The Kaiser's Mosques

Scope and structure

By documenting and analysing this heritage in the necessary detail, this study fills a gap in art history. It also contributes to our understanding of European powers’ historical responses to the challenge of cultural diversity in territories under their control. This dual perspective on aesthetics and its meanings also characterizes the following elaborations, which neither take the form of a ‘style biography’, nor that of an ‘art topography’. They are also not a mere cultural history that engages artworks to illustrate a history of ideas as a linear progression. Instead, the text proceeds more like an essay, which in its most classic form identifies a problem at the beginning and then seeks to illuminate it from different perspectives before returning with a preliminary conclusion.⁴ This method is reflected in the book’s five main chapters (II-VI), all of which are composed of two, three, or four sub-chapters.⁵ Specific questions, formulated separately in each section, are approached through case studies.

Chapter II begins by exploring sources of style. It emphasizes a fondness in 1870s Vienna for the Islamic architecture of Cairo that has not been sufficiently appreciated thus far. This fondness, as will be demonstrated on a micro-scale, significantly impacted architectural design in Habsburg Bosnia during the 1880s and 90s. Building on existing networks bridging the Mediterranean, the World’s Fair of 1873 proved an important catalyst and taste-maker in this regard. Furthermore, the traditionally assumed sources of earlier (i.e., pre-1878) Viennese Orientalisms will be explored, but they will be shown to have had a smaller impact than commonly believed. Habsburg Bosnia’s Orientalizing style derived more closely from the architecture of international expositions than from the mid-19^th century experimentations in the capital. Fittingly, in Bosnia this Orientalizing architecture, much like its precursors, can be said to have had an ‘exhibitionistic’ character.

Chapter III discusses the liminality of this architectural phenomenon, situated on a former civilizational frontier. It first focuses on architectural works outside the administrative and cultural metropolis of Sarajevo, emphasizing that a remarkable concentration of relevant objects is found in areas close to the border with the old Habsburg domains. They include a seminal town hall (at Brčko), which may have proven influential with regard to all other administrative buildings in the Orientalizing style; a domed mosque (at Tuzla) that was perhaps more exceptional than it was influential; and a train station (at Bosanski Brod) that acted as an interchange between two civilizational (and infrastructural) zones. By pointing to the seeming paradox that, in these borderlands, architectural differences from the Hungarian territories across the Sava were not to be levelled but instead were even exaggerated, as it were, by promoting this peculiar style, a better understanding of the logic behind it is sought.

Chapter IV then moves from the province to the metropolis, focusing on three projects of prime relevance to Bosnia’s Muslim community: the renovation of Sarajevo’s most prominent mosque; the construction of a training establishment for a new Bosnian Muslim elite; and a monumental administrative extension to Sarajevo’s second-most prominent mosque. Through these projects, a stylistic development is traced that departs from the sensationalism of the ‘world exposition style’ to seek legitimacy in a distant monumentality before the more proximate is deliberately rediscovered. Whereas, at first, the new could be clearly differentiated from the old, eventually the borders between the two became blurred. Chapter IV is perhaps the most classically art historical, advancing knowledge about selected projects (and design decisions made in the course of which) with a view to establishing basic chronologies of stylistic evolution.

Chapter V moves away from the façades and looks at the logic behind the placement of buildings across a territory and within its metropolis, before zooming into the smallest unit to look at the arrangement of rooms within buildings. One focus in this chapter is on negotiating the borders between public and private, innovative and conventional, and between various building types.

Chapter VI questions the logic behind the Orientalizing style’s promotion on the part of the authorities by looking at representations of Bosnia’s Ottoman heritage to foreign and local audiences. It highlights the central role of the Regional Museum (Landesmuseum), founded in 1888, in knowledge-production and communication across traditional divides. In the following sub-chapter, Bosnia’s place in an illustrated and empire-wide publication project is discussed. This representational challenge proved to be a catalyst for thinking about how to achieve cross-cultural cohesion, one result of which was the publication’s significant delay.

The book’s conclusion recapitulates what it regards as ‘new’ knowledge and discusses its bearing – not only for Bosnia, but for art history as a discipline, a discourse, and an institution.

Preparatory remarks

This book’s non-linear structure necessitates moving back and forth between buildings, people, and institutions. Instead of fixing them in a developmental sequence, they will be selectively zoomed in on where they contribute to the discussion of a specific problem. For that reason, the major works and actors ought to be briefly familiarized here.

The central statesman for the understanding of the Orientalizing style’s evolution in Bosnia and the approach to its Islamic inheritance more generally is Benjamin von Kállay. Between 1882 and 1903 this Budapest-born Balkan connoisseur concurrently served as Austria-Hungary’s Joint Minister of Finance and as a (non-resident) superintendent⁶ of ‘the occupied territory’, which (like his finance ministry) was assigned to neither half of the empire. Although no statements from him that would neatly outline the logic of the style’s advancement have surfaced, Kállay’s position in decision-making processes pertaining to Bosnia, which is frequently likened to that of a colonial⁷ administrator, makes it probable that the stylistic experiment was his brainchild to begin with. As will be explained, important turning points, coinciding with top-level decisions, occurred ca. 1885 and ca. 1891. In the first instance, the decision to proceed with the renovation of Sarajevo’s major mosque in an Orientalizing (rather than, say, Occidentalizing) aesthetic proved highly impactful; in the second, the decision was made to extend the style’s reach to public buildings lacking a specific association with Bosnian Muslims. In neither case was that decision retrievable in a historical source, perhaps because it was never committed to writing. Yet subsequent events suggest that these questions must have been asked, and answered by a person in charge. In late 19^th-century Bosnia, this person at the end of the line was Kállay.

