The ‘Millet-system’ to the test: Religious freedom, tolerance and co-existence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Bosnia as revealed in Arthur J. Evans’s 1875 travelogue Through Bosnia and Herzegovina on foot

In many respects, Arthur J. Evans’s 1875 travelogue through Ottoman Bosnia is typical of its time: in true Orientalist style, the book is an even mixture of romanticised depictions of nature and landscape and expressions of a Western sense of superiority and condescension. Yet, there is more to Evans’s objectives than mere descriptions. His journey takes place against the backdrop of the 1875 Herzegovina Uprising of the Orthodox Christian population which ultimately resulted in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin and the loss of Ottoman territories to the Russian Empire, the official independence of Serbia, and the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia. Aware of Eastern and Central European powers’ ambitions for the region, Evans proposes that, rather than supporting the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the United Kingdom should support the Serbs’ rebellion and help install an independent Christian Bosnian state, albeit under British tutelage. Evans thus approaches the journey with a preconceived idea that all Bosnian Christian communities, especially the Orthodox, are oppressed, unhappy, and eager to join the rebellion. Consequently, he emphasises or exaggerates anything that seems to support this view. This paper will argue, however, that, in spite of Evans’s efforts to the contrary, his account reveals a remarkable level of religious freedom, co-existence and tolerance among the different Bosnian religious communities (‘millets’) at one of the most testing times for this society. Moreover, the situation on the ground as depicted by Evans seems to demonstrate that much of the inter-religious tension was instigated by outside influences and that rebellion was far from the minds of most ordinary Bosnians of any confession