Bosnia and Herzegovina / All works
Novel
Zemlja heretika
Not translated into English
Zaim Topčić · 1972
Synopsis
A historical novel whose title means “the land of the heretics”, the book is set in medieval Bosnia, dear to its author. The plot is not described. The names that recur most often in the text are those of Ban Stjepan II Kotromanić, who ruled Bosnia from 1322 to 1353, and of Pope Benedict XII; one also encounters the Bogomils and the Bosnian Church, the fortresses of Bobovac and Srebrenica, priests, serfs and an adviser to the ruler.
Context
Published by Svjetlost in Sarajevo in 1972, in a series of contemporary authors, the book runs to 372 pages. Enes Duraković included it among the hundred books of Bosnian literature, and the press of the country presents it as a very important historical novel, by a writer whom critics judge to have been marginalised without reason. His son, the writer Zlatko Topčić, recalls his father's love for the Bosnian Middle Ages and places its publication a year earlier. The author's first novels had described the horrors of Jasenovac.
Who it is for
For readers interested in medieval Bosnia and its heresies, seen by a twentieth-century novelist.
Prizes and reception
Ranked by critics in the canon of Bosnian letters, it is counted among the major works of its author.
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