MEDIAEVAL TOMBSTONES

Bosnia, the ''farthest land of the East open to the West, and the farthest land of
the West facing the East'', as Mak Diszdar (1917 1971) once described it, has
experienced a unique historical destiny.
Occupying the wooded, mountainous and, in places hardly accessible interior of the
Balkans, Bosnia seems to have been predestined for an independant and autochthonous
national development.
On the other hand, Bosnia's central location made for a constant interaction between it
and surrounding lands.
In the tenth century, Bosnia became a separate Slavic state, and in the centuries following
assumed, along with Croatia in the west and Serbia in the east, an important role on the
Balkan medieval scene.
As her population was both Serbian and Croatian, Bosnia was always in a precarious
position between its neighbours whose rulers constantly laid claim to its teritory and its
people.
One of the most important and interesting aspects of the Bosnian mediaeval past is
the appearing in the twelft century of the Bogumil heresy. __Bogumilism was part of
a________ heretical movement which spread over a large area, from the Black Sea to the
Atlantic, , and included the Italian, French and German nonconformists such as
Patharenes, etc.
They repudiated the authority of the Pope and abolished the church hierarchy. They also
denounced the power of worldly rulers.
Bogumilism was also a political movement because it necessarily contained a protest
against many fundamental aspects of the feudal system and its social injustices.
It is no wonder then that from the very beginning the Bogumils were exposed to severe
persecution. During the several centuries of their existence in the Bosnian state (12 th to
16th centuries) they were continually under external pressure.
Nonetheless, this age of violence and instability produced a lasting monument to
Bosnian history and art the singular tombstones (steak/steci), which lie scattered all
over present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as parts of Serbia, Montenegro and
Croatia. Some of these massive stones, which are unique in Europeanart, are decorated

with carved reliefs and display various symbolic representations or scenes from real life,
like hunting, tournaments, duels, fencing , and dancing. Some of them bear inscriptions
which reveal the name of the deceased and his social position in the feudal hierarchy;
sometimes they tell us why and how he died.
Frequently, these epitaphs end with the warning: ''You shall be as I am , but I cannot be
as you are''.
The poems in The Stone Sleeper are the result of Mak Dizdar's intense spiritual
pilgrimage into the Bosnian past, and of his attempt to make Bosnian mediaeval culture
come come alive in an imaginative transcriptrion of them.

Translated by:Omer Hadiselimovi