"And in the room in which I was sitting, there was a window, beyond it was eternity. And I was staring at the ground persistently." This epitaph from 1258 was discovered on one of the mystical stećci– unique Bosnian gravestones, dating from the period between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries.
There are at least three theories about the origin of these graves, whose writings contain simultaneously the grace and the laconism of the Japanese haiku.

The most popular and striking of the legends is that the graves belonged to the Bogomils – a Christian sect which originated in Bulgaria. During the Middle Ages it spread to Bosnia and Herzegovina in a scale quite annoying for the Orthodox and Catholic Churches and penetrated as far as Western Europe, inciting the creation of the first universities.

One of the early defenders of this version is the Hungarian writer Janosh Asboth. In the 1880s he devised a whole system of explanations which connected the Bogomils to the unique reliefs on the gravestones – according to him, the floral motifs, the animals and the human figures imprinted on them depict religious rituals.



In recent year, however, moderately romantic historians are re-evaluating Bosnia’s history and question not only the theory about the Bogomilist essence of the Bosnian Christian church but also the connection between the Bogomils and the stećci.

“During the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when many of these stones were made, a significant part of the population of Bosnia proper was Catholic, and a large part of the population of Herzegovina was Orthodox…to identify all stecci as such with Bogomilism is to replace one mystery with another – the mystery of non-existent Catholic or Orthodox gravestones,” British historian Noel Malcolm wrote in Bosnia A short history.

Contemporary historians seem to prefer a more prosaic explanation: namely that the language written on the stećci was a symbolic language that developed in the region – some of the reliefs reflect barbaric myths and rituals while others depict scenes from the lives of Slavic and Vlach nobility. Or, as Noel Malcoms sums it up, they may have the more trivial function of a most mundane decoration.

The beautiful mystery may have been crushed by pedantic historians but the epitaphs remain remarkable. A gravestone from 1094 reads: “You, who are honouring my stone, may have gone to the stars. And you came back because you found nothing there except, again, yourself.”