Knežina // Time Machines Exist
The clock needs to be turned back for context here. I’m not talking about daylight savings either, I'm talking centuries, to a very different time when this same bit of land was a very different place. History always leaves its mark, and sometimes that mark is the absence of anything.
We had driven the 12km from Sokolac and made it to the village of Knežina, but there wasn’t any village to be seen. According to the 1991 census, 465 people lived here. I could see only six people here today, but that was the constituent number of our group. There hadn’t been much in the way of life on the journey either, although judging villages by the roads that lead to them is naive at best, insulting at worst.
But back to that clock. Rewind it all the way back to the beginning of the 16th century, let's say 1516. The Ottoman Empire was in charge of these parts, and the magnificently named Selim the Grim was in charge of the Ottoman Empire. Why the grim, you ask? The father of Suleiman the Magnificent, Selim was responsible for expanding the empire’s borders by some 70%, which he certainly didn’t do through diplomacy and human kindness. Selim was unapologetically brutal and cruel, a product of an upbringing focused first on survival, although don’t make the mistake of considering him an outlier. The 16th century was cruel, more often than not. His epithet could just as easily be translated as ‘the Resolute’, after all.
And what of Knežina? I don’t know if bustling would be the right word, but compared to its current dormant state, bustling probably makes sense. Heck, maybe it was chaotic. In that year (the same year when the world’s oldest social housing complex still in use was built, for reference), Knežina was awarded the status of a settlement, given a leader and the means with which to defend itself. It became a thing, if you’ll allow the use of more modern parlance.
To be given this status, Knežina needed to meet the spiritual and religious needs of its Islamic community, to provide education for the young, accommodation for traders and organised facilities for its craftsmen. A mosque was needed, but it didn’t take long for four to be built. More than 300 houses also shot up, and by the mid 17th century, Knežina had a population of more than 1500.
I hadn’t seen a single house since we had arrived.
Soon, using the word ‘bustling’ to describe Knežina wouldn’t have been too much of a stretch. There were markets, tanneries, mills, craftsmen, traders coming and going, the buzz of ambition, the low hum of a society going about its business. Life revolved around the Sultan Selim Mosque, a single-spaced domed mosque with a led-dome and a very tall minaret. That mosque still stands today, although it hasn’t been standing continuously since its 16th-century construction.
We weren’t looking only at the mosque. We had ventured a couple hundred metres or so behind the mosque to the monastery, although please don’t take that distance as gospel. My perception of distance is notoriously pathetic.
The 14th century Orthodox Monastery was a darling to appreciate. You could say “small but perfectly formed”, but the umbrella of faith can never really be described as small. The monastery, itself dedicated to the Mother of God with a monastery church dedicated to Saint Equal to the Apostles Emperor Constantine and the Empress Saint Helen (I shit thee nay), was one of the oldest in the area, constructed in 1371 and possessing a history of struggle and silence in equal measure. The monastery was built by Andrijas, the brother of Livno-born Serbian Prince Marko, the unfortunate fellow who had the joy of being the de jure Serbian king in the late 14th century. The Ottomans destroyed it, although it was eventually rebuilt. There was a worry that the communists of Yugoslavia 2.0 wouldn’t allow its survival, but they were surprisingly okay with it, provided it didn’t change from its original purpose. Small fry, I guess.
I ambled around the church, again reticent to enter, content with considering it from the outside and admiring the tranquillity of its small cemetery. Morbid, yes, but aesthetics are aesthetics.
Our group soon moved down to the mosque, the former centre of Knežina, where 500 years of history were condensed into stone and glass. Despite my best intentions and ambitions, buildings do not talk to me. I can read as many books about the communicative nature of architecture as I like, but I will still stand in front of a structure and see only the materials and function. Walls do not speak, windows do not inform.
Besides, the Sultan Selim Mosque was relatively new in this iteration, having been rebuilt in 2011. It was destroyed in 1992, as the war kicked into ever-new gears. Its dome was splendid, its minaret daunting, its undeniable sense of peace infectious. I love mosques, I absolutely adore them, especially those found in the relative wilderness. The memory of Knežina’s Sultan Selim Mosque is defined by its former glory as a social centre, but today it reigns as a beacon of peace in a landscape of grass.
It all makes for a quite beautiful image, no matter your angle of approach. With the monastery in the foreground, you are blessed with a minaret in the background, with the reverse being true. You can draw all the lines between societies of multiple faiths, but introducing such conversations into the image would only muddy the waters. In purely aesthetic terms, the double act of the Sultan Selim Mosque and Knežina’s Orthodox Monastery was a beautiful sight.
