Spirit of Place and Nation Building. Kosovo and Bosnia from Imperial to Post-Communist Times

During the period of nation building, the spirit of place ( genius loci ), attributing uniqueness to specific locations and ascribing to them close attachment to the nation, became a central vehicle for defending and appropriating territories and even for establishing a diaspora in exile. It was evoked through discursive practices reminiscent of religious rhetoric and around monumental works of art, thereby staging history as mythical sacred theatre. The process of establishing imagined national geographies during the long period of nation building from the nineteenth century to the post-communist period is analysed in comparative perspective in two multi-religious and multi-ethnical regions in southeast Europe— Kosovo and Bosnia. The leading question I will try to answer is why the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo was successfully established as a national holy place in the collective memory of the Serbs, whereas similar efforts in Bosnia did not result in inscribing mythic places into national memory.

with it 2 -similar to the death toll Christian martyrs had to pay for their loyal attachment to their religious faith.
When milieu and racist theories of the nineteenth century culminated in the "bloodand-soil" ideology of the Nazis, the mythical spirit of place provided the compatriots who believed in the mission of racially purifying with spiritual and physical powers that arose from its telluric depth. One of the leading landscape and portrait photographers of the Third Reich, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen (1883-1962, writes in an introduction to her book of photographs Mountain People (Bergmenschen, 1936) about the mutual penetration of the land and the people manifesting in their physiognomy and habit: Just look at them: our high mountain dwellers. They are steep: the back of their head, the nose, the chin, the gaze, the posture, the walk....They are all their own landscape: craggy and cracked like the old mountains, grown old by the harsh weather of time; quick-tempered like wild streams of snow water in spring; in their eyes the bright power of mountain flowers. Here it is: the face of the landscape in the landscape of the face. 3 (Lendvai-Dircksen 1936, unpaginated) 4 In her photo book The Face of the German East (Das Gesicht des deutschen Ostens, 1937) she compares the power of natural forces in Saxony with the conquest of the German settlers, whose 'urge to the east' is depicted as an almost cultic approach to the rising sun: Dark harmony in minor is sprinkled by the light of the northern face; the violence of the rhythms of feeling, fresh natural forces form and shape the face of the German East. Blood flows of all tribes of the empire surged in the waves of the centuries against the strangeness that crowds out of the giant eastern areas. Good, best 2 Mountains, which were especially glorified in German films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Arnold Fanck's The Holy Mountain (1926) or Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (1932), merged with the elementary spirit of its people who died in their gorges. people's force of German lands searched and found their living space in the open East, towards the rising sun. (Lendvai-Dircksen 1937, unpaginated). 5 In her later photographic book Migrating Dunes (Wanderdünen, around 1940) living being, born on earth and moving on the earth. (Schmitt [1942] 2018, 7) 6 However, the space revolution (Raumrevolution), which started with overseas expeditions, attached great importance to the water as a field of domination and transformed peasants into pirates. Schmitt observes that a new space revolution is taking place through the conquest of the element of air, which suspends the old division between land and sea and makes them equal to the "nomos of the Earth"-the space of conquest, of division and of utilization (ibid., 71).
Franz Strunz (1875Strunz ( -1953, professor of history of natural sciences in Vienna and member of the NSDAP, even claimed that "landscape, especially the extreme landscape (not the easy comprehensible geometric one) forms the human. Man carries it with him, ill-humoured, when it is dark, plain and heavy, relieved and elevated, when he sees the bright heaven over himself" (Strunz 1939, 144). 7 He attributed to Germans a special relationship to nature und named German medieval mystics, romantic and symbolist poets, and writers as examples: We Germans see the landscape as the most humane among all peoples of the earth. Landscape, folk character and homesickness are German destinies. We Germans have discovered it as a subjective experience: as a space experience and a mental-spiritual reproduction of this existence. Landscape is made up of landspace, spirit and sentiment. (Strunz 1939, 146) 8 According to Strunz, landscape has a power which can be compared to the transforming forces of historical events. At the same time, he declares homesickness to be a geo-psychical illness especially affecting the German nation (Volksgemeinschaft), understood as a community based on blood ties, due to its close relatedness to the soil and environment (Umwelt). This painful desire finally transgresses geography and becomes a form of biological self-preservation. Homeland therefore means, as Strunz concludes, "a paradigm of all reality and experience, just as man is the image of the world." 9 Therefore, he declares homesickness closely related to wanderlust (Fernweh) and home as "a bridge to the world" (ibid., 151). Such understanding of home and homesickness has not excluded expansion. The conquest of new space for living was at the same time considered the natural right of a superior race: where it did not have it, it was doomed to conquer it-as "the nation without space" (Volk ohne Raum), propagated as a complementary ideology by the publicist Hans Grimm (1875Grimm ( -1959 in his eponymous book from 1926. The new territories in the East should provide space for future German generations longing for "freedom": in an eternal struggle for life, they had to extend their territory not only in a romantic-religious vertical direction to heaven, but also in a horizontal, expansive direction eastwards into the neighbouring, racially "inferior" countries (Grimm [1926(Grimm [ ] 1936. In the course of nineteenth-and twentieth-century nation building, the Janusfaced longing for the spirit of place was thus destined to become a central vehicle for patriotic defence of the homeland, on the one hand, or a means for the expansive appropriation of new territories, underpinned by milieu and racial theories, on the other hand. The process of evoking the spirit of place went hand in hand with sacralisation of the homeland and its compatriots, and the demonization of all those excluded from the primordial bond of community and nature, considered to be "foreigners" or "homeless nomads" as Jews (Darré 1942, 5-6).
In the following, I want to outline the process of a growing spirit of place in two multi-religious, multi-ethnical regions in southeast Europe during the long period of nation building from the nineteenth century to the post-communist period after the Yugoslav disintegration wars in the 1990s: Kosovo and Bosnia. First, I would like to demonstrate the role of discursive practices for reviving and re-enacting historical events of (imaginary) national or even transnational importance at a specific locationin order to evoke the spirit of place and to sacralise the sacrifice of the nation. Further, I will analyse the role of art and architecture to resituate the traces of the past or even to transfer the spirit of place from one location to another for the period when the place was occupied by enemies and thus not accessible. Finally, I will suggest some reasons to explain why the Field of Blackbird was inscribed, with long-lasting effects, as a holy place into the collective memory of the Serbs, whereas in Bosnia, similar efforts at the foundation of a common Bosnian identity reminded unsuccessful.