In the provincial administration (Landesregierung), a non-elected body remotely controlled from Vienna, Kállay had many able collaborators who would support him in effecting his cultural policies. Edmund Stix, installed in 1882 as the administration’s construction department head,⁸ clearly played a key part in the first half of this period – but not as a designing architect.⁹ For such, the administration attracted many young architects and engineers from the empire’s core lands. On the one hand, there were the students of famous Ringstraße architects at the Academy of Fine Arts: Josip Vancaš had studied with Friedrich Schmidt (Vienna City Hall, Votive Church), Karel Pařík with Theophil Hansen (Austrian Parliament, Stock Exchange), and Ćiril Iveković with Carl von Hasenauer (co-author of the Burgtheater and the twin Imperial Museums).

On the other hand, there were architects and engineers who did not have as prestigious associations, but whose work, often in the service of governmental bodies, also proved impactful. Among these, Hans Niemeczek, Franz Mihanovich, and Miloš Komadina may be named.¹⁰ Niemeczek played a central, hitherto not appropriately acknowledged, role as an architect in the service of the Vakuf-Commission, or Endowments Directorate – an institution charged with managing the often substantial assets of the Islamic ‘pious’ foundations (Bosnian vakuf, from Arabic waqf). For that reason, his name is attached to many Habsburg-period renovations of Ottoman buildings. With projects like the railway station of Bosanski Brod, this Sarajevo-based architect also made a name for himself as a principal protagonist of the Orientalizing style. However, it is probably owed to a ‘lesser’ training (perhaps at an Applied Arts School in Austria or other core lands of the empire rather than the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna) that much less biographical information is available about him than about the aforementioned academicians.

Similarly little is known about Mihanovich, Tuzla’s long-time Kreisingenieur. He may be named as an example of how a public servant posted outside Sarajevo could leave his mark. In the prefectures (Kreise) of Tuzla and Banja Luka, his name is attached to notable projects, which he may have developed in close cooperation with the head department in Sarajevo. Komadina played a similar role in the Kreise of Mostar and Travnik, but this monography should not repeat what has already been documented in another publication specifically charting in detail the relevant objects in Central Bosnia.¹¹ Instead, the present book’s focus is really on the Kreise of Sarajevo, Banja Luka, and Tuzla during Kállay’s tenure (1882–1903). Even so, to understand this core period’s characteristics and logic, frequent excursions to the period after 1903 and other Kreise are obligatory.¹²

Next to the administration’s construction department (with its offices in the six prefectures’ administrative centres) and the Endowments Directorate, the Regional Museum was a key institution in the occupied territory’s cultural and scientific affairs. Issuing a much-read journal, the museum played a central role in the production of knowledge about the area’s cultural and natural inheritance, as chapter VI will illustrate. The museum’s first director, the public servant Kosta Hörmann, was a central player in Sarajevo’s cultural milieu, as was his able successor, Ćiro Truhelka. Both are likely to have been regularly consulted in the mediation of developments portrayed here.

With regard to the Muslim community’s institutions and opinion-leaders, the aforementioned Endowments Directorate must be singled out, next to the Medžlis-i ulema (a council of Muslim theologians around the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, the foremost religious authority of that community), and the Scheriatsrichterschule (Islamic Law School), which was to produce a new theological-juridical elite loyal to the emperor. All three bodies were (re-)founded in the 1880s to smoothen relations between the local Muslims and the imported administration. They were also headed by Muslims – as were, in reflection of the demographic and socio-economic constituents, most town councils. In the absence of a democratically elected provincial representation (Landtag) until 1910, following occupied Bosnia’s definitive annexation to Austria-Hungary in 1908, the office of mayor was the highest democratically legitimized position that could be attained by a Bosnian Habsburg subject. The mayors of the capitals of the six Kreise (largely identical with the old Ottoman sancaks) – Tuzla, Banja Luka, Bihać, Mostar, Sarajevo, and Travnik – evidently had a higher standing than those of towns situated lower in the administrative structure.

Among this period’s Muslim opinion leaders, Mustafa-beg Fadilpašić and Mehmed-beg Kapetanović may be singled out. Both hailed from prominent families that traced their origins (as discernible from the patronymics including the title pasha) to a forebear once serving as an Ottoman governor. The Istanbul- trained Fadilpašić was Habsburg Sarajevo’s first mayor; he simultaneously served as the long-term president of the Endowments Directorate.¹³ Kapetanović, whose family hailed from Herzegovina, succeeded Fadilpašić as the capital’s mayor in 1893. He is also known for publishing the influential journal Bošnjak.¹⁴ It followed ponderings about the future of Bosnia’s Muslims from the 1880s, which he demonstratively published in the local language using the Latin alphabet rather than Arabic. The impact of these two Muslim opinion-leaders on the shaping of Habsburg Bosnia’s cultural policy may have been underestimated.¹⁵ Indeed, the central question of Bosnian Muslims’ reception of the Orientalizing style, or even their participating in its consolidation, has not been satisfactorily answered, or even asked.

Lastly, key buildings to which we will repeatedly return should be identified – new and old ones alike. Sarajevo’s two most prominent Ottoman mosques saw substantial interventions during the Habsburg period. The renovation of the Begova mosque in 1885 is here represented as a catalyst for later developments (ch. IV.1, Fig. IV.1-21). The adding of a monumental frontal extension to the Careva mosque in 1911 (ch. IV.3, Fig. IV.35-42) introduces a late phase in the stylistic experiment, during which exotic borrowings give way to more local references.