Bihać // The Whole Idea of Architecture is Permanence

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It was a little strange how much exploring we did before actually getting to Bihać. My first morning in the town was spent at Japodski Otoci, a gorgeous collection of islands 15km away that eventually became the location for my imaginary wedding. Okay, not the imaginary wedding itself, but the imaginary post-wedding celebration. The islands were the domain of the Japodes (or Iapydes), but those water-loving wonders will get their own focus in time. After that, we visited some rafting camps before heading out to Željava, an abandoned secret Yugoslav military base that I wrote about months and months ago. By the early afternoon, the research for Bihać finally made it to Bihać.

I always feel a little uncomfortable saying Bihać.

Bihać still manages to be underrated here. I’m not entirely sure how, as it is surrounded by the most beautiful national park, some gorgeous towns, and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s best river acts as its spine. The centre of the town is a charming pedestrian area lined with cafes, while the city park is accentuated by the aforementioned magnificence of the Una river. Yes, the park used to be a cemetery, but I don’t make the rules. You do.

Actually, why bother beating around the bush? No, that isn’t a park joke. The entire theme of this piece is the concept of repurposing, or maybe the concept of reductionism. Should we consider things as they are now, or as the end result of everything that has created them? Does the present matter in and of itself, or can it only be considered with the past included? Are buildings whole, or bricks and mortar? Am I John, or a miracle of atoms and biology? The truth is yes, yes, yes. That doesn’t make for great reading.

Once you know that the central park in Bihać used to be a cemetery, is it possible to forget that? That might be a dramatic example, but that is the example that has turned this particular light on. It was the Austrians who decided to make the change, eager as they were to live next to life as opposed to death. You can blame the Habsburgs for a lot, but you can’t blame them for that. The corpses were moved, and trees were planted in their stead.

© John Bills

The Gradski park in Bihać isn’t even the most obvious example of this in town. The Fethija Mosque stands proud at the top of the pedestrian street, but it doesn’t take an architectural expert to notice something different. The main body of the mosque doesn’t follow the usual form. It is blocky, to say the least. Come to think of it, it looks a little bit more like a church, doesn’t it?

Who are you asking, John? Yourself?

Before it was a mosque, the Fethija Mosque was the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua. A house of Catholicism, it was constructed in 1266 and takes the crown as the oldest Gothic building in Bosnia and Herzegovina, although it is important to note that that isn’t an actual prize. Bihać was a fairly well-fortified town, first mentioned six years earlier in a charter from our old buddy King Bela IV (he of Bellator fame), who took charge a couple of years later and proclaimed it a royal free city.

No, no history today.

Okay, answer number one. You can’t tell any story without first acknowledging its origins and what brought it to the moment of telling. The Ottomans conquered Bihać in June 1592 and set about making the place their own, so to speak, and the church had to go. They didn’t exactly want to smash it down and rebuild, so they essentially repurposed the thing. The Gothic tower was used as a minaret, and several small changes were made to the interior to make it less church-ish and more mosque-ish. Some windows were walled up, others pierced. The Ottomans thought the ceiling was too high, so a lower one was built, creating a vault between the original and the new.

Today, the Church of Saint Anthony of Padua is the Fethija Mosque. A church of the same name has been built elsewhere in Bihać, but that isn’t my concern here. I considered the mosque, aware that it was once a church, but how to view it as anything other than a mosque? If you cut your hair short, I’d struggle to remember it long. It was once a house of Catholic worship, today one of Islamic worship. Being a lapsed Christian on a slow path to Islam, there are easy links to make there.

© John Bills

But no, John, it is a building. Mosques and churches are where communities of faith come together, but they are not faith itself. That is an internal thing. It is an individual’s relationship with the world around them. If there were no churches and mosques in the modern world, I wager that faith would still exist, and differences of faith too. My god is not your god, but there is no god but God. Today, the mosque is a mosque. Previously, it was a church. What will it be in the future? And all this is at odds with the initial idea of architecture. The whole idea of architecture is permanence. Somewhere along the way, it got bastardised and became more about art than function. This is true of everything.

And this conjures up one of the great struggles of existence. We are constantly told to live in the moment, but how can we live in the moment when we must consider the past and the present all at once? Should we look at everything in a vacuum? What a hollow way of living. When I look at you, I don’t just see you in the moment. I see you in every moment I have ever seen you, all the moments I didn’t get to see, and all the moments I will miss. We are everything. Buildings are buildings, but their stories aren’t one dimensional, they are kaleidoscopic.

Life is kaleidoscopic, even when it looks grey. We are magnificent, even when we don’t believe it.