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1917: a Bosnian minaret in the Dolomites? / Italy / Areas / Home

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1917: a Bosnian minaret in the Dolomites?  / Italy / Areas / Home

“Ziano di Fiemme, agosto 1917. Copyright photo archive of the Austrian National Library”


There were thousands of Bosnian soldiers employed in the Austro-Hungarian ranks during the First World War. A project detects and now tells the traces in Trentino

Bosnia Herzegovina, for centuries an Ottoman province, was occupied by the Habsburg army in 1878, following the decisions taken at the Congress of Berlin. Vienna proceeded with the actual annexation in 1908. Four Bosnian regiments destined to merge into the imperial-royal armed forces were however already established in 1882. After the assassination of Sarajevo and the outbreak of the conflict in the summer of 1914, the Bosnians they ended up – like millions of their European peers and beyond – in the trenches of the Great War.

Among the Austro-Hungarian ranks, the Bosnians were particularly recognizable for their uniforms, distinguished in particular by the fez. They also distinguished themselves from a military point of view, obtaining honors and awards. According to the data reported in an articulated studio of the historian Zijad Šehić, ordinary professor of the University of Sarajevo, the mobilized during the whole war in Bosnia and Herzegovina were 291,498. Members of all religious/ethno-national communities present in the country were included, even if the Orthodox were considered potentially less reliable, given the ongoing war with Serbia and episodes of desertion, and were employed with greater shrewdness. The study reveals how the percentages could be calibrated differently depending on the type of unit and its destination at the front or in reserve and in the rear. An overall overview is offered by a document, presented by Šehić himself and dated March 1918, which reveals how among the Bosnian war invalids at that date there were 4,413 “Muslims”, 5,371 “Orthodox”, 2,586 “Catholics”, 32 “Jews ”, 324 “others”. Data which, the scholar points out, “roughly represent the confessional structure of the population at the time”.

Bosnian regiments were used by Austria-Hungary along the entire front with Italy. The engagement was consistent on the Isonzo front, but military reports also tell of important battles on the Alpine-Dolomitic one. However, it is the testimonies of the population in the Trentino valleys that help to understand the movements and presence on the territory of Bosnian soldiers, when far from the trenches. It is certain that some departments were quartered for many months in the valleys of Fiemme and Fassa, at the foot of the peaks along which the front ran which stood in the spring of 1915, the day after the outbreak of hostilities.

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The memoirs of Ziano di Fiemme

After the difficult phase of accommodation following the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vienna he had tried to cultivate new relationships with Bosnian Muslim landowners and intellectuals. After the 1908 annexation, the Habsburg administration granted the Islamic community autonomy in religious and educational matters. The soldiers’ right to worship was guaranteed by the presence of military imams, which were significantly increased during the conflict. According to what has been reconstructed by various scholars, the construction of a mosque was discussed at length in Vienna itself. On the Isonzo front, a place of worship for Bosnian Muslim soldiers was actually built in Bretto/Log pod Mangartom in 1916: today several photographs testify to the architecture of this mosque, before its destruction after the end of the war.

“The Bretto Mosque/Log pod Mangartom during WW1” – Wikimedia

On the Trentino-Tyrolean front there are no buildings of similar features and dimensions. However, traces of the presence of places of worship organized for the Bosnian soldiers themselves have remained in the memory of some communities. In Gardolo, in what is today a populous suburb of Trento and often at the center of debates on the integration of the population of foreign origin, the testimonies collected in the eighties referring to the presence of “rudimentary wooden minarets” were call back more than once in public debate.

In Ziano di Fiemme the existence of a minaret has been talked about for decades. For example, Candido Degiampietro, master of the village and child during the war years, wrote about it in 1986, recounting: “All the inhabitants of the villages crossed by the Bosnians had come to see those soldiers in the strange uniform, who instead of the usual cap of the Austrian uniform ( die Mütze) wore an unusual gray headdress: the “fez” of the Muslims.[…] The Bosnians were tall, almost gigantic men who, set aside in Ziano, immediately erected a wooden minaret, from which, three times a day, their “muezins” launched an invitation to prayer, to the astonishment of the population, to which felt like living in another world. (errors in the original citation)

In 1993, Aldo Zorzi, a passionate lover of local history, recounted the curiosity, caution and humanity traced in the stories of the last witnesses of these meetings. Even a testimony with little sympathetic tones towards the Habsburg multiculturalism – which appeared in an important Trentino magazine in 1929 – confirmed the existence of the religious structure: “… in the spring of 1916 we saw the flow of troops after troops, a polychrome mass of Germans, Serbs, Croats, Galicians and Ruthenians. It was then that Ziano saw a minaret rise not far from the church. The soldiery penetrated all houses, all environments, in a repulsive promiscuity detrimental to any moral sense. It is due to the firm religious and moral principles of that people that the consequences were not irreparable”.

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According to the information collected at the time by Aldo Zorzi, the minaret would have been erected in the “Parti del Cioto” area, in the westernmost part of Ziano. The billboard recently set up in the village shows a photograph that emerged from the archives of the Austrian National Library: the image testifies to the presence of a rather unprecedented vertical structure in the aforementioned locality. Walter Zorzi, one of the local enthusiasts who helped track down the document, reveals that a photograph of the minaret had appeared in an exhibition back in 1976: “It left me very impressed. Following this memory of mine, in the following years I was able to view the photograph in the Austrian archive, which concerns the ceremony held on the occasion of the birthday of the Austrian emperor in Piazza Ziano in August 1917, where in the background of the photograph he still clearly notices that tower that I was able to see on the first occasion, many years before”. Although characterized by forms distant from those of the traditional architecture of these religious structures, it would be precisely the Bosnian minaret.

A detail showing the structure of the minaret

Experiences rediscovered

“I knew a few things, others I drew from dad’s writings, so I was called to be part of a committee that managed, with the cultural association Ziano Insieme, the creation of the itinerary of the open-air museum […] and which tells a bit of Ziano’s story from its origins up to the 1970s, with the transformation from agriculture to tourism”, says Carlo Zorzi, son of Aldo, explaining the collective effort that supported the project. Ziano di Fiemme certainly represents an interesting example of inclusion of the encounters brought about by the First World War in the wider narration of the territory promoted by the community. As for the prisoners of war of the Russian and Serbian armies, the memory of the Bosnian soldiers has also remained preserved for a long time above all in toponymy and popular memories. For years, the only exception was a small monument in Italian, Bosnian and German positioned in 1916 on Mount Fior (Melette), on the Asiago plateau, as evidence of a bloody battle fought during the Austro-Hungarian offensive in the spring of 1916.

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The very rich public memory of the conflict, open and inclusive of the different experiences of the local population, has therefore gradually begun to recognize the role that the “other” presences had in shaping the overall experience of the conflict on the territory. OBCT, in partnership with the Italian War History Museum, Deina Trentino e Travel the Balkansand in collaboration with Extinguished Countries, has launched a new project aimed at continuing efforts in this direction, recounting the experiences of encounters that the First World War brought to a territory devastated by the conflict such as Trentino. Stories that reveal moments of difficulty and tension, but also episodes of contamination and solidarity. See you soon, with more news.

Ziano di Fiemme, panel of the open-air museum – photo by Marco Abram

Publication produced as part of the project “The Great War: Europe in Trentino and the encounter with the Other”, with the support of the Caritro Foundation

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