The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric

The life and existence of every great, beautiful and useful building, as well as its relation to the place where it has been built, often bears within itself complex and mysterious drama and history. However, one thing is clear; that between the life of the townsmen and that bridge, there existed a centuries-old bond. Their fates were so intertwined that they could not be imagined separately and could not be told separately. Therefore the story of the foundation and destiny of the bridge is at the same time the story of the life of the town and its people, from generation to generation, even as through all the tales about the town stretches the line of the stone bridge with its eleven arches and the kapia in the middle, like a crown.

A stone bridge passes over the Drina River at the town of Visegrad, in Bosnia. The bridge was built in the 16th century by the order of Mehmed Pasha, an Ottoman Vizier who had spent part of his childhood in Visegrad. Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge on the Drina tells a fictionalized version of the story of the bridge, and of the town of Visegrad, which like many others found itself at the mercy of the great historical forces that rocked the Balkan Peninsula over many hundreds of years. The novel begins with the construction of the bridge in 1577, detailing the lives of the townspeople who cross it, and who make it the center of town life, up until the outbreak of World War I and the partial destruction of the bridge by Austrian forces. As Andric--Bosnia's only Nobel Prize winner in Literature--describes above, the story of the bridge is in many ways identical to the story of the town, and the town itself is a representation of Bosnia in miniature.

The best stories about the bridge are often the most tragic, death-tainted ones: the story of Radisav, for example, the enslaved builder who dares to rebel in secret against the cruel Turkish administrator, and for his crime is impaled--carefully through the anus, making sure to slip past any vital organs to keep him alive--on a pike in the middle of the bridge. Or the story of Fata, a young woman caught between obeying her father's command to marry a man she does not love and her private vow never to step into the man's house, who finds a way out by marrying him and then throwing herself off the bridge to her death. Or Milan, a guard in the service of the Austrian occupiers who lets himself be fooled by a pretty Turkish girl intent on sneaking a renowned rebel through in the guise of her grandmother, complete with Muslim veil. But there are stories, too, in which the bridge serves as the meeting place for lovers or the backdrop for acts of great bravery.

For Andric, the bridge is a symbol of permanency in the midst of great upheaval. Though Ottoman power recedes and the Austrians take over, the bridge remains. The development of the railroad bypasses the bridge, depleting its significance as a link between the East and West, but still the bridge itself remains. It's for this reason that the final scene, against the backdrop of history's as-of-yet deadliest conflict, is so shocking. The bridge's destruction ultimately serves as an indictment, it seems to me, of the faddish revolutionary Marxism that spreads among the Serbian youth of Bosnia prior to the war. An ideology which has no respect for those things which have existed long enough to become intertwined with national identity and history, Andric saying, is one that presages the most horrible kinds of violence.

The Bridge on the Drina is part of my ongoing project to read a book from every country. With the addition of Bosnia, I've read 49 countries so far!