“Balkan Cosmology” by Bruce Sterling (2022)
bruces.medium.com
bruces.medium.com
It is extremely well written, the author clearly completely absorbed himself into the local culture. So many of the seemingly random references are actually relevant and very clever.
Along such lines, here is Michael Pupin in 1914, writing about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife <https://archive.org/details/independen79v80newy/page/n72/mod...>:
>The Pan-Serb propaganda does exist, I admit it frankly, and I ought to know whereof I speak, because I am a Serb and a former subject of the Austrian Empire. But this Pan-Serb propaganda is not a political conspiracy, born and bred at Belgrade or at any other place in the kingdom of Servia. It is a natural heritage of every true Serb, who is ever ready to obey the voice of the Serb minstrel, the gouslar, which commands him and has always commanded him for five hundred years to struggle for the "honored cross and golden liberty." This voice was always the supreme commander in all Serb struggles against the Turkish oppressor, and it is today the supreme commander in the Serb struggles against Austrian tyranny. The causes of the Pan-Serb propaganda are in Vienna and not Belgrade. The tragedy in Sarayevo on the 28th of June was being prepared in Vienna during the last thirty-six years; it was enacted on the very day—Vidov Dan—when every true Serb celebrates the anniversary of the battle of the field of Kossovo, in 1389, when the Serb Empire fell. Its memory always served as a reminder to the Serbs that they must avenge the wrongs perpetrated against the race, and that by united effort only can they regain the glories of their ancient empire which vanished at Kossovo.
This is, let me repeat, Michael Pupin. He was one of the most famous scientists/engineers in the world in 1914, far more famous than Tesla, and even today is clearly the second most-famous Serbian scientist. A building is named for him at Columbia. He had lived in the US for 40 years. And yet, when a man and his wife are shot and killed just because they happen to be royalty, and the murder is likely going to start a general European war, Pupin's response is this rant (I can't think of any other way to describe it), written for a mass-market weekly magazine, about how such actions are the heritage—no, the *obligation*—of every Serb and have been for 500 years!
> No map can do justice to the ethnological complexity of this region. The Serbs, Croats and Montenegrins are of the same blood, tho divided by religion and nationality. The annexation by Austria in 1908 of Bosnia and Herzegovina, both racially united to Servia rather than Hungary, destroyed their hopes of joining in one great Servian empire, and this disappointment gave rise to the bitter resentment against the Austrian crown which is now displayed.
It's quite interesting to think that even then, in the US press, Austrohungarian imperialism translated as 'preventing the Great Servian empire'.
It also happened that they were occupying Bosnia, where neither Austrians nor Hungarians lived, but Serbs did.
> He lived in Belgrade with Serbian author and film-maker Jasmina Tešanović for several years, and married her in 2005.