Banja Luka // Job Found Himself in the Sun
© John Bills
Love. You know, the kind you clean up with the mop and bucket, like the lost catacombs of Egypt, only God knows where we stuck it. Awful, awful, awful, but at least this is guaranteed to be the only article about Safikada’s Tomb that references The Bloodhound Gang. Or the only article written about Banja Luka that references The Bloodhound Gang. In fact, this might be the only article of any kind written in 2022 that references The Bloodhound Gang, full stop.
Anyway, back to love. The L-word has a lot to answer for. It makes people do crazy things in the hope of acquiring it, only to demand subservience and further sacrifice in a misguided quest to prove its existence. In some ways, the biblical story of Job is the story of love, of a perfect love ruined by neurosis and self-sabotage. Am I bitter? Absolutely, but many of these points stand. My bitterness is already beginning to melt. The power of silence, I suppose.
Still, without love, where is all this poetry going to come from? Where will the romance grow? Many towns have their own stories of tragic love, but it is the possibly true but probably a little allegorical story of Banja Luka’s own Safikada that stands tallest. The story of who and what now? Read on, young lover.
© Kitic Goran // Shutterstock.com
There are two prevailing tales when it comes to Safikada. The first originates from the 16th or 17th century and has the beauty as the granddaughter of Ferhat-pasha Sokolović, the grand Ottoman leader who developed Banja Luka in the first place. In this story, Safikada falls in love with a guard at the Kastel fortress, an intense love that blossomed at first sight but was predictably buggered by the whole ‘family will choose your husband’ element of 16/17th century Ottoman society. The lovers decided to flee, because obviously, only for her soldier beau to be called to the front to fight for the empire. This didn’t end well for him (he died), and Safikada was understandably distraught once the news got back to Banja Luka. In an act of eternal defiance, she put on a wedding dress and jumped in front of the cannon signifying midday, shouting “I will be faithful to you till the last day of my life” as she did. Unsurprisingly, jumping in front of a cannon made this the last day of her life.
The second version? Well, that has its roots much closer to the modern-day but follows much the same plot. In this version, Safikada is the daughter of a wealthy merchant from the town, but she still falls in love with a soldier guarding the fortress, an Austro-Hungarian soldier no less. Of course, he gets sent to the front, where he meets his end, and Safikada is once more distraught. In a highly-charged response to what she considered an act of meddling that came from the highest charge, she defiantly strode towards the fortress, ignoring calls for her to stop from the guards. She didn’t stop, and one guard felt he had no option but to shoot Safikada. Shoot her he did, and that was that.
The string that ties these stories together is the same. Safikada was a beautiful girl from Banja Luka who had the temerity to fall in love with someone she, you know, loved, not someone chosen for her by her family. Alas, her love could never be realised, and she decided that life was not worth living if it was denied such a love. Whether or not there has ever been a noon cannon in Banja Luka (there hasn’t) is irrelevant because the story of Safikada has nothing to do with minutiae and everything to do with matters of the heart.
You don’t choose who you fall in love with. You can, but that love will almost certainly be false. Safikada’s final resting place can be found between the fortress and Banja Luka’s central mosque, and it has become a small pilgrimage spot for lovers around the country, lighting candles in memory of the love that was not allowed to be. But, as Mr Twigg told us, love is not a decision, it is a feeling.
Love. It’s a crazy thing, you know? This most undescribable of emotions fuels much of the joy that keeps the world turning. As a wise man once said, don’t love wisely; love well.
