ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that in the case of Ottoman Bosnian tombstones, language and script enshrine religious identity as well: Arabic script is commonly used for Muslims, and Church Slavonic and Cyrillic, and later Latin, for Christians. Ottoman Bosnian funerary praxis came about at the confluence of vernacular epigraphic and/or iconographic customs and the imperial lexicon of death. The visual characteristic of Muslim and Christian graves in early Ottoman Bosnia reveal minor typological differences especially when one considers all aspects of this funerary culture - location, type of burial, general masonry, environment, visual and textual clues. In the necro-lexicon of pre-Ottoman Bosnian tombstones, however, the discord between history and memory is stark. The Ottomans themselves had already begun to develop a distinct funerary material culture with composite origins in Turkic, Arabo-Islamic and Byzantine traditions. Despite regional variances that melded into it over time, this imperial style became the marker of the majority of Ottoman burial grounds.
