Word: visegrad
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Above the rushing green waters of the Drina River, a beautiful white stone bridge with eleven vaulting arches provided a meeting place for the lackadaisical citizens of Visegrad. On summer evenings the townsfolk strolled its length, bought melons and cherries from the peasants, sipped thick Turkish coffee. The town elders sat smoking in the middle of the bridge, looked with contentment on the Bosnian mountains ringing their valley, gravely discussed public matters. The young men came to sing and joke, to flirt with passing girls or lean dreaming on the parapet. On such soft nights, a man on the bridge...
This book is an evocative chronicle of the bridge, ranging the 350 years from its building by a 16th century grand vizier, as a link between the European and Asian halves of the Ottoman Empire, to its near destruction in World War I. At Visegrad, in what is now Yugoslavia, the right bridge had found the right people, an amiable mixture of Serbs, Jews and Turks with an immoderate love of women, an inclination to alcohol and laziness and a dislike of war, for they were men who "preferred to live foolishly rather than to die foolishly...
Disputatious Moslem. Violence came infrequently to Visegrad but, when it did, men died resignedly. Early in the book, Author Andrić offers the most grisly description of an impaling since the Tartar Prince Azya was mounted on a stake and had his one eye gouged out in Henryk (Quo Vadis) Sienkiewicz's Pan Michael. Later, when the Serbs revolt against the crumbling Ottoman Empire, severed heads are as common on the bridge as 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...