By: Emir Medanhodžić
I read this outstanding book on the history of Bosnian-Herzegovinian archaeology in a single breath, in just one day. It presents the remarkable biography of archaeologist Vejsil Čurčić, who lived through five different political systems in Sarajevo, from the Ottoman Empire to Tito’s Yugoslavia, during difficult and unfortunate times. His work and legacy were deliberately erased from the history of archaeology simply because he was the first Bosniak and Bosnian-Herzegovinian archaeologist to graduate in Vienna. Although he served as director of the National Museum and worked for many years as a curator, there was no place for him in the National Museum’s 100th anniversary memorial publication in 1988, when the museum’s director was Rizo Sijarić (who was killed as a civilian victim of the war in Sarajevo in 1993).
I do not wish to reveal too many details from the book, as I hope to inspire readers to discover it themselves, but it is worth mentioning that in 1937 Čurčić completed a book about stećci, medieval tombstones, which was never published and disappeared without a trace at the end of the war in 1945. The author of the book reveals that Šefik Bešlagić used photographs and texts by V. Č. as his own work without citing the sources. This is something we must now correct: the first scientific researcher of stećci was Vejsil Čurčić, who documented them with photography and aerial images during the 1930s, and who later produced paper casts using the papier-mâché technique. These casts became the foundation of the extraordinary international exhibition on stećci held in Zagreb in 1950, for which the legendary introduction was written by Miroslav Krleža, and which later appeared at the EXPO exhibition in Paris.
I was especially struck by Vejsil Čurčić’s statement about curators and archaeologists: “No smaller guild, yet no greater stench,” a remark that still feels relevant today. I hope that some young researcher in the future will write about archaeology in the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, although I honestly doubt it. Unfortunately, the fate of Vejsil Čurčić also reflects the condition of the Bosniak people at that time, who failed to understand that archaeology is extremely important for the politics and strategy of a people and a nation, and that it will always remain vulnerable to such manipulations. But that is another story for another occasion.
To all lovers of history, I warmly recommend reading this exceptional book, which represents the final part of Kaljanac’s trilogy on the history of our archaeology.