ABSTRACT
The spread and consolidation of the Ottoman cosmopolis in terms of literary culture and epigraphic preferences allowed for the Ottoman Islamic funerary style, in form and content, to expand into rural areas. Islamic tombstones turned to religious language and ritual invocations to specify the community's modes of mourning and memory practices. In that sense, the lack of inscriptions in Bosnian rural cemeteries and especially the lack of a more explicit attachment to Islamic identity of the early stones ought to be placed in the context of local rather than broader theological factors. Cemeteries became spaces ritually and symbolically recognisable as Muslim, Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish, discontinuing the heterotopic, cross-confessional memory characteristic of the early period. Islamic societies across the world have nevertheless developed rich practices of marking death through material culture and the Ottoman obituary styles and practices excel.
