Banovići // The Enormous Last Day of Life
© John Bills
When you’re dead, you are dead for a long time.
Advice to live by, I assure you. There must be a joke there somewhere, a quip about life advice focusing on what comes after, but I’m neither energetic nor witty enough to make it. There is a delightful contradiction, in that much of my religion-based annoyance comes from the addiction to a hypothetical afterlife at the expense of the actual lives we are living. That, however, is another story for another day.
Besides, we needed to find the damn cemetery first. Almir had been a fantastic host all day, carting me around the sights and sounds of Banovići and the surrounding region, filling me with information and curiosities and generally doing an excellent job of proving the general first impression of Banovići to be wrong. First impressions? I’ll get to those in time too, but right now, we’re focusing on the small matter of eternity.
It will come back to Banovići, I promise you. Have some faith in me, dear reader.
© John Bills
It shouldn’t be any great surprise to know that we got lost looking for this small Turkish cemetery, because the cemetery itself was lost to the world for centuries. It wasn’t until a farmer got too enthusiastic with a sickle that its presence was discovered, or re-discovered. Nobody knows how long it has been here, nobody knows why it is here, nobody knows anything.
There’s a point in there. Nobody knows anything.
We eventually found the cemetery after going up and down mud roads, Almir doing his best to centralise us while I remarked about the size of the snails here. Big, for the record. Almir found the place, and I stopped talking about snails.
The Turkish cemetery is somewhere between Gradina and Draganja, a couple of settlements that make up Tulovići, itself a disparate collection of houses 10 minutes or so north of Banovići. There are a few graveyards in these parts, although something about this one makes it stand out. The setting, for one, as the tombs inch their way up a small hill overlooking the area. The views go on, as the cliche goes, for days, but the pockmarked nature of the gravestones is the aesthetic gem. Each is decorated, a knife here, an arrow there, an envelope, money, crops and the like, theoretically depicting the purpose of the soul buried deep underneath. Some are big, some are small, all are important.
Cemeteries conjure up intense thoughts at the best of times, but there was an intangible loss to this one that jarred. Life is to be celebrated, cherished, adored, lived. We all die, of course, but that doesn’t mean our lives should be lived in a throwaway manner, quite the opposite. We are meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but life isn’t lived in the grand scheme of things. Love is a big, wonderful idea, but life is made of small things.
© John Bills
But the ‘meaningless’ word stands out. All of the individuals buried on this small knoll just outside Banovići lived lives, they were children of people who lived lives, yet their final resting place was lost for centuries. Not hidden, lost. Not secret, abandoned. Not disguised, ignored. What meaning can be taken from this other than the inevitability of our own degradation? Life is fragile, memory even more so. We already compromise our memories with accentuations and how we want things to have happened. When all of that is out of our control? One generation remembers, the next one recalls, the next reminds, the next abandons. After that? It doesn’t matter, buddy, you are gone. When you're dead, you're dead for a long time.
I don’t know how many tombs there were on this small hill. Did it matter? Not really. It could have been 200, the number itself rendered meaningless by the futility of everything. There is that word again, although I implore you to remove your negative connotations and try to fill it with joy. Being meaningless does not mean being pointless. Being meaningless can be liberating. I don’t know how many tombs there were on this small hill. The only point of importance was that they were here.
The sky was a tranquil mix of blue, grey and white, further imbuing the scene with a sense of removal. We are all essentially living one last enormous day of life. How we celebrate that is entirely up to us.
We stayed for a short while at the cemetery, remarking about the various decorations and contemplating eternity. It is a difficult concept to contemplate, I assure you. It is big, for a start, infinite or unending time. Don’t try to comprehend it, because that rabbit hole goes deep. Heck, the rabbit hole goes on forever, hence the ‘infinite’ aspect of it all. It is thought that many of those buried on the Gradina knoll were Ottoman soldiers, those who took part in the capture of the region for the Empire, but that is speculation. Accurate speculation, I’m sure, but speculation nonetheless.
© John Bills
The only thing that is certain, in 2022, is that those men were buried in a gorgeous part of the world. The air was serene. It took a long time for these tombs to be discovered, but maybe it was all worth it in the end. Eventual discovery must count for something. Not that these individuals care, they are dead, after all.
Because when you are dead, you are dead for a long time.
We left the cemetery and headed to the Misirlije Turbe, the final resting place of an Ottoman pasha thought to be from Egypt, a seven-metre-long grave designed as such to leave nobody in any doubt as to his power and status. He too, is dead. There are a lot of indispensable people in the graveyard.
