Word: alihodja
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...melons used to be, but the townsfolk-always approving of good workmanship-remark that the Turkish executioner has "a lighter hand than Mushan the town barber." When the Austrians finally march into Visegrad on the heels of the routed Turks, in 1878, they find a disputatious Moslem named Alihodja on the bridge with his ear nailed to a beam. He had made the mistake of arguing with Turkish guerrillas who were urging the reluctant townspeople to defend Visegrad to the last...
...bruised and put-upon Alihodja sounds the elegiac theme of Andrić's book. He watches gloomily as the bustling Austrians destroy the "sweet tranquillity" of Visegrad. They busily replace the outmoded fountains with new " 'unclean' water which passed through iron pipes so that it was not fit to drink"; they industriously built a railroad to the border that finally puts an end to the centuries-old traffic over the Drina Bridge. The book's last chapters take place in the first months of World War I, with Visegrad being shelled impartially by Austrian and Serbian...
Ironic Love. Near death himself, old Alihodja reflects that he has been right all along in his contempt for Western progress. For years, he mutters, the Austrians pretended concern for the bridge: "They had cleaned it, embellished it, repaired it down to its foundations, taken the water supply across it, lit it with electricity and then one day blown it all into the skies...
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