A bridge in the turmoil of the Balkans: Ivo Andric and Ismail Kadare

The stories of Andric, The Bridge over the Drina and Kadare The Three-arch Bridge present the famous Balkan legend of the Immured Woman, yet the two writers have a very different view of this edifice. For the Yugoslav author, the bridge represents the solid, harmonious relations in which generations of a multiethnic population had evolved despite the vagaries of History. Disaster came from the West with the Great War of 1914 when emerging nationalistic ideologies shattered this peaceful cohabitation forever. The Albanian writer, on the other hand, sees the bridge as a tragic misfortune; its construction was based on blasphemous misinterpretations of legends and opened the gates to the Ottoman invasion, bringing in its wake oriental despotism and a chaotic Empire of Babel which finally tore the country away from Europe.