Sacrifice in Blood, Sacrifice of Breast-milk
The Three-Arched Bridge is yet another masterpiece from the the great Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. Drawing heavily from the Serbian legend of a the sacrife of a young wife-and-mother Rozafa, partly motivated by great patriotic fervor and partly manipulated by two deceitful brothers-in-law who duped her unsuspecting husband into the act , the novel tells of another immurement and its mysterious motives in the background of 14th century Albania. Narrated by Gjon Ukcama, the Albanian monk, the novel takes us into the hotbed of political tensions and itrigues on the eve of the Ottoman invasion in the wake of the crumbling Byzantine empire. The decision to build a bridge over Ujane e Keqe would result in wide-spread conflicts from various corners like the Boats and Rafts, the company that enjoys the monopoly in ferrying across the river, and the natives steeped in superstitions who believed that any such 'outrage' against the spirits of the waters would incite their wrath. Yet since the Count also supports the bridge-people, the construction begins. But what is constructed during the day gets destroyed during the night quite mysteriously. Who is responsible? The Boats and Rafts people? The water-spirits? Anyone else? It is at this time the old epic once again begins to make rounds. And the 'heroic tale' becomes terrifying reality when a mason named Murrash Zenebisha is immured into the wall of the bridge in a grotesque manner, obviously with the consent of the Count as well: “If it is true ...that ..enemies have hit upon the idea od destroying the bridge with the help of a myth, then you should devise some way of punishing the culprits in kind....”
The terrifying image haunts the rest of the novel completely. Reports of how the Emperor brutalized his Bulgarian soldiers and other atrocities pouring in would confirm one thing: that the sacrifice of Murrash Zenebisha is not going to be the last. Within a few years Ottoman conquest would become reality. It was in 1398, just a few years after the bridge built on blood was completed, that the Kosdovo massacres occurred. Coming to contemporary reality, Enver Hoxa's Stalinist regime, the Soviet supremacy and the Balkan conflicts that raged during the last decades of the twentieth century could be seen mirrored as strong undercurrents in the novel, as elsewhere in Kadare.
(Brief Review on the Amazon page of the Book)
More on Ismail Kadare:
Chronicle in Stone
https://alittlesomethings.blogspot.com/2024/07/chronicle-in-stone-by-ismail-kadare.html
Dictiator Calls
https://alittlesomethings.blogspot.com/2024/07/dictator-calls-by-ismail-kadare.html
Chronicle in Stone and The
Accident by Ismail Kadare https://alittlesomethings.blogspot.com/2015/06/blog-post.html
Three Arched Bridge and
Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare
https://alittlesomethings.blogspot.com/2015/06/blog-post.html
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