the Genius Loci on the Field of blackbirds in Kosovo
The battle on the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo polje), in which the Serbian knights were defeated together with their Bosnian allies by the Ottoman army on 15 June (according to the Gregorian calendar) respectively 28 June (according to the Julian calendar) in 1389, became an increasingly important historical event during the middle of the nineteenth century, not only for Serbian but also for international European politics.
The Serbian struggle for liberation, although less supported by the Europeans than the battles in Greece, and the "Turkish question," concerning the division of the Ottoman legacy among new national states, raised the issue of the forgotten medieval battle (Zirojević 1998;Sundhaussen 1999;2000). It soon took on a fateful dimension for In the following decades, British writers, or those based in Great Britain, increasingly

11
Reports from Slavonic Lands (1844-1847) was published by the Russian Slavicist Victor I.
Grigorovich, who does not mention the famous battle at all (Grigorovich 1916 Kóssovo belonged to Europe-to a society, though rude, of activity and progress; but it was conquered to be a pasture-ground for Turkish horses, on just such a showery morning as this, some five hundred years ago. (Mackenzie and Irby 1877, 182-183) However, the local Serbs would compensate for the lack of historical traces by reciting folk ballads and by vivid, colourful descriptions of the battle-as if they had themselves participated in it.
...and so fresh remains its memory that to this day it is scarcely possible for a traveller to converse from more than a few minutes with a genuine Serbian without hearing the name of Kóssovo....As for any one who has been much in Serbia, and has studied the national traditions and songs, he will at last come to feel almost as if he had been at the battle of Kóssovo himself, so minutely is every detail enumerated, so vividly are the motives and actions realised, so deep the lines, so strong the colours, in which the principal characters are drawn. (ibid., 183-184) The writer and artist Mary Edith Durham (1863Durham ( -1944

