I remembered something from the book I read before:
Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination
by Vesna Goldsworthy
“Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers and filmmakers in Western Europe and America have found in the Balkans a rich mine of images for literature and the movies. Bram Stoker's Transylvania and Anthony Hope's Ruritania are among the best known of these images. In this pioneering book, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the origins of the ideas that underpin Western perceptions of the "Wild East" region of Europe. She examines Western and East European letters, diaries, personal interviews, and a wide range of Balkan-inspired literature. She shows how the lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography for Western literature and for the entertainment industry has affected attitudes toward the countries of the region and the West's political involvement.” (Powells Review).
In a chapter with title “Why the Balkans Attract Women”, Goldsworthy refers to an unsigned article with the same title that appeared in 1912. in Graphic magazine. The question raised then and almost a century later by the author of Inventing Ruritania is “why those rough, wild, half civilized and half orientalized small countries attract some of the best women intellectuals?”. The unsigned article, as quoted by Goldsworthy, states that the East attracts women because in it's being it is female to the bone, as much as the West is male.
It can't get rid of the idea that the successor of Goldsworthy's Vicountess Strangford, Mary Adelaide Walker, Adelina Irby, Lady Hutton, Flora Sandes and other women who went to Balkans in the early 1900s, is, let's say, Christiane Amanpour. She did have fun in Sarajevo, but I'll leave her alone. A better example is an American anthropologist I met in Sarajevo at a conference couple years ago who conducted a research about the perception of civil society among the formerly opposed armies of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in Bosnia. I somehow know, at least from my experience as an interpreter for British Forces in Bosnia, that squaddies in all armies, everywhere in the world, think about just one thing – getting laid. She said that they were very cooperative when she went to visit them in the barracks and in the places where they hung out in free time (!) . The other one I met conducted a textual analysis, or something like that, of voting ballots at the far out polling posts during the several election years.
Now, the question raised here is whether is there is some king of fetish that Balkans satisfy in a safer and more discrete manner than elsewhere where shit has happened or is happening? Is it perhaps a case that, for instance, Bosnia still has something of that 19th century concept of a lost land, a place of refuge for the western pervert. A place where you can get lost? It's not my experience, I feel quite claustrophobic in this small country, but in a way that Bosnia is mediated, with two most sought war criminals still at large, and many of little pockets where all sorts of people hide, it may be the focus of some mild sort of orientalism. It's a four hour highway drive from Trieste to world's end.
Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination
by Vesna Goldsworthy
“Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers and filmmakers in Western Europe and America have found in the Balkans a rich mine of images for literature and the movies. Bram Stoker's Transylvania and Anthony Hope's Ruritania are among the best known of these images. In this pioneering book, Vesna Goldsworthy explores the origins of the ideas that underpin Western perceptions of the "Wild East" region of Europe. She examines Western and East European letters, diaries, personal interviews, and a wide range of Balkan-inspired literature. She shows how the lucrative exploitation of Balkan history and geography for Western literature and for the entertainment industry has affected attitudes toward the countries of the region and the West's political involvement.” (Powells Review).
In a chapter with title “Why the Balkans Attract Women”, Goldsworthy refers to an unsigned article with the same title that appeared in 1912. in Graphic magazine. The question raised then and almost a century later by the author of Inventing Ruritania is “why those rough, wild, half civilized and half orientalized small countries attract some of the best women intellectuals?”. The unsigned article, as quoted by Goldsworthy, states that the East attracts women because in it's being it is female to the bone, as much as the West is male.
It can't get rid of the idea that the successor of Goldsworthy's Vicountess Strangford, Mary Adelaide Walker, Adelina Irby, Lady Hutton, Flora Sandes and other women who went to Balkans in the early 1900s, is, let's say, Christiane Amanpour. She did have fun in Sarajevo, but I'll leave her alone. A better example is an American anthropologist I met in Sarajevo at a conference couple years ago who conducted a research about the perception of civil society among the formerly opposed armies of Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks in Bosnia. I somehow know, at least from my experience as an interpreter for British Forces in Bosnia, that squaddies in all armies, everywhere in the world, think about just one thing – getting laid. She said that they were very cooperative when she went to visit them in the barracks and in the places where they hung out in free time (!) . The other one I met conducted a textual analysis, or something like that, of voting ballots at the far out polling posts during the several election years.
Now, the question raised here is whether is there is some king of fetish that Balkans satisfy in a safer and more discrete manner than elsewhere where shit has happened or is happening? Is it perhaps a case that, for instance, Bosnia still has something of that 19th century concept of a lost land, a place of refuge for the western pervert. A place where you can get lost? It's not my experience, I feel quite claustrophobic in this small country, but in a way that Bosnia is mediated, with two most sought war criminals still at large, and many of little pockets where all sorts of people hide, it may be the focus of some mild sort of orientalism. It's a four hour highway drive from Trieste to world's end.
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