Christ in the Ruins
Dan Philpott
October 1, 1996
In early September, driving to Sarajevo, I rode up and down Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina's low, forested hills, from whose crests I could view alternating patches of bright green fields, shadowed green trees, and small villages of white buildings and red roofs, all heightened by the background music of sunshine and wind. I had momentary daydreams of festivity: fiddles, banquets, ale-what Americans call "the old country." It was only when I rode into the villages that I passed close by the white buildings, entering their shadows, and saw that they were hollow. Their windows were empty; their concrete walls were crumbling, cracked and bare; rubble and weeds lay inside. Houses and shops and churches appeared as skeletons, once clothed with life and flesh but now shorn structures laced with cavities, quiet monuments to war's intrusion into tranquility.
This landscape's strangeness was randomly dispersed. Burned walls might stand next to a house with trimmed rows of bushes, flowers hanging out the windows, and people walking in and out. The burned homes are the ones where the Croats lived the day the Serbs came to town, or where the Serbs lived the day the Muslims or Croats came to town, or where a Serb was married to a Muslim, or simply where the wrong person lived at the wrong time. Sometimes kindred townspeople had joined the invading ethnic armies and burned their neighbors' houses. Sometimes whole villages were hollow.
I tried to imagine the skeletons clothed again with life and flesh, the houses filled with carpets, lamplight, televisions, bookshelves with Bibles or the Koran, fathers ranting and laughing, remonstrating and relaxing, mothers putting kids to bed, living as families. In a few places, people are doing the ...
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