Vilayet Printing House (Sarajevo)

Topal Sherif Osman Pasha

Shortly after the Constitutional Law for the Vilayet of Bosnia was issued, Osman Pasha invited publishing magnate Ignjat Sopron to Sarajevo. Sopron was the owner and manager of a publishing and printing house in Zemun (then part of the Austrian Empire, today one of the municipalities of Belgrade, Serbia).[4] An ethnic German, he was born in 1821 in Novi Sad as Ignaz Karl Soppron.[7] Upon his arrival in Sarajevo, Osman Pasha offered him a subsidy to establish and organise a printing house. It was to be headquartered in a building on Sarajevo's Dugi sokak street that was being rented by the vilayet's government.[4][8] Sopron soon came to the city bringing with him printing tools and materials, accompanied by a typesetter from Belgrade, Ilija Tomić. Tomić was in charge of the Cyrillic and Latin letters, and he engaged three graduated students of the Serb secondary school in Sarajevo to be his trainees. Osman Pasha also invited a man named Kadri-effendi from Istanbul to work as the typesetter for Arabic letters.[8] The principal aim of the printing house was to issue an official gazette and to publish elementary school textbooks, thus stopping their import from Serbia and Austria.[4]

Sopronova pečatnja, or Sopron's Printing House, was officially opened on 19 April [O.S. 7 April] 1866.[7] The Cyrillic orthography that was used in it was consistently in accordance with the linguistic reform of Serbian philologist Vuk Karadžić, which was at that time relatively new and still not universally accepted.[9][10] The first issue of a political-informative and educational weekly newspaper named Bosanski vjestnik (Serbian Cyrillic: Босански вјестник, "Bosnian Herald") appeared on the same day.[7] This was the first newspaper ever to be published in Bosnia and Herzegovina.[11] Sopron made a deal with the vilayet's authorities to publish it independently from the official gazette.[7] When Sopron presented the editorial policy of his newspaper to the authorities, he indicated that it would be printed in the Serbian language, much to the Ottomans' displeasure. The authorities subsequently scratched "Serbian" and replaced it with "Bosnian". Sopron accepted the revision and went along with Osman Pasha's idea of promoting a unitary Bosnian nation.[6] Nevertheless, Bosanski vjestnik had "a decidedly Serb orientation".[11] Sopron did not consider this contradictory, as he apparently identified Bosnian-ness with Serbness. In the newspaper, the language was occasionally referred to as Serbo-Bosnian, while both the Serb and the Croat ethnic designations were expressed.[6]

The first issue of the official gazette, named Bosna (Ottoman Turkish: بوسنه; Cyrillic: Босна, "Bosnia"), appeared on 28 May [O.S. 16 May] 1866, i.e., 13 Muharram 1283 AH. It was a bilingual weekly with half of the pages printed in Ottoman Turkish in the Arabic script, and the other half printed in Serbo-Croatian in the Cyrillic script. The text in Serbo-Croatian was a faithful translation of that in Turkish. The gazette was primarily concerned with publishing and explaining laws, orders, and proclamations, but it also provided news from the political, economic, cultural, and social life of the vilayet. It would be issued without interruption for more than twelve years, and for much of that period it was the only newspaper in the Vilayet of Bosnia. It had different editors over time: Mustafa Rifet Imamović, Mehmed Šakir Kurtćehajić, Salih Biogradlija, Javer Baruh, Nurudin Kurtćehajić, and Kadri-effendi. Most of them were Bosnian Muslims, except Baruh (a Jew) and Kadri-effendi (a Turk). A constant in the gazette was its translator from Turkish, Miloš Mandić,[12] a polyglot who had previously worked as a teacher in a Serb elementary school in Prijepolje. Besides Sopron, Mandić was one of the contributors to Bosanski vjestnik, along with Bogoljub Petranović and Salih Sidki Hadžihuseinović. Petranović was the manager of the Serb secondary school in Sarajevo and the leader of the Serb youth movement in the city, while Hadžihuseinović was an official of the Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque.[7] In August 1866, the printing house published its first book, Lesson on Man and His Duties (Наравоученије о човеку и његовим дужностима), translated from Greek by Georgije Jovanović.[13][14]

