Trees of Life

Louis Bricogne, a French forestry expert, traveled the Ottoman Empire in 1860s and reported that Bosnian peasants were entirely dependent on the forest resources, using wood in every aspect of their lives. That is not surprising, considering that that more than half of Bosnia’s territory was covered in forests, making it one of the greenest Ottoman regions. But while forests and trees were indeed the key material used for construction as well as heating and industry such as mining, they also played an important role in marking religious and social boundaries between the Bosnian religious communities, particularly the Catholics and the Muslims. This paper focuses on forests and trees as they appear in Franciscan Catholic sources in Ottoman Bosnia in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. By tracing trees in physical spaces as well as stories, it explores their material and metaphorical function in defining communal belonging and safeguarding the boundaries between the Catholic and Muslim communities. Whether planting the trees or cutting them down, access to and usage of woodlands were directly implicated in negotiations of how space should be shared and fed into broader religiously-informed anxieties. At the same time, trees were also metaphorical signposts that structured how histories of community, belonging, and religious change were memorized and told. By focusing on the ubiquitous Bosnian landscape, the paper examines the inextricable relationship between land and a sense of communal belonging, allowing for examining how the physical world sculpted cultural imaginaries and memories of the Ottoman communities.