Bosnia for
those that didn’t know is a relatively small region in south/east part of Europe
that today is called “The Balkans” although this name is not the native name for
the region but it is derived from the days of the Ottoman Turkish occupation, in
anticity all the way through the middle ages the most common name for this mountainous
place was Haemus that according the classical Greek legend it was the
name of a Thracian king (it is derived from the Greek root word αίμα-aima that means literally blood).
The Balkan region
was always home to many tribes thought out all its history which were
considered barbaric by their more civilized neighbors, they were regarded as unpredictable
and warlike by both Greeks and Romans, their temperament but also the not
favorable environment in which they lived made them stay relatively isolated from
that advancing plague that we today call civilization even today some areas are
still completely untouched, for example
Bosnia is still today heavily covered by forests ( 53% for a total 25,599km2 of forest area).
Because of
this natural isolation the new Christian faith spread relatively late in Bosnia, when the neighboring kingdoms accepted
very fast the “gospel”, Bosnia was still a question mark for many so it became
quickly a refuge for all kind of “heretics” like cathars, Manichaeism, bogumils,
Arianists,…. Who were running away from the persecutions all over Europe.
With the independence
of the Bosnian Kingdom in the year 1377 (but it started before that) from the Hungarian hegemony a religious hierarchy
was beginning to form, this new formed religious organization was traditionally
called “the Bosnian Church” ( Crkva Bosanska in the local language ), we
don’t have many sources about this new formed church but we can suppose that it
was an admixture of various Christian “heresies” that was also heavily influenced
by our European traditional religion, an example of this influence might be the
name of chief priest that was called Djed that means literally grandfather
or elder, it was a figure much similar to a pagan druid then a Christian bishop.
We need to
take in mind that this religious organization didn’t have any church buildings
(most of the ceremonies were celebrated in nature ) or dogmatical influence on
the local population so we can say that the majority of the people were still
practicing their native European traditions which can be seen on the motifs and
symbols depicted on their tombstones (I will explain this in detail in a future
post) , the figure of the Djed was only a support figure and only
assisted in social events like marriages or funerals.
Eventually also
this new formed religious organization will be destroyed and the Bosnian people
will fall under more dogmatical religious contexts but even then the local folk
will never stop practicing their native traditions but unfortunately they will
not succeed in conserving the meaning and mediocre scholars will trough out our
history create all kinds of theories and lies about our heritage but I can feel
the fog that surround those white stones is slowly disappearing and the sound of people singing and dancing can be
heard in the distance.