Mandić's alphabet book, page 11

In October 1866, Sopron sold the establishment to the Government of the Vilayet of Bosnia.[7] It was renamed Vilajetska pečatnja, or the Vilayet Printing House, and from March 1867 onwards it bore the name Vilajetska štamparija (the same meaning).[12] Sopron remained the owner and editor of Bosanski vjestnik, and managed to publish 51 issues.[7] After a year in Sarajevo, Sopron left the city and returned to Zemun.[15] The first director of the printing house was Haim Davičo, a Belgrade Jew, who was offered that position by Osman Pasha.[16] Mehmed Šakir Kurtćehajić, the editor of Bosna since early 1868, began publishing Sarajevski cvjetnik at the end of that year. It was a bilingual weekly like Bosna, containing commentaries on current politics and articles on various social issues, most of which was written by Kurtćehajić. He fiercely defended the Ottoman regime in Bosnia, polemicising with newspapers from Serbia and Austria which criticised it.[15] In May 1869, when Osman Pasha ceased to be the governor of the Vilayet of Bosnia, Davičo returned to Belgrade. The new governor installed Kurtćehajić as the director of the printing house.[16] Kurtćehajić died of tuberculosis in September 1872;[15] the last issue of Sarajevski cvjetnik had appeared two months earlier.[17]

Kurtćehajić's death marked the end of a prosperous period for the Vilayet Printing House. Its subsequent directors were less capable, and the establishment's condition began to deteriorate. In 1877, the last Ottoman governor of Bosnia installed Kadri-effendi as director, and he significantly improved the condition of the printing house. Austro-Hungarian troops entered Sarajevo on 19 August 1878, marking the start of 40 years of Austro-Hungarian occupation. Four days later, General Josip Filipović, the Austro-Hungarian commander in Sarajevo, transferred the management of the printing house from Kadri-effendi to an Austrian official. This spelled the end of the Vilayet Printing House, which was renamed Zemaljska štamparija (National Printing Press), and continued its work as the official printing house of the Condominium of Bosnia and Herzegovina.[16] The last, 636th, issue of Bosna appeared shortly before the end of Ottoman rule over Bosnia, on 30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1878.[12]

Apart from the newspapers Bosanski vjestnik, Bosna, and Sarajevski cvjetnik, the Vilayet Printing House published around fifty books and booklets in Serbo-Croatian, Ottoman Turkish, and Hebrew. While most of these publications were concerned with various Ottoman laws and legislation, the printing house also published a number of textbooks.[14] The textbooks for Serb elementary schools in the vilayet were prepared by Miloš Mandić on the basis of those that were used in Serbia. These include an alphabet book (Буквар), a short Biblical history (Кратка свештена историја), a basal reader (Прва читанка), and the First Knowledges (Прва знања); they were published in 1867 and 1868.[13][18] Mandić's alphabet book, the printing house's first textbook, was the second Serbian alphabet book using the reformed Serbian Cyrillic. The First Serbian Alphabet Book (Први Српски Буквар), authored by Vuk Karadžić, had been published in Vienna in 1827.[13][14] The original plan was to print fifteen textbooks for Serb schools, ranging in subject from grammar, arithmetic, geography and religious teaching, but only four were printed.[19] Although they were based on the textbooks used in Serbia, the vilayet's authorities made sure that every mention of Serbs and the Serbian language was erased from them.[20]

Bogoljub Petranović collected Bosnian Serb lyric folk poems and published them in 1867 in a separate book (Српске народне пјесме из Босне (Женске)).[7][13] The First Bosnian-Serb Calendar for the Common Year 1869 (Први босанско-српски календар за просту годину 1869), consisting of 58 pages, was edited by Jovan R. Džinić.[21] In Serbian tradition, calendars contained more than just calendarical data and were also popular literary and educational almanacs. Džinić's calendar had more of an educational, rather than literary, character.[22] It also included a collection of advice that was traditionally presented to journeymen during the testir ceremony of the guild of tailors in Sarajevo, in which a journeyman was promoted to a master craftsman. This is the only known text of this kind, beside a manuscript written in 1841 for the guild of goldsmiths.[23]

Catholic school textbooks in the vilayet included a geography book (Kratka zemljopisna početnica s dodatkom o Bosni, 1869) by Franjo Ž. Franjković, an alphabet book with elements of religious education (Bukvar s napomenkom članakah nauka vjere za katoličku mladež u Bosni, 1869), and another geography book (Početni zemljopis za katoličke učionice u Bosni, 1871) by the Franciscan Grgo Martić. The Catholic bishop of Mostar Paškal Buconjić financed the printing of an Ottoman Turkish grammar in 1871.[13] The Hebrew books included Meshek Beti (משק ביתי) and Appe Zutre (אפי זוטרי), which list religious observances, respectively, on Shabbat and Passover, and a small liturgical book titled Tikkun Moda'ah. These were composed around 1875 by the Sarajevo Rabbi Eliezer Papo.[24] The printing house also published the first printed work of Bosnian Aljamiado literature, the book Sehletul-Vusul, which contained the principal teachings of Islam. It was composed by Omer Humo, the mufti of Mostar.[14]