Six hundred years ago, a Bosnian king raised a lily.
The golden lily of the Kotromanić kings became the mark of a kingdom and when that kingdom fell in 1463, the lily did not fall with it. The same spirit is carved into the stećci, the medieval tombstones scattered across our country: the kolo, the circle dance, the dragon, and the open, raised hand. Ordinary people insisting, in stone, that they had been here, and that they were their own.
That insistence runs through the whole of our history. They have tried to erase it, most brutally in the war and genocide of the 1990s, which scattered Bosnians to every corner of the earth. But a people can be dispersed without being undone. Wherever they landed, they carried the same six-hundred-year-old lily, and wore it with pride.
This summer, that scattered nation found one place to look at once. A team carried Bosnia onto the world’s biggest stage and for ninety minutes at a time, Bosnians everywhere stood in the same ring, hand to hand, around the same flag.
The kingdom is gone. The lily is not. And neither, it turns out, are we.
Bosnian History 