ABSTRACT
Any attempt to understand the personal and social toll of death and the dead must include a cultural context. What are the ways in which the dead, dying, and death are framed and articulated? What is the language and what are the practices that are evoked in response to such events in personal and communal life? This paper examines written and oral sources that reflect the attitudes towards death in Ottoman Bosnia. It engages two intertwined aspects of death culture: one that tries to avoid death and the other that attempts to embrace it. The analysis will thus engage cultural expressions related to salvation from and salvation after death. Furthermore, because of Ottoman Bosnia's religiously plural environment that included Muslims, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, and Sephardic Jews, many of the local beliefs and practices were designed and shared through a socially intimate pool of knowledge and reworked through specific eschatological symbols and material culture. Although the rise of secularism and the national awakenings of the nineteenth century have profoundly affected the beliefs and practices surrounding death, many premodern narratives, myths, and commemorative representations have endured to date, testifying to the durability of shared cultural imagination in providing a buffer against mortality and forgetting.
