SOURCE: Mukerji, Vanita Singh. “Bosnian Politics and the Role of Religion in The Travnik Chronicle.” In Ivo Andrić: A Critical Biography pp. 97-107. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 1990.

In the following excerpt, Mukerji finds that Andrić posits in The Travnik Chronicle that religion could not have secured the state of Yugoslavia in the midst of political upheaval.

In antiquity, the frontier between the Greek and Roman worlds ran through the territory of modern Yugoslavia. The demarcation line between East and West was fixed and more sharply defined by the division of the Roman Empire in A.D. 390. Then came the eleventh-century schism when the Christian Church was divided between Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic creeds. In the fifteenth century the Turks invaded Europe and for more than four centuries these lands separated two worlds. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, great European statesmen demarcated their spheres...