The cultural tradition of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when we talk about performing arts, existed in the time of the medieval Bosnian rulers who had professional entertainers in their courts and residences, so-called jugglers, histrions, buffoons, mimes, pipers, string players, as well as traveling groups of various profiles. They were sought after when various public or private festivities needed to be celebrated in a ceremonial manner. Records of the Dubrovnik archives and documented chronicles from the 14th or 15th century serve as an evidence of this.
In Bosnia at that time, there were no prominent playwrights, nor a special written dramatic heritage. Bosnian (as well as European) medieval theatrical life took place in the streets, squares, and churches (“Liturgical Drama” and “Church Performances”).
Social prestige
Thus, inside the city walls, or outside them, in the meadows, on improvised fairground scenes, among the diverse population or, closed and exclusive circles, it lived in the courts and castles of rich feudal lords and nobles, often for the purpose of highlighting their wealth, importance and social prestige.
– After the fall of Bosnia under the Ottomans in 1463, theater arts gradually declined, the myth was interrupted and stopped, so that in the next three centuries it almost completely disappeared from the social scene, reducing theater and dramatic art exclusively to isolated and barely recognizable attempts. In the Islamic world of that time, according to strict dogmatic understandings, it was shameful for a person to appear on stage. Moreover, as the Ottoman authorities at that time did not know or practice theater arts for religious and social reasons, they immediately began to suppress this type of stage entertainment after the conquest, which completely disappeared in the following period. But what remained was the so-called folk acting, which did not require a stage, and in which the audience was a full participant. On these natural stages, various jokes, taunts, thanks, imitations, pantomimes, monologues, acrobatics, folk dances were performed… Shadow and puppet plays were shown, performances with animals… – explains Nedim Mušović, museum advisor at the Museum of Literature and Performing Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for the magazine Visit BiH.
Later, long after the Ottoman conquests, in Bosnia, under the influence of oriental shadow theatre, at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries, a certain, in terms of performance, extremely important form of folk entertainment developed under the name Karađoz (Turkish: Karagöz, black-eyed), which, in accordance with rigorous religious postulates, eliminated the presence of a live actor or entertainer on stage.
Nevertheless, it inevitably nurtured dialogue and certain structural elements as the basic dramatic and performative link necessary for the development and flow of the play. This type of stage storytelling was very popular during the Ottoman Empire and was widely performed in taverns, inns and public spaces as well as private homes, especially during the month of Ramadan.
– Only from the middle of the 19th century did the initial specific forms of pure theatrical activity appear. The first harbingers of dramatic enthusiasm were teachers and pedagogues who began to come to Bosnian regions in increasing numbers, introducing, based on modest experience, into their schools special ceremonies that include, in addition to didactic lectures, ceremonial speeches, ceremonial performances, and appropriate patriotic-religious recitations in the form of dramatic form or monologues in part or in full – Mušović points out.
Thus, stage life in Bosnia and Herzegovina slowly awakens in 1840, when the teacher Aleksandar Banović comes from Dubrovnik to Sarajevo. From a group of his students that same year, he founded an amateur troupe and with them for two years occasionally performed plays for the public.
-However, since he could not sustain himself because he did not encounter the necessary understanding, he left Bosnia in 1842, and the information about his attempt to create a theater is very scarce and left in fragments. In these isolated attempts by individual enthusiasts to establish some kind of theater and organize theater performances in Bosnia, the most significant is certainly the work of teacher Stevo Petranović, who founded the “Amateur Theater Society” in Tešanj in 1864, with which on May 23, 1865, as the exact date of the premiere, he staged Hebbel’s “Judith,” thus becoming a kind of progenitor of modern theater life in these regions. Later, within the same theater society, plays by Schiller, J. S. Popović, Matija Ban… were performed – he says.
Theater in the House
He adds that Petranović’s theatrical significance is best seen in the fact that even after his departure, and especially during the period of Austro-Hungarian rule, Tešanj was a place with intense stage amateurism.
-Not long after these attempts, an amateur theater of the English consul Holmes, the “International Theater”, operated in Sarajevo (around 1867) and had a closed character. The actors and guests, or rather the audience, were mostly the consul himself with his family, with the help of foreign officials and members of the diplomatic corps in Sarajevo, and some prominent representatives of the Ottoman administration also attended the performances. The repertoire was mainly improvisational, with many performances, sketches, dances and plays, mostly performed in French, which was the means of diplomatic communication at the time – says Mušović.
According to him, in the ” Sarajevski cvjetnik ” newspaper, in which the word theater is mentioned for the first time, it is recorded that for a short time the consul of the North German Confederation, Dr. Otto Blau also temporarily staged theatrical performances in the premises of the Prussian consulate.
-Sometime around 1870, probably under the influence of Holmes’s theater, the “Theater in the House of the Despić Brothers”, a famous Sarajevo merchant family, was established, and chamber performances were performed occasionally until the occupation of 1878. The repertoire of this theater consisted mainly of comedies and cheerful plays by contemporary Serbian comedy writers, as well as recitations of folk songs and other stage performances of a diverse nature – Mušović emphasizes.
Therefore, the concrete history of the dramatic genre in Bosnia and Herzegovina begins only in the era of Austro-Hungarian rule, especially in the last decade of the 19th century, when a cultural revival took place among all the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it manifested itself through the establishment of cultural and artistic societies, the launch of magazines of various profiles, the opening of reading rooms and amateur stages where the first performances of traveling theaters (from Serbia, Croatia, Austria and Hungary) were performed, which became a kind of impetus for the creation of the first domestic dramatic texts.
