BIRTH HOUSE OF IVO ANDRIĆ

This is not really the "birthplace of Ivo Andrić" (Rodna Kuća Ive Andrića). The writer was not born here, but 1 km south, in Dolac, while his mother Katarina was visiting a cousin, on October 9, 1892. Nevertheless, it was in this beautiful mid-nineteenth century corbelled house that the only Nobel Prize winner for literature (1961) in the former Yugoslavia spent the first two years of his life. In 1894, the death of the father, Antun, forced the family to move to Višegrad, in eastern Bosnia. The young Andrić would return to Travnik twenty years later: pro-Serb and suspected of involvement in the Sarajevo bombing on June 28, 1914, he was imprisoned, then placed under house arrest at the Catholic monastery in Ovčarevo (5 km northwest) in 1915. But it was far from here, in Paris, in 1927, that he found the material for The Chronicle of Travnik (1945), one of his two masterpieces with The Bridge over the Drina (1945). Working at the time at the Yugoslav embassy in France, Andrić immersed himself in the reports of the French consul stationed in Travnik from 1809 to 1814, when the region was under the control of Napoleon's troops. The writer uses them to build his plot: the friendship between the French and Austrian consuls. A chronicle that allows him to give a detailed description of Travnik in the Ottoman era and the relations between the Serbian, Jewish, Turkish, Aromanian, Greek, Bosnian and Croatian communities of the city. All of this history is not mentioned much in this "native" house, which was transformed into a museum in 1974. Andrić was then a model artist within socialist Yugoslavia: born into a Bosnian Croat family, he chose to become a Serb and opposed the Austro-Hungarians, and then the royalist regime of Yugoslavia. Today, visitors come from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Croatia to follow in the footsteps of this "national writer" whom everyone claims as their own. It is therefore hardly surprising to discover, on the^first floor, the "birth room", a room nicely decorated with Ottoman furniture, where little Ivo... was not born. On the first floor, it's a bit more serious. Several rooms are devoted to the place of Travnik in the author's work - but it is more tedious for those who cannot read Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian. There is a short emotional sequence, however, when Andrić's last visit to his city in 1972 is mentioned, three years before his death in Belgrade on March 13, 1975.