Authority to Liberate the Ottoman Legacy

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One of the most striking elements of Dušan Grabrijan’s and Juraj Neidhardt’s oeuvre is the extent and freedom of associations with the contested Ottoman legacy in the first decades of the socialist era in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as seen in their book Architecture of Bosnia and the Way towards Modernity. Such freedom primarily resulted from the increasingly favorable political environment that permitted and encouraged decentralization from the predominantly negative portrayal of the Ottoman past.This paper seeks to unravel the structure and sources of the main discourses used by Grabrijan and Neidhardt in Architecture of Bosnia to deal with the stigma of the Ottoman heritage. We argue that they utilize a certain syncretic language that reflects their own and varied experiences within the Orient-Occident borderline. We assert that their first generating discourse is that of modernism, while the second one revolves around the so-called ‘close neighbor’ or ‘domesticated foreigner’ perspective on the Orient. The premise of Grabrijan’s and Neidhardt’s first position is argued through the parallels of their narrative and the inherent modernist authorization to operate with scientific displacement. The premise of the second position is confirmed through contact nodes with the local differentiated orientalist discourse, which Heiss and Feichtinger (2013) define as distinct in relation to Said’s general concept of oriental Otherness as formulated in Orientalism (1978).In addition to plunging into the dualistic nature of Grabrijan’s and Neidhardt’s work on the lines of modernism and otherness, center-periphery, the conclusions of the paper point to the broader problem of the controversies of the Bosnian and Herzegovinian heritage, where the relationship of modernism towards/with Ottoman heritage is still an underrepresented subject.