Vitez: Bosnia’s Unlikely Culture Hub
The hidden magic of small towns in Bosnia
Vitez is a small town in Bosnia, a part of the country that sunk into the deep end of the rough and tumble during the horrors of the 1990s. All embroiled sides eventually withdrew from the front lines and turned the conflict into a passive-aggressive state of affairs. Despite all this, a local cultural centre provides the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, gathering the whole community around their programs, projects and groups like musicians, writers or actors. This small building is a sponge constantly sucking in local and regional talents on their stage. Against all expectations, the Croatian Cultural Society Napredak turned this sociocultural backwater into a case study of what’s possible with enthusiasm, community involvement and audience development. Their fundraising abilities are definitely a lesson for us in bigger cities.
It’s a sunny weekend just before this summer’s official curtain call. A week ago, the local Cultural Centre informed me I was one of the recipients of this year’s literary award for short stories devoted to the local author Marko Martinović Car. My short story is about the apocalypse in a Herzegovinian village triggered by the uprising of the dead after the local priest orders people to put down old oaks at the local cemetery. Based on Slavic mythology, oaks are abodes of the deceased, and it’s all about keeping vampires underneath their tombstones. I came up with the idea of this surreal thriller after seeing what the cemetery in my family’s village looked like since they got rid of every last leaf of grass. I never wrote such stories before. What about my writer’s block? Gone.
The best way to enjoy your time here is to allow the town to charm you without expectations. That’s what I did.
The Communist authorities closed down the Society after World War II, but it was revived when Yugoslavia fell apart. If their branch here is anything to go by, they’re still going strong. Describing the accomplishments of Anto Zirdum, their former chairman, as a miracle, would be an understatement. He’s proved beyond denial what’s possible in communities on the fringe of major cultural hubs even if the idea seems like a mission impossible. And that’s a lot, trust me.
I noticed one particular detail that stuck with me after taking a walk through the place here: large quantities of chopped wood around houses and buildings. In a conversation, Anto told me that some poorer people prefer that kind of heating during winter. If that’s true, these almost artsy piles paint a rather grim picture.
We meet the current chair of the Society — a music teacher — for drinks in their Club. She’s happy with how things are going. The schedule is packed full of events, workshops and similar things that makes me envy her a bit. I live in a bigger city, but there are very few places enticing such interest in the local audience. Anto tells me about how during the Habsburg administration teachers weren’t allowed to marry anyone outside their profession due to its rather mobile nature back in the day.
Anto is behind the Anka Topić literary award for young female poets. She was the first woman to publish a book of poetry in this country — Lost Stars, in 1908. The award has a serious reputation and some accomplished authors are among the laureates. I could write a whole essay about the passion he has for this work. He’s got this need to create stars out of dust. Listening to him talking about open-air readings in a forest, where the trees become instruments playing music, was almost intoxicating. The same with his ideas about grand choirs singing in caves. When I was about to wallow in pity for such a person stuck in a place like this, with severely limited resources, outreach and barely an audience to speak of, he proved me wrong. And boy, how wrong I was indeed.
Anto turned this puddle into an ocean. I know one similar comparison — Pazin. It’s a town in Istria that turned the minimum to the maximum. All that with a push of a group of people who were courageous or maybe foolish enough to believe they could pull it off and that living away from the buzz of cities isn’t a sociocultural death sentence. It only comes with individuals who are willing to sacrifice time and energy for their community’s benefit. When such people are gone, not many are left willing to pick up the torch. Once the inspirational story slowly withers away. Anto did draw the line once when he ran out of fuel, metaphorically. But the new establishment started doing exactly what he was afraid of so he got into the driver’s seat again.
I can’t imagine how I’d survive in a place like this, without everything (bigger) city life got me used to. Still, I felt it was a shame I don’t live here. For a single moment, a feeling of belonging to something meaningful and purposeful played a trick on my mind. But it wore off quickly and anything more than a longer weekend might drive me mad here.
We were all gathered around a table with food that was honest, homemade, unpretentious and looked like something no one wants on their Instagram feed. One of the ladies asked me how the cake tasted, apologising for her mother’s clumsy accomplishment on my plate. This was not the right place to play a picky expert on their cuisine. What I ate couldn’t be described as any kind of cuisine. The red wine I was served was too cold but what the hell? They’re too kind to me to play a primadonna.
One needs a strong backbone to survive the daily grind of fighting for what’s right in this environment. More so when it’s something inclusive and profound. Anto tells me the local power brokers don’t particularly like him because he follows his own rule book more than theirs. It does come with an asterisk, mind you: he’s got a certain level of safety from pressures others can’t escape because of his contributions. The compromises are many but the rewards are aplenty too.
Many things I find relatable here: how to manage a project and distinguish what’s possible from what you’ve got to sacrifice. Many things we do are built on a foundation made of a pile of senseless paperwork. It can be quite accurately described as nothing but hurdles on your way to money. A means to see how far you can go before giving up on everything because you are one piece of paper away from reaching the finish line. And the palpable disillusionment.
There are some for whom those limits of possibilities have proven to be too harsh to handle. Ivo Totić was a local teacher and poet whose first book of poems Crna fizika (Black Physics) triggered exciting feedback from other authors. Born in the Bosnian town of Zenica in 1967, he died in Vitez in 2017. The book was published in 1995, at a time when the ink on the Dayton Peace Agreement was still fresh. Like Amy Winehouse, he left behind a small body of work before descending into a breakdown. Allegedly, he ended up unemployed and living with his father off the latter’s meagre pension. The final nail in this coffin of indignity was invisibility. His reputation rarely reached beyond the confines of his community. He’s yet to become one of those post-mortem bards. Fortunately, he’s remembered in this little literary hub. If it’s true that no one’s a prophet in their own village, he might be a success story after all.
Anka Topić — the woman behind their literary award — fought not just for poetry but also for women’s rights and equality. Her poetry pleads for equality and coexistence among confessions, a famously difficult task in Bosnia. As she lived unmarried with another woman, there was gossip of her being a lesbian. That’s a label that could turn her into a target of a conservative Christian community. Against all my narrow-minded expectations, locals do appreciate her work.
The books published in Vitez tend to suffer from the same thing as Ivo Totić: a limited outreach. Napredak has many branches and their publishing activity is quite prolific. They do lack the fine-tuning that makes publishers stand out: memorable design, innovative marketing strategy and distribution. Anto is a writer who sent his work to shops that never gave him any feedback regarding sales. When there was a commercial success, he’d forget to show up for the money unless they reached out to him first.
While I waited in the audience for my “I would like to thank the Academy” moment, the local music teacher and group of musicians played The Second Waltz by Shostakovich. It reminded me of Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut. Some locals loyally attend events, and due to the pending elections, some aspiring candidates who needed another opportunity to impress their voters. If it’s true that God is in the details, the cheap tie that the guy was wearing is a subtle hint at the truth behind the agenda of local politics. But you don’t win elections with subliminal messages. The in-your-face approach is the only one that works.
If the many campaign posters with various slogans wallpapering the streets are anything to go by, they’re very fond of exclamations. At one party’s headquarters, the slogan reads: “more defiance ! more pride! more hope!”. The place looks like an abandoned storage with dirt on the concrete floor and random wooden planks leaning against the wall. Next door, windows covered by shabby grids, paint slowly peeling away from the wall. Hope and pride? I don’t think so.
The one right thing they can do is to make things bureaucratically a bit easier for people like Anto Zirdum. Specifically, I’m referring to his invaluable contribution to this community. It takes away too much precious time he’d otherwise use to develop new ideas. Now they’re planning the construction of a new, bigger building and it’s well deserved. This was one of those things the Yugoslavian regime did right: in provincial towns, they built hotels and cultural centres to attract visitors, and workforce and enhance the quality of living outside home, places of work and worship.
Infrastructure is a major problem for many institutions with ambitions that go beyond what’s available. While it may provide some very creative solutions, sooner or later it leads to burnout because you can’t keep chopping away things that aren’t necessary without damaging the essence. Nor should you have to. That’s where places and dreamers like this come in. Not afraid to imagine operas or Sci-Fi festivals in a local cave, they make you feel hopeful and excited. Sometimes that’s enough to get you through the day.
I don’t think I’ll wait for another special occasion to return here. Just when I descend into despair about a society that’s increasingly looking like a bad idea, it will remind me that sometimes a church tower doesn’t need to have a bell in order for you to hear its toll. Dissatisfaction might be a heavy cross to bear but it’s a necessary engine for the most important creations of any kind. The desire to change, and improve things is the saving grace making the precious difference between a blooming community and a sociocultural atrophy. Additional appeal might be restaurants like Dva šofera, offering coffee for less than a Euro until 9 AM. I don’t care what kind of fluid it might be, and their Instagram profile, by the name, lets you know that there are two car washes nearby. Correct me if I’m wrong but that’s not very different from the concept of Michelin restaurants, just reversed and not only in terms of price tags. Unfortunately, they had their day off so I can’t vouch for the taste of things on their menu.
The bus ride takes me 4 hours to return home. I try to focus on the landscape of Bosnian small towns we’re sliding through. From this side of the window, Bugojno may be just a bit more than a bus stop. But there’s life there, people are going about their day, laundry hanging on windows to dry. They’re having their drinks and their worries and joys. The media isn’t very optimistic: young, educated and ambitious people deserting the city drowning in corruption.
The local football club Iskra has seen better times, the wages are low and underprivileged students get very few scholarships. It reminded me of our local newspaper where the headlines usually put you on a spectrum between anxious and plain suicidal. There’s hope indeed, but not in the empty promises of election campaigns where the only thing standing between you and a happy ending is a vote for the right party. It’s found in places like the small cultural centre in Vitez, giving you a reason to get out of the house without feeling Netflix and a big bowl of popcorn might have been a better idea.
That might be the biggest trick this town played on me. I was fooled into thinking it was as small on the inside as on the other side. There were bars with pretentious names like San Remo. So what? You’d struggle to find its equivalent in San Remo, unless if you’re referring to knights because that’s how the name translates in English.
Bosnians tend to be industrious: in almost every house by the roadside near my hotel, there was a store selling things or services: car mechanics, second-hand shops, dentists, barbers and a small antique shop full of treasures. In the window, you could see two pianos, a mannequin wearing the Yugoslav police uniform and old chandeliers. Some of those things were just old, without some sort of charm to them.
Suddenly, I saw my reflection in an antique mirror behind glass. It made my eyebags look like Birkins. The morning fog was slowly evaporating high into the skies from the tips of trees lining the vast orchards around the houses. By the time I got back to the bus station to catch my ride home, the midday sun jumped above the horizon to bid me not farewell, but goodbye. I’ll end this with a quote of Ivo Totić:
There, upstairs! I belong to no one,
Not to my town nor the people;
I don’t have an earthly home
Or the world on my back
