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Stone Speaker: Medieval Tombs, Landscape, and Bosnian Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

The Poet Mak Dizdar (d.1971) has become a cultural icon in contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina. Inspired by the lapidary imagery and epitaphs of medieval Bosnian tombstones, his best-acclaimed collection of poetry, Stone Sleeper , reawakens the medieval voices and assigns them a new role in the historical imagination of contemporary Bosnians. In this study, Amila Buturovic looks at Stone Sleeper's recovery of the ancestral world as an effort to refashion the sentiments of collective belonging. In treating the medieval tombstones as sites of collective memory, Dizdar's poetry evokes new possibilities for Bosnians to cast aside national differences based primarily on religion and embrace a pluralistic identity rooted in the sacred landscape of medieval Bosnia.