
AIM, Sarajevo, February 2, 1995 "In the past week, rain and snow have completed what Serb shelling had begun with the aim to wipe out one of the most significant museums in Southern Europe, the Country Museum in Sarajevo", this is how a colleague journalist from "The Daily Telegraph" finished his report from this city. This colleague had probably, like many well-meaning guests of Sarajevo, felt an understandable only human sadness because the home of history of this and other civilizations was dying. For the citizens of Sarajevo, this museum was the first elucidation of their existence, a link with the past by far clearer than the modernistic "non-patriotic" one, but also evidence that the skill of living together was the destiny of this space from times immemorial.
The Country Museum in Sarajevo, a colossal building constructed in neoclassicist style of Carl Parzik back in 1913, must be the only such institution in the world from which, through the ruins, one can see the sky for three years already, and down whose deserted walls rain pours. Soon an agreement about the repair of the museum will be reached, since, allegedly, the UNPROFOR has got guarantees from Karadzic's fighters that they would not disturb the works. But, instead of UN soldiers securing reconstruction of the Museum, all one can see of the United Nations on this monumental building are UNHCR sheets covering the broken windows and a UNESCO flag at it entrance.
Before the war this Museum stored unique items valuable to the world, and only in the three collections of this Museum (the ethnological, archeological and naturalist) there were 1,750,000 exhibits. For the sake of comparison, it should be said that the neighbouring Croatia preserves 5,000,000 exhibits in all its museums put together. The gates of the National Museum in Sarajevo guarded, for instance, excavated finds from significant archeological sites in Bosnia, sich as the figurines (statuettes) of negroes from Butmir which are 4,500 years old and which are still an unresolved enigma, but undoubtedly speak that Bosnia was multicultural even 2,000 years ago. At the time, Indians, Britons, Gallics, Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, or Hispanics lived on these territories, there were 42 religions and 52 deities present. This Museum was and still is the home of the one and only preserved copy of the Haggadah, the ancient illustrated Jewish codex of Spanish provenance from the 13th and the 14th century. The operation of saving the Haggadah during the World War Two is well known, when the Germans unsuccessfully tried to get hold of it, but neither they nor the latest conquerors of this city succeeded in the attempt to seize it from Sarajevo. The Haggadah has been saved again.
In the very beginning of the war in Sarajevo, on June 6, 1992, right after the former Yugoslav People's Army moved out of its barracks called "Marshal Tito", Professor Dr. Enver Imamovic, Director of the Country Museum, with a few soldiers of the Army of B&H and a few employees of the Museum, managed to get through to the Museum and the place where the Haggadah was kept. Had they come just a few minutes later, they would have found nothing because water was already up to their knees in all the Museum premises. Since on the occasion many other valuable exhibits besides the Haggadah were rescued, this date is taken as the beginning of a rescue of the Country Museum in Sarajevo, but this job has no end. To rescue such a museum means to be rescuing a culture of a nation, of a civilization, even of the one which had wished to destroy all of this.
Down in the botanical gardens of the Country Museum, the crown of an evergreen holly can still be seen. Standing beside it, with many of its branches cut off and wounded with shell fragments, stands a Pancic's pine-tree. Then there are larches, yews cedar-trees, Japanese cherry-trees, and finally the fantastic standing tomb-stones protected by sand-bags.
Today the UNPROFOR speaks of opening, and the next day of not opening the blue road to Sarajevo. Karadzic's supporters sign in the morning, and close the passage in the afternoon. Prominent world diplomats land in Sarajevo, discuss percents of a country, and then retell the discussion in Pale where the power-holders arrogantly shake their heads. In Herzegovina, they calculate, not how to achieve peace, but how to draw a German mark into their own pockets out of every tiny slice of food that enters B&H at some self-made custom-houses or how to grab the biggest possible portion of "our country". But we are in fact all dying together with our joint Country Museum. When the colleague mentioned in the beginning of the text wrote that the Museum had come to the end of its life, had he too gone down into the cellar of this building and stood helpless, awe-struck in front of the boat which is 13,000 years old and which is irreversibly falling apart?
MIRSADA BOSNO