The Weight of Wool
Ottoman and Habsburg coins turned into jewelry; the remnants of successive empires worn on the women’s chests. In some cases, the đerdans are so elaborate that they almost entirely occlude their wearer, turning them into knights in shining armor.
The Swimmer
I miss the bathhouse. I miss it alive, but I miss it haunted too.
Duh
Suddenly I realized how much I had cemented Duh into a fictional character, a romantic stereotype of the victim who could not be anything else.
Kinder Surprise
He acted as though we saw each other every day. After that, I didn’t see him for years. My father ghosted me.
My Grandfather is a Cadaver I Dissect from Afar
My grandfather is a cautionary tale, hovering over me every time I have a drink. He is a cadaver I dissect from afar, dead before I was even born.
Pilgrimage to Ilije Bursaća 51
I imagined that the world before April 1992 was meticulously preserved in our former apartment, and I wanted to reach out for that life and reclaim it.
LIght Needs
She read and she gardened, but she wouldn’t have described herself as a reader or a gardener. Interests, preoccupations, and desires anchored the days without defining the self.
Ivanka
With age came the insecurities; she questioned every aspect of the dish—what’s the perfect amount of salt, what’s the right portion size for a person, almost as if she’d never prepared a meal in her life. And she prepared so many.
Hercegovina Kalifornija: Landscape and legacies in the Neretva Valley
Can the stories of vineyards, orchards, cow farms, the agroecological institute, and irrigation systems once again become interconnected in a vision of slow progress?
Mirage (academic autofiction)
I had been warned multiple times about risks of the topic I chose as a potential doctoral project. Well, that was a tricky one.
My First (Almost) Extinction Event
At the time, I did not know that I was swimming in a mass mortality event.
Balkan Waters
These spa towns all have traces of the different empires that thundered through the region that at least had the decency to leave behind some nice pools. Two of them are particularly close to my heart.
Against Summary
Escaping the summary’s grip would mean to choose observation over argument, arriving at conclusions through sustained—perhaps interminable—seeing and listening.
On labels, taxonomies and (self)identities
Labels and taxonomies don’t define museum objects only. By trying to see myself in academia, I realized that academics come with their own.
Following the Fear
She tells me to keep my heart under my pillow for the next several weeks, and she instructs me to wash myself with water from the ritual three times a day. When the water finally runs out, she says, I am to throw my heart into the river.
From atop a mountain: Living, writing, etc.
It was the research process itself that connected all the dots, the biographical and the ethnographic: honeybees and our father’s land, local Sufis’ lessons and my past academic teaching, ruinous new habits of weather and a search for “a life” on this altitude.
Counting Change
Unwelcome change welcomes languages, and all of the languages I come to know to some degree—come even to forget—share numbers. The numerical representation of the word “one” is 1 in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian; it is 1 in Turkish; it is 1 in English; it is 1 in French; it can be 1 in Japanese. My aunt says, “You have just 1 life. Live it. Treasure it.”