Lilies, the Devil, and Rainbow Colors

A Brief History of Our Sacred Symbols

Sarajevo’s first Pride march in which took place on 8 September 2019. Participants are marching under the slogan “Ponosno zajedno” (Proudly Together). Photo credit: Antonio Balic

This year’s Sarajevo Pride produced exactly what contemporary politics increasingly specializes in: a symbolic scandal. A participant dressed as the Devil marched at the front of the parade, another wrapped Bosnia’s medieval lily emblem in rainbow symbolism, and within hours social media was flooded with warnings about sacrilege, national humiliation, and moral catastrophe. In a country that has survived war, ethnic cleansing, state capture, mass corruption, deindustrialization, and the systematic looting of public wealth, it was apparently a young man with a rainbow flag who finally crossed the red line.

Let us set aside, for a moment, the fact that the struggle against discrimination based on whom people share their bed with was once a perfectly understandable and legitimate political cause. The problem is that this goal long ago began disappearing behind an ever more bizarre production of identities. There was a time when the argument was simple: people should not be harassed because of their sexual orientation, nor reduced to it as the defining feature of their existence. The irony is that this struggle eventually began producing precisely what it had originally risen against. Instead of becoming simply human beings liberated from the politicization of their sexuality, people acquired ever more labels. Rather than becoming a less important aspect of one’s personality, sexuality—through the hyper-sexualization of society—has become more important than ever.

And so, instead of abandoning categories altogether, we now invent new ones faster than medieval heralds fabricated coats of arms for imaginary noble families. Things have reached a level of absurdity where a person can find themselves accused of insensitivity, bigotry, or even fascism for failing to adequately appreciate the inner struggle of a human being who identifies as a bisexual whale with an emotional affinity for binary unicorns and a seasonally fluid attraction to astral jellyfish.

Let us also set aside the fact that I still cannot figure out who first came up with the idea that the emancipation of homosexuals in a country where half the population is still arguing about events from the fourteenth century would somehow be accelerated by placing a man dressed as the Devil at the head of the parade. It is roughly the same level of marketing genius as launching a vegetarian awareness campaign with a pig slaughter or promoting a convention of teetotalers through a rakija festival. If the objective was to convince religious conservatives that homosexuals pose no threat to their way of life, it is difficult to imagine a less fortunate choice than the very figure that has spent the last two thousand years playing the chief villain in their cosmology.

And yet...

The most hilarious reactions were undoubtedly those accusing a certain young man of desecrating the lily flag—the moment when the lumpen-proletarian inquisitors entrusted with defending national sanctities finally entered the stage. Under those very same lilies, tricolors, checkerboards, crosses, and crescents, people watched—without anything approaching this level of emotional trauma—as factories built over generations disappeared, social wealth was transformed into private loot, public assets were sold for pennies to politically connected speculators, labor was reduced to a cheap commodity, and entire towns were turned into reservoirs of despair and low-wage workers.

Under those symbols, war profiteers became respected businessmen, gangsters transformed into esteemed investors, loan sharks into distinguished bankers, and party apparatchiks into a hereditary aristocracy with a first claim on the state itself. Somehow, all of that passed without too much fuss. The symbols survived cigarette smuggling, drug trafficking, privatization rackets, crony tenders, influence peddling, diploma mills, systemic corruption, organized pedophilia within religious institutions, and all the small and large industries of human degradation that defined the post-socialist transition. But now, at last, they have encountered the enemy that leaves them shocked and horrified: a twenty-year-old who learned on TikTok that his sexuality is the most important political event since the French Revolution.

Not to mention how bizarre it is when people behave as if medieval symbols descended directly from heaven, vacuum-sealed in moral sterility. As though lilies, crowns, double-headed eagles, and the rest of the heraldic flora and fauna did not emerge in a world where kings, emperors, despots, and other feudal lords conquered foreign lands, sold subjects into slavery, hanged and butchered opponents, raped women and children, and waged wars that left millions of corpses in their wake. If a flag is “tainted” because some confused young man incorporated it into his sexual self-promotion, then by the same vulgar and intellectually impoverished standards every medieval—and many modern—coat of arms should have been placed under quarantine six centuries ago.

But let us return to the Devil who led this year’s LGBT parade through Sarajevo. Judging by the amount of bloodlust and venom that flooded social media in response, he appears to be the most popular deity in these parts, and his place is precisely where he stood. Such malice, such sadism, such delight in the prospect of another person’s public humiliation, such eager anticