Serbian schoolteacher in Bosnia in the 19th century

This article presents excerpts from the *Memoirs* of Dionisios Marinkovic, a Serbian Orthodox schoolteacher in western Bosnia at the end of the nineteenth century. It is a historical account written in 1900, covering the period 1835-1900. The approach is that of a commented source document, the publication of which aims to shed light on the roots of contemporary Yugoslav conflicts. The main idea is that national and religious stereotypes, although embedded in Serbian collective consciousness, do not account for the real complexity of interconfessional relations in Bosnia: Marinkovic describes both tensions between Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Muslims, and scenes of peaceful coexistence. The contribution of this account is to show that intercommunal violence is not a historical inevitability, but the result of political and human choices, thus relativizing simplistic nationalist readings of Balkan history.