From Sinj, I continued my journey southwards through the Dalmatian hinterland to Imotski, close to the border with Bosnia, tracing the footsteps of the 19th century British Egyptologist, J. Gardner Wilkinson. There being no direct bus route, I had to change buses at Split. Imotski is a small town, perched on a hill overlooking a large fertile plain, surrounded by the Dinaric mountains. The views are splendid, and the old town centre is attractive, built of the usual white limestone blocks.
Unlike Sinj, Imotski is rather isolated, with no highway linking it with the coast. It is rather a peripheral place. While the surrounding villages engage in agriculture, the town offers few opportunities. Young people sit around outside cafés. Many, no doubt, have left for more promising corners of the country. Imotski has had some famous sons, among them the poet Tin Ujević. But they didn’t stay there. I bought some locally-produced pršut (cured ham) from a shop in the town. The owner told me hopefully that a tunnel would be built through the mountains, linking Imotski to the coast, giving it a boost. For now, there was only one restaurant in the town, in the hotel where I stayed.
Imotski is famous for its two dramatic sink holes, the Blue Lake, and the Red Lake. These are typical features of limestone, karst regions. They were formed by the collapse of underground caves millions of years ago. The Blue Lake is in a wide, deep hole directly below the town castle. From one side of the castle, built atop a hill on the edge of the town, you look straight down into the lake, a considerable distance below. A zig-zag path leads down to the water’s edge. The lake is fed by several small streams, and the level of the water is said to vary considerably, sometimes disappearing altogether.
A short distance from the town, the Red Lake is named for the red colour of the cliffs that form the walls of the hole. It is one of the deepest sink holes in the world, a total of more than 500 metres. The nearly sheer cliffs make it impossible to descend to the water’s edge, but it is a spectacular sight. The lake is fed by an underground river whose origin and destination are unknown. It contains a unique type of fish which is also found in the rivers and streams in the plain below Imotski, hinting at the underground connections that link them.
Imotski was under Ottoman rule from the late 15th century until 1717, when it was captured by the Venetians. Gardner Wilkinson saw a stone in one of the walls recording that the castle had been restored by one Lubomir, said to have been a Bosnian prince before the Ottoman conquest. According to the local tradition, as related to Gardner Wilkinson, the castle had been captured by some 80 men, who had tricked the Ottoman garrison into believing they faced a much larger force by lighting numerous fires in the forests, prompting them to abandon the fort. Nothing remains of the town’s Muslim past.
Gardner Wilkinson was told how the Venetians, as a cruel form of sport, had offered condemned criminals the option of hurling themselves off the castle walls on to a ledge more than ten metres below. In the unlikely event that they succeeded, they would receive a pardon. Otherwise they plunged down the cliff into the Blue Lake.
Gardner Wilkinson found evidence of the former Muslim presence in the country around Imotski. In the village of Župa, he saw tombs with the crescent and star carved on them. At another village he saw tombs ‘apparently with the crescent and the cross rudely sculptured upon them…’. I had myself seen such a tomb with both cross and crescent in 1998, in a medieval graveyard near Stolac, across the border in Bosnia. The apparent confusion of Christian and Muslim symbols presumably dated from a period when people had publicly converted from one faith to the other, but were still hedging their bets. Several other tombs in the graveyard I visited near Stolac bore the typical markings of the Church of Bosnia, the heretical sect that took root in Bosnia in the Middle Ages, with their carved figures with outstretched, out-sized hands. Perhaps the ambiguity of the tomb with the cross and the crescent reflected the fact that this was a land of confused religious identities, where heresy had only briefly been supplanted by Catholic Orthodoxy before Islam appeared on the scene.
At Vrgorac, further south from Imotski, Gardner Wilkinson wrote of the ruined castle in terms that expressively reflected the attitude of his time to the drawn out conflict between Christianity and Islam in the region: ‘It was built in the days of terror, when the conquering Turks were spreading conquest and desolation over many Christian countries, and Dalmatia was trembling for its liberty and its faith…. It stands as a satisfactory memorial to the triumph of Christian over Moslem power; a still more singular proof of which is seen in the conversion of a minaret into the belfry of the church below.’ Yet under Ottoman rule Christianity had been tolerated, and although Christians were undoubtedly second-class subjects of the Sultan, they co-existed with Muslims. There were churches as well as mosques in Ottoman lands. As the Ottomans were rolled back in the 17th and 18th and most of the 19th centuries, Islam was simply effaced from the reconquered territories. Only in the last quarter of the 19th century, when Austria occupied Bosnia, did Christian Europe permit Muslims to remain in its midst.
Gardner Wilkinson was much interested in the Morlachs. He described at some length the manifold superstitions and folk beliefs of the Morlachs, including the measures they took to ward off vampires and witches. In Imotski, he witnessed a group of them, ‘simple-minded boors, with the usual long pigtails, loose brown jackets and blue tights’, claiming their rewards for killing wolves at the town hall, where they were ‘quizzed by the hat-wearing townsmen.’ At Župa, he was not altogether happy with the interest they showed in him: ‘Had it not been for the odious habit they have of making spitting part of their conversation, I might have been as much pleased with their visit as they seemed to be with mine… and their custom of abstaining from ablutions renders their near approach by no means desirable.’
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