At the Gates of the East

Bosnia has left comparatively few written records of its culture, and this book attempts to fill that gap with an anthology of British travel accounts of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ranging from the earliest British travel writings in the sixteenth-century to the beginning of the twentieth-century, Hadziselimovic traces the British fascination with fictions of Bosnia as "exotic," "distant," and "oriental." In addition to holding up a revealing mirror to the attitudes of the British toward the Balkans, this book discusses how these travel narratives also provide a wealth of information -- cultural, political, military, economic, religious, and geographic -- that may hold clues to the roots of the recent war in Bosnia.