Colonised Nationalism — How Foreigners Taught Bosnia Whom to Be Proud… — Bosna — TG.ME

Colonised Nationalism — How Foreigners Taught Bosnia Whom to Be Proud of and Whom Not to Mention Sarajevo should soon be getting a monument to Ban Kulin, one of the more significant rulers of medieval Bosnia. In honour of this grand opening, I would like to point out that there are no known depictions of his physical appearance, no known portraits or sculptures, and no written records that tell us what he looked like. The same is true for most, if not all, of our important medieval figures. So it will be fictional; it will be an artist’s interpretation that gets shown to the public. But why exactly are we allowed to create sculptures of people from only a certain part of our long history? Why is it that we are allowed to be proud of monarchs who were historically the greatest obstacles (in Europe) to the emergence of the modern nation-state and nationalism, and the greatest antagonists to the idea that a collective has the right to decide things in the realm they governed?