Resurrecting the Mosque of Banja Luka

The story of the Ferhadija mosque begins with a doomed Hapsburg general, Herbard VIII von Auersperg, who, like so many in the Balkans before and since, got into a territorial dispute and lost his head. The year was 1575 and the victor, the Pasha Ferhat Sokolović, had lately become the first beylerbey of Ottoman Bosnia. The territory in question is sickle-shaped, curving along the present-day border of Bosnia and Croatia. It is still known as the Krajina, or Borderland, a term derived from the Slavic word meaning “edge,” or “to cut.” It is a territory that has always been at the limits of empires, the possession of one man and the object of another’s desire.

The Pasha took as his prizes the land, Auersperg’s son (a prisoner), and the general’s decapitated head, which, affixed to a spear, presided over the Pasha’s victory parade. (In response to this ignominy, the heads of two minor pashas were erected on pikes at the site of the next Auersperg victory, “to revenge Herbard’s highly esteemed head.”) Then, for 30,000 ducats, the Pasha ransomed the head and the son back to the Auerspergs. It was this money, according to legend, with which he commissioned a mosque for his new capital city, Banja Luka, deep in the heart of the Krajina. Designed in the studios of Mimar Sinan, known as the greatest architect of Ottoman reign, the Ferhadija was a mosque of legendary beauty, famous, like Helen of Troy, for its pallor, rare proportions, and the grace and slenderness of its minaret. “In the face of such beauty,” wrote a Croatian traveler five hundred years later, “was it possible, then, to stop the imagination?”

The people said that, jealous that no one else should possess something so beautiful, Ferhat Paşa locked the three master masons in the Ferhadija’s minaret. High in the tower, the masons fashioned wooden wings and leapt from the serefa and flew towards the river Vrbas, where they plummeted to their deaths. Ten years later, the Pasha died at the hands of a mutinous slave.

It is a joke in Bosnia that so many of its people have lived in three states — they were born in one, lived in another, and will die in a third — without ever leaving home. In this regard the Ferhadija is no different from the next citizen. In 1878, the Ferhadija mosque passed from the Ottomans into the hands of the Austro-Hungarians, from whom it was liberated by a Serbian king in 1918 and brought under the auspices of his new state, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which was subsequently toppled by Hitler and the fascist Croatian Ustaše in 1941, an alliance which was, in turn, ousted four years later by Josip Broz Tito’s guerrilla band of communist Partisans. Tito, factory worker-turned-revolutionary, went on to found and lead the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was taken over by Serbian nationalists when Tito died in 1980, and from which a new coalition declared Bosnia independent on March 3, 1992, prompting the war which brought us the Serb nationalist Radovan Karadžić, who declared the Republika Srpska the ancestral homeland of the Serbs, himself as its president, and Banja Luka as its de facto capital. These last rulers, who did not like what the mosque represented, lined it with explosives, and, in 1993, blew the Ferhadija up.

In 2016, after twenty-three years of dismemberment, the mosque was resurrected in its eighth homeland: The Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This is the mosque that I have come to see.