When I complained to a friend that I had perhaps dried up in my writing, he told me not to worry in the slightest. He had a certain cure for that illness. He was, actually, expecting the arrival of the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, with the same diagnosis, so that the two of us could be cured at the same time with his prescription.
The only thing I knew about Banja, about Sokollu’s Spa, the Spa of Višegrad, as everyone called it, besides being the source of crystalline calcium carbonate used to build the bridge in Višegrad, was that there was a medicinal spring in this place three miles from the town. It was here that Mehmed-pasha Sokollu, in his waning years in 1575, built a domed Turkish bath, wanting to give something (more) to his birthplace. In a brochure from 1934, I read that the radioactive waters (at an altitude of more than 1200 feet) treated rheumatism, neuralgia and ‘women’s disorders’. The brochure further claimed that the spa waters have an especially beneficial effect on barren women. ‘When a barren wife hails at the spa, and then begets a child, the village round doth shake its head, saying: By God, if she hadn’t hailed at the spa and her incantations said, she never ever would have bred…’
So it was that I also travelled through the thick forest to the spa, which I nicknamed ‘the Maidenhair’ after the magical looking rare grass that grows only there. I was happy to meet up with my old acquaintance, Orhan Pamuk, himself a native of Istanbul. And I was mildly surprised that he too, was suffering from a dry spell, because he was known to be a prolific writer. If perchance in some period of his writing life he did not publish a book for a long while, the one that followed was sure to be a hefty baby.
I gave birth to my children less often, and most often they were of medium weight. Such was my rhythm. However, in the last couple of years I had not conceived a single one, and I was getting seriously worried. That was why I went to visit the stone that gave birth to water: such fertility revived my faith. The stone on which I stepped had been polished for more than four centuries and was now the colour of grass and moss. The water, hot but not boiling, was of a heavenly warmth. and my body was turning into a ghost: alive yet dead. Pamuk and our host tried to talk through the water vapour, but the words disappeared in the glass windows of the dome and lost all their meaning. Our eyelids closed, but our eyes did not go to sleep. I push my way through the powerful water, to sit under the heavy stream that rushes from the mountain into the small pool, across my back. I am beaten as I never have been before. And I am happy to the point of silliness. This is the meeting point of the Cabbala, Zen, Sufism, Orthodox Aestheticism, the Catholic erasure of the fear of sin, the artistic heights of Islam... Just as the maidenhair fern can grow nowhere else but here, only here does the water arrive from a depth of 590 feet and from a more important historical depth of thirty-eight thousand years. An age sufficient to quell counts about its reason for existence or for speaking to the world.
It is also the reason for my relationship with the past. The antiquity that is inhaled here is completely authentic and cannot be resisted. The spirit first loses its orientation, and then the concept of time, and then the body also loses its orientation, and then its concept of space. This peculiar nirvana transformed me into a large question mark: were the barren women at this bath, perhaps, serviced by a man who was renowned for his healthy seed? Was this bath perhaps a male harem for desperate barren women? What kind of pleasure this tucked-away pool must have been for beys, pashas, viziers or sultans, regardless of whether they were the hosts or guests here. Whichever of the genders served these active waters and their bathers – it is noted in a long-lost text, that making love under this mountain stream (at a temperature of 95 degrees) is on par with the pleasure in the beauties of the heavenly gardens, Valhalla and Jannah.
This hamam could have been an ideal place for a caravansary, for surely travellers would have parted with their money here. Yet, nature (and perhaps fate) wished to hide it from the busy byways, and so placed it at an altitude that discouraged the weary traveller from the very thought of climbing up to it. That is why the stones of the hamam were polished by decades and centuries, and largely not by the hand of man. Although, it must be admitted, that hand got involved wherever and whenever it could: thus it is possible to find quotations in old manuscripts that overlap with the present: ‘Next to the spa stands a building where a popular investor maintains a restaurant and has rooms for overnight stay. In front of that building there is a large veranda in front of which spread magnificent panoramas of nature.’
I don’t know who the popular investor is nowadays, but he has not deprived himself either of the ‘restaurant’ nor of the ‘veranda’. For, it is true, the satisfaction of bathing in the tiny heavenly pool would not be complete if one does not go to the restaurant veranda afterwards, across a large hanging balcony without glass, above a deep mountain ravine that expands your thoughts with its marvellous views: thoughts that do not seem, reflecting off the Bosnian hills and vales that stand shoulder to shoulder with you, to return to you infertile. And the food! Along with the local specialities, you will be served royal young trout, just pulled from the nearby rapids, ordered by telephone only an hour before. This is trout that has gone all winter without eating, and has just begun to feed on pristine food.
However, the modern structure of this restaurant should not be confused with the caravansary in the 16th century. That, it is not. Today, for those who wish to enjoy these marvels for a while longer, there is a hotel – a rehabilitation centre called ‘Maidenhair’, with all the necessary comforts and also a modern pool, which is also filled with the thermal waters. The source of their radioactivity is radon, and where there is radon there will also be doctors and physiotherapists. Clearly, you do not have to be ill or concerned about your health to come to this place. In fact, by going there healthy, you prove to yourself that you have not yet rid yourself of hedonism.
Even Mehmed-Pasha himself did not make a caravansary of the hamam, of ‘the beautiful spa with its dome roof’; he built one nearby: “next to the River Drina as Sokollu’s stone inn or caravansary, which could take about ten thousand horses and camels under its roof”. Do you think the numbers are exaggerated? I wouldn’t say so. If they are, then they are not far from true. Just imagine what a task it was like to build a bridge like the one in Višegrad in the 1570s! In Mehmed-Pasha’s time Višegrad had about seven hundred homes, a mosque named Selimiye, a fountain, about three hundred shops, an imaret (hospice) that served the village’s poor, and a Dervish monastery – a tekya. In the village of Sokolovići (which got its name after the pasha, or the pasha got his name after the village, it makes no difference), there was a mosque called Sokolović mosque, but there was also a place for a Christian church where, according to legend, the pasha built a church dedicated to his Orthodox mother. This, of course, should not surprise anyone, if it is generally known that it was actually Mehmed-Pasha Sokollu who, as a vizier of the Turkish Dīvān, in 1557, personally had the Serbian Patriarchate at Peć renovated and then placed his brother Makarije at the head of the church, as the sources say, at the moment, ‘when Orthodoxy was in chaos and disarray, and the national idea of the Serbian people was beginning to wane in the heavy shackles of its slavery’. Some historians hold the position that, with the latter, ‘the great vizier through this decree preserved the Serbian people from final extinction and destruction’. This cannot be far from the truth if one knows to what extent the Serbian people of the time, no longer having their own independent state, lent importance to the only existing replacement for statehood – the Serbian Orthodox church. This is the reason for the widely held qualification that Mehmed-Pasha Sokollu was ‘an unshakeable Moslem and, at the same time... a good patriot who paid his dues to his people with dignity’. He believed that he made peace between Islam and his Bosnian homeland; his Serbian roots and the Orthodox Christian faith.
And that is why (in my mind) it was there, at the hamam, at that particular