"Their Fate Is Tied to Sorrow and Eternally Unforgettable": Muslim Migration, Memory, and Transnational Identity Construction in the Post-Ottoman Balkans

This paper critically examines materials from the private archive of Hajrudin Čengić in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, first consulted as part of a Council for European Studies Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship during the summer of 2014. An electrical engineer by training, Čengić was also a passionate amateur ethnographer and historian of his native region of the Sanjak, a former late Ottoman borderland on the present-day Serbo-Montenegrin border. Beginning in the 1950s, Čengić traveled throughout Turkey and Yugoslavia, contacting and interviewing Muslims who had fled the Sanjak as Muhajirs - Muslim migrants or refugees - during the region's tumultous transition from Ottoman to Yugoslav rule in the 1910s and 20s. His papers, ranging from uncategorized notes to unpublished manuscripts, provide unique (if imperfect) access to the lived experiences and historical memory of ordinary Ottoman Muslims who fled their Balkan homelands during this transformative time. At the same time, my paper considers Čengić's writings as a primary source for the contemporary and contested construction of Bosniak-Muslim identity in the second half of the 20th century, testifying to the enduring influence of the Ottoman past and the understudied resilience of its associated transnational migrant networks.