reports in her travel journey
Through the Land of Serbs, published in 1904, how strongly the memory of the past dominates present life: "They sang me snatches of Servian ballads-all monotonous wails over the slaying of someone by the Turks, ending in a cry for vengeance" (1904,202). A year later, in the travel report The Burden of the Balkans (1905), the author warns in the preface that the contemporary revolts in the Balkans are no longer only of religious origin, but have racial motives, asserting that the revolutionary party in Bulgaria would also murder Christians of all other Balkan nations when the opportunity occurred (1905, vii, viii). She describes the Balkan people as living "in their past to an extent which is hard for us in the West to realize" (ibid., 4). In her 1909 report High Albania, which includes Kosovo, she realises that the region was populated at that time mainly by Albanian-speaking people (1909,278). Nevertheless, the Serbian population used to regard the region as its own and to appropriate it by comparing the historical battle with catastrophes of biblical proportions and by interpreting natural phenomena as divine miracles: There spread out, burnt, and parched before us for miles and miles, was Kosovopolje, the fatal field on which the Turks gained the victory that established them,   in the Habsburg monarchy (Zimmermann 2016a;2016b). On the basis of topographical names, they tried to derive the mythical origin of the Slavs from several old cultures, such as Old Macedonians (also identified as Illyrians) and Etruscans. By presenting the South Slavs as heirs of ancient cultures, they raised a claim of a close attachment with the spirit of a place, which was ultimately also important for the foundation of which Great Britain and its allies were about to re-conquer. In his contribution to the exhibition catalogue, James Bone (1872Bone ( -1962 describes the suggestive effect of the temple construction with its monumental, expressive sculptures: You entered a loggia formed of mourning caryatids, down which a sphinx, human save in the wings, stared watchfully and expectantly. Looking between the figures of the loggia, you saw groups of widows whose mourning and hopelessness were expressed in gestures with a primitive directness and force that came as a shock to the visitors. The loggia led to a small doomed hall, in which was a gigantic statue of the hero Marko Kraljević, the Serbian Siegfried, on his snorting horse. Round the walls in tall panels were torsos of Turks, and above was a rhythmic frieze of it that seem to throb gesture through these forms as a tempest speaks through the new and fantastic shapes it gives to the trees in its grasp, or the announcements of the tongues and crowns of flame in a forest conflagration....Its beauty comes like the beauty of the flames, which is fire itself. (Bone 1915, unpaginated) The artist received inspiration from "vivid folk-songs of his country, and something of the starkness and grandeur and terrible silhouettes of the wild hills seems to remain in his work," argues Bone. Such an expressive sort of art, bearing the militant past of the Balkan landscape in it, could be understood in times of war by British citizens as well: "In ordinary times the art of Meštrović might be too alien to England with our tradition of decorum and comfort, but in these times of stress the mood has been impelled upon us through which we can see and feel the message of his terrible images and the deep pitifulness, too, that lies within them. His heroic art, indeed, is almost the only art that does not seem alien to these mighty days." (Bone 1915, unpaginated) The exhibition was accompanied by numerous meetings Although five hundred years had passed since the battle, the medieval warriors were revived and their presence was invoked for revenge. The publicist Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874Chesterton ( -1936 compares them with the "living dead", who enjoy eternal life in the memory and identity of the nation: Five hundred years ago our Allies the Serbians went down in the great Battle of Kossovo, which was the end of their triumph and the beginning of their glory. For if the Serbian Empire was mortally wounded, the Serbian nation had a chance to prove itself immortal; since it is only in death that we can discover immortality. So awfully alive is that Christian thing called a nation that its death is a living death. It is a living death which lasts a hundred years longer than any life of man. (Chesterton 1917, 31) At The Kosovo battle, together with the peasant uprisings in the sixteenth century, was interpreted at that time as the anticipation of the partisan struggle against fascism (Zimmermann 2010a). In 1989, when the 600 th anniversary of the battle was celebrated under Slobodan Milošević's rule (1987)(1988)(1989)(1990)(1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995)(1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000), religious rituals were reanimated in the Serbian nationalist context (Zimmermann 2014a, 330-355;2014b;2014d). The images of sacred warriors were resurrected in ethno pop songs, in radio re-enactments of the battle, on the front pages of the press, in radio and film. The remains of the fallen prince Lazar, which rested in the monastery Vrdnik resp. Nova Ravanica for centuries, were brought to the Kosovo field for the festivities (Perica 2002, 128). The religious national myth appropriated the genius loci, evoking its spirits in modern media and mobilizing it for the new war, which ended with its loss, depicted as yet another martyrdom of orthodox religion.
Today, the spirit of place on the Field of Blackbirds again attracts foreign travellers.
In 2016, an anonymous British tourist confessed in the Bohemian Blog, an alternative online travel journal, that he or she visited the Field of Blackbirds due to its war-time past: It was war that attracted me to Kosovo. I don't like writing that, but it's the truth....
Back then though, all I knew about the place was the Kosovo War. I remember a year when it seemed to be all that was ever on the news; when I was growing up,

Absence of the spirit of Place in bosnia
A different pattern of appropriating the spirit of place occurred in Bosnia, which became a protectorate of the Habsburg monarchy in 1878. As early as the 1870s, the Ottoman Empire, while attempting to reform its administrative structures, permitted the previously prohibited construction of sacred places of non-Muslim religions (Sundhaussen 2014, 136 , 81-85, 192-197] his concern about Russia's new strategy to reinforce its influence in the Balkans by means of pan-Slavic propaganda (Kalaj 1885, 101-103). While the Russian empire protected all the Orthodox nations-the Greeks, the Romanians and various Slavic nations-at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it started to support particularly the Slavic "brothers" amongst Orthodox believers around the middle of the nineteenth century (Zimmermann 2014a, 103-107). Together with the enlightened local Bosnian (ibid., 28). He starts by referring to one of the rare monumental reminders of Bogumil culture: They are called the Bogumil tombs. And that those in fact belonged to some specific sect can be hardly doubted, as it can be observed that the tomb monuments are ornate neither with a cross nor with a turban; they also show no symbols of any other contemporary existing confession, whose adherents in this country, where religious life is deeply rooted, would certainly have never forgotten the signs of piety. (…) Who and what were these Bogumils? Interesting question. It will be demonstrated that the Bogumilian principle is, so to speak, the principle of Bosnian history. This is the axis around which everything revolves, so much that everything that is not related to it is limited to simple rivalries for personal power. This goes so far as to say that we can raise the question whether the Bogumils founded as well as ruined the Bosnian state. The question is important, important for Bosnia, since the Bogumils actually quite rightly called their religion the Bosnian, important in relation to the Hungarian empire, since the Bogumilian period coincided with the era of Hungarian supremacy and the sect played a major role in all Bosnian undertakings of the Arpads, Anjous and Hunyadys. Finally, the Catholic Church and Hungary lost Bosnia because they were not prepared to tolerate the Bogumils.
But the question is also important from a wider European point of view. (…) It is certain, however, that especially Manichaeanism and the Bogumils belonged to the first sects who arose in the first centuries of Christianity; there is also an organic connection between them and the Western European Reformation. It is undoubted that Bosnian Bogumilism has given a powerful stimulus to the Western European Reformation. Although not identical with it, it was in a sense the father of the same.
(ibid., 27-28) 13 Asbóth subscribes to Rački's theory that the Bogumils later converted to Islam, which advanced Bosnian Muslims, in the eyes of the Austro-Hungarian occupant, from residual residents of the Ottoman period to the status of forming the core of the Bosnian nation:   imaginary common history to the Bosnians of different ethnic groups and religions they governed.
Several large exhibitions accompanying the enlightened Austro-Hungarian project did not provide sacred environments that mythically evoked the spirit of a multinational place, but rather invited people to cosy, profane buildings. The so-called "Bosnian House" at the Millennium Exhibition in Budapest in 1886, another house at the Emperor's jubilee exposition in Vienna in 1898 and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian pavilion erected in the Rue des Nations for the Paris World's Fair in 1900 were hybrids of a Bosnian architecture and invented pseudo-Moorish stylistic elements (Reynolds 2014, 106-108;Hajdarpasic 2015, 192-196;see Fig. 3  , an influential mediator between cultures. The guide, which also provides information on the "Bosnian-Herzegovinian Tourist Club", founded in 1892, as well as other publications of this kind testify that Bosnia-Herzegovina became a popular tourist destination in Austria-Hungary at the time. The spirit of place became a part of a tourist offer, of a landscape with standardised routes and sights for experiencing a European Orient.

Vienna-born writer and journalist of Croatian origin, Milena von Preindlsberger-Mrazović
In socialist Yugoslavia, after the break with the Soviet Union in 1948, the Bogumilian myth was again used, this time in order to propagate Tito's "third way" between East and West (Zimmermann 2010a;2010b;2014a, 232-246). conclusion Kosovo and Bosnia are the scenarios of two different patterns of appropriating the spirit of place, but not equally successfully. In the former, the spirit of place was evoked over decades through intense discursive practices. It drew from monumental art and media, using them in an analogous manner to religious rituals in order to stage the events of the past as a sacred theatre. The spirit of place of the latter was based on rational, enlightened adaptations of history as displayed in museums or in commercialised ethnographic exhibitions, adapted to the taste of European spectators and designed by leaders coming from areas outside of the region. Kosovo polje was established as a national sacred place, whereas Bosnia, as a multi-ethnic territory, was promoted as a trans-religious or secular space, uniting different ethnicities and religions by way of the Bogumil identity-without, however, constituting a living religious cult. They both demonstrate how pathetic religious concepts of a holy place, based on the idea of the spirit of place, were recoded-in order to animate and legitimate the establishment of modern nations. Secularised, intellectual attempts at constructing a common memorial culture and myths of a common spirit of place uniting different ethnic and religious groups seem to be much weaker than emotionally charged myths claiming the exclusive right of one nation to inscribe itself into a given place and to forge a bond with the territory. The appropriation of a geographic area in the name of a sacred national history could succeed only if the spirit of place was kept alive within what a nation believed to be its identity and its mission.  ---. 1917. "Kossovo Day Heroes whose memory will never fade." In The Lay of Kossovo: Serbia's Past andPresent (1389-1917)