![]() Borderland history was all the rage in my program. In that period, Dalmatia was a borderland region, a space where three empiresâthe Ottomans, the Venetians, and the Habsburgsâmet and mingled. I moved to Budapest and assembled the essay in a little over six months, focusing on seventeenth-century Dalmatia. Then came my masterâs thesis, another dive into history. He must have panicked, too, because he said nothing more. I panicked and pretended I didnât know what he was thanking me for. I imagined that he wanted to say something like this: âThank you for recognizing the efforts your mother and I made thank you for acknowledging what we are.â But what I was ready to say on paper, I wasnât on the phone. He said, âThank you,â followed by a muffled cough that I learned to recognize over the years as the sound of discomfort. Not long afterward, my father told me he read the acknowledgements. I squeezed all that was ever ineffable in our lives into a single sentence at the end of a paragraph. I dedicated that thesis to my parents with the line, âTo my parents, who taught me to love, not to hate.â The acknowledgements section offered me the only template to express my awareness, and maybe even appreciation, of us being an ethnically mixed family. On a bad one, I suspected that everything about the war and conflicts between the Croats and the Serbs was somehow my fault. On a good day, I sat in history class learning that I didnât belong. Integral to that interpretation was also the erasure of the Serbs from the Croatian historical and cultural landscape. Maybe my interest in history was a way to intellectualize my anxiety when reading about the centuries-old struggles of the Croats for their own state, which was the bottom line of all history we were taught. I could only embrace it once I found myself in the US to do my bachelorâs degree, where an ocean shielded me from Croatian politics. I myself was a school student back then, and history was my most feared subject. This was a study of history education in 1990s Croatia. My walk into history began much earlier than my doctoral work, in my early twenties and undergraduate thesis. Although I didnât understand it at the time, nature could cradle us and root us, while borders and nations spat us out like bitter, sinewy morsels. And it wasnât simply that my mother loved nature nature was our main site of family meaning-making. I must have chosen the study of Ottoman Bosnia as sufficiently close but far enough for examining my own roots. The more time passed, the less original my approach appeared. âTo my mother,â I wrote, âwho loved nature and delighted in strange stories.â I studied a religiously mixed town in Bosnia and Herzegovina under Ottoman rule, where the coexistence of Catholics and Muslims played out through material and metaphorical engagements with the mountains and streams and forests that surrounded them. I dedicated my dissertation to my mother, who died a year before its completion. But history is treacherous at the best of times, and after a while, my history writing turned into my own primary source. It afforded me a way to look for stories other than my own, the troubles of others to fill the void. But Iâm not a rebel I did it as a distraction. JOVAN ATHAN... ICONOGRAPHER HOW TOThe only way my parents knew how to resist was to build our family foundations on a thick bedrock of silence, a past-proof construction designed to keep away stories, voices, and memories. It was a time when questioning origins and loyalties was everyoneâs business, with unpredictable consequences. As the demand for national purity replaced the Yugoslav ideal of brotherhood and unity, their marriage turned from exemplary to suspect. A Croat mother and Serb father, ours was a closely-knit family living in the newly independent Croatia during the 1990s. But many meet my answer with the retort: âSo much history.â What people mean to say is thereâs so much trouble where I come from. When I say âCroatia,â some have no idea where that is. I spent nearly two decades moving around the world, rarely staying in one place for more than a couple of years, and explaining who I am to strangers has become the one constant in my life. On the road between Maslenica and Obrovac, facing the Velebit mountains. ![]()
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