Banja Luka // White Guy, With a Moustache, About Six Foot Three
© Dejan Polovina // Shutterstock.com
In the centre of Banja Luka, there is a park. This park, as it goes, is built around one of the great moustaches in the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is a magnificent moustache, a bristler, a tickler, a bushy bugger that dominates the face as much as it does the lip. The sort of moustache that takes years of development, years of cultivation, years of dedication and commitment to grow.
This isn’t the sort of moustache that grows on trees, which is an easy segue back into the park that stretches around it. Okay, the park isn’t actually built around a moustache, that would be too awesome, but the man celebrated in its name and in its centre was a man with a seriously good ‘tache, and the statue in question somehow does justice to it. That man was a poet and playwright, an argumentative and irascible man who was as passionate as they came and had a way with words that inked his name into the history books. His name was Petar Kočić, and those same history books aren’t always overjoyed by his memory, but his influence is undeniable. That is how history works, I’m afraid.
Kočić was born in a tiny village called Stričići, located just north of Banja Luka. It was the day after Vidovdan in 1877, and the Ottoman Empire’s rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina was as good as done. In fact, within a year, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had begun de-facto rule down here, setting in motion a changing of the guard that was basically just a different type of awful. If Petar Kočić had been born half a century earlier, he almost certainly would have spent his life rallying against the ills of the Ottoman yoke.
But he wasn’t, so he didn’t. Kočić was the son of a priest and a mother who soon died giving birth to Petar’s brother. Understandably distraught, Petar’s father decided to head to Gomionica Monastery to become a monk, leaving his three children in the care of the rural community. This meant work and lots of it, giving Petar no time to learn how to read, no time to learn how to write. That would have to wait until his second decade.
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That time came when he headed to Gomionica aged 11, and Lordy did the boy make up for the lost time. Education finally came to Petar Kočić, although the time and place of it all meant that the boy was taught Serbian history and little else. Add this to a decade of the available storytelling being folk tales told in the dead of the rural night, and what do you expect? Nationalists aren’t born, they are developed. Growing up in abject poverty with only grand tales of national warriors for comfort, it would have been weird for Petar Kočić to develop in any other way.
That shouldn’t be taken as an excuse, of course, but stories are never, ever as clear and simple as we might like them to be. Kočić was a bright student, an energetic and enthusiastic one, but his fiery personality brought confrontation and complication. He was diligent and attentive, sure, but he was also expending plenty of energy raging against the machine. He was also getting to know the bars of Sarajevo (Petar moved to the city after completing elementary school in Banja Luka), and one such night brought an altercation with a group of Bosniaks in which Petar was the aggressor. The Gymnasium wasn’t having any of this, and Petar was, for want of a better phrase, out on his arse. Off he went in search of further education, a search that took him to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.
You’d think that the young Petar Kočić was happy to be in Belgrade, but the opposite was true. Okay, not exactly the opposite, but he certainly wasn’t too chuffed. You see, he was absolutely impoverished, living on benches and frequently facing the wrath of bored policemen. Education came at a price, both literal and figurative, and that price did untold damage to the body and mind of Petar Kočić. He wasn’t alone in this fate, such was the state of eking out an education at the time. Yes, it meant learning, studying and growing, but it also almost guaranteed illness, hunger and poverty. An already fragile Kočić grew ever more disillusioned, seeing his life as one difficult phase after another.
And so, he began to write. It would be disingenuous to say that Petar Kočić found salvation and happiness in writing. It would also be incorrect. Writing was very much an outlet for Kočić, a way to vent anger and frustration at a world around him that he saw as being filled with injustice.
He also happened to be pretty darn good at it. It was as a writer that his name first gathered traction. Kočić focused his writing on the lives of peasants (particularly in direct opposition to the privileged lives of the Austrian bureaucracy), rallying cries against subjugation and inequality. His most famous work was Jazavac pred sudam, The Badger on Trial, the story of a not entirely sane farmer (from Melina, just outside Banja Luka) called David Strbac who attempts to sue a badger for having the temerity to eat crops. The whole thing descends into a farce, obviously, but the farmer ends up being a little more in charge of his faculties than the disbelieving court wants to accept.
Kočić’s writing was just about as anti-occupation as it got. He took every opportunity to denounce the ruling class, be it the Austrian authorities or landowners around the country. His audience grew, and it wasn’t long before his diatribes attracted the unwanted attention of those in charge. I say “unwanted”, it may have been exactly what Kočić wanted, but it also saw him thrown in prison for two months. The fiery writer refused to play ball, and those two months were extended by eight more, and once again. By 15. Most of this was spent in solitary confinement. As one can assume, his mental health deteriorated further.
© WikiMedia Commons
When Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1907, there was a general amnesty, a hope that those considered politically undesirable could be rehabilitated. There are no lost causes, after all. Alas, the Empire was disastrously optimistic here. Kočić was released and soon found his way into formal politics, rallying for agrarian reforms, freedom of the press and all the rest. For the Serbs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Petar Kočić was a leader, a volatile man who wasn’t afraid to take on the state, no matter the damage it did to him.
In this instance, ‘damage’ is an understatement. Mentally exhausted, Kočić resigned from politics. A few years later, he was moved into a Belgrade mental asylum, where he spent two miserable years before passing away in the chaos of World War I. He may have committed suicide, but it is more than likely that a lifetime of stress and the whole ‘city being bombed’ thing brought about his end.
How is Petar Kočić remembered? A difficult question, one that will get differing answers depending on who is asked. For some, he is a volatile character who embodiment many of the worst national stereotypes, a passionate man with a poor temperament prone to outbursts. To others, he was a figure of hope, a voice in the darkness. To all, he was an engaging writer, a creative who found a way to tackle real issues in an accessible form. Kočić inspired a whole generation of writers, for better or for worse. Among them was Ivo Andrić.
Petar Kočić and his remarkable moustache live on across Bosnia and Herzegovina today, with streets, statues and schools named after him. His moustachioed gaze stares back from 50% of the 100KM banknotes in the country, although God help you if you get one of them. Getting rid of those things is tough business.
