Column by: Anita Barjaktarević, RED AFRICA TRAVEL
A Continuing Tradition
THE LEGACY OF ITS SCHOLARS, WHOSE LIFE’S WORK WAS TO RECORD AND PROTECT THE KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR SOCIETY, IS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL TESTIMONIES OF THE THIRD WORLD Although the Third World is used now as a derogatory term, the phrase was actually coined to describe the nations of the world who refused to follow the narrative of the Cold War; refusing to be subservient client states to either the Soviet Union in the East or the United States in the West. It was the history of these Third World nations that gave them the strength to refuse to be governed by outside powers.
DUVANJSKI PRASLON One of the most powerful testimonies of the Third World is the legacy of its scholars, whose life’s
work was to record and protect the knowledge of their society. For two years the Thomas Cahill book “How the Irish Saved Civilization” topped bestseller lists. The book chronicles the work of medieval monks in protecting the accumulated knowledge of Western civilization from invading Germanic tribes. The same book could easily be written about the legacy of knowledge in the Balkans, where the Franciscan monks in wellknown monasteries such as Kraljeva Sutjeska accumulated books and items of historical interest, studying them and keeping them safe for
successive generations. The work of these monks was considered so vital that they are the subject of one of the first documents guaranteeing religious rights, the Ahdname of Fojnica, issued under Mehmed the Conqueror in 1463 and still kept at the Franciscan Monastery in Fojnica. But the legacy of the scholarly medieval monks did not end with the Middle Ages, and indeed continues on to this day in the Herzegovinian monastery in Tomislavgrad. The monastery hosts a remarkable collection of items from pre-Illyrian times to the present, including numerous manuscripts, 31
