Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875Evans, Arthur, Sir
History
Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on foot during the insurrection, August and September 1875
Evans, Arthur, Sir
Bosnia and Herzegovina -- Description and travel; Bosnia and Herzegovina -- History -- Rebellion of 1875
On an eminence rises the cathedral and spacious palace of the bishop,
enclosed, like so many churches of Sclavonic lands, in old walls with
round, cone-peaked towers—a southern Kremlin. Just below it is the
market-place, and in its centre the equestrian statue of the national
hero, the Ban Jellachitj, the poet-warrior who in the days of the Magyar
revolution led his Croats against their national enemy, and saved the
Austrian police-state when its fortunes were at their lowest ebb. He is
dressed in the picturesque hussar uniform of his country, with flowing
mantle and high-plumed cap, riding northwards on his pedestal, and
pointing his sword forwards towards the scenes of his triumphs over the
Magyars.
The town is divided into three parts, the lower town in which is the
market-place and main street, the height on which the cathedral stands,
and the upper town on which rise many large houses inhabited by the
resident bureaucracy, where is the Diet-hall, the Ban’s house and the
Museum, and looking down from whose airy terraces you see the lower town
stretched out like a straggling village below you, and are reminded
of the view of Buda from its Acropolis. The cathedral, in spite of
its bulwark of fortifications, has suffered much from the Turks, who
destroyed it, they say, three times; and inside from its own bishops,
who have defaced the gothic nave and aisles with whitewash and monstrous
Jesuitic shrines. Its exterior is, however, still partly fretted with
old stone panel-work, which recalls the Tudor ornamentation on the
schools of Oxford. From the top of the square tower expands a beautiful
panoramas—the silvery Save and its rich valley—the distant Bosnian
mountains fading into the blue sky; and in the other direction the dark
forest-covered heights of the Slema Vrh, which have given Agram her
Sclavonic name Zagreb—‘beyond the rocks.’ Except the cathedral, and
the finely-carved façade of the Marcus church, there are no buildings
of beauty or interest. The Ban’s residence was so completely devoid of
architectural pretensions, and so indistinguishable from the houses
round, that we should not have noticed it, but for a large black flag
thrust forth from one of its windows in honour of old Kaiser Ferdinand
the ‘good-natured.’ As is too generally the case in Hungary, the people
of Agram are far behind in æsthetic culture; the pictures in the Academy
here are few and curiously bad, and the one good painting was not by
a native, but a Czech artist. The Agramers, however, seem to have the
good taste to appreciate this, and photographic copies are to be seen in
the shop windows; rather, perhaps, owing to South Sclavonic patriotism,
than to respect for high art. The picture represents the funeral of a
Montenegrine Voivode or leader, whose body is being borne along a gloomy
mountain gorge from the battle-field; and the grandeur of the lifeless
hero, the dark, almost Italian look of the weeping clanspeople, are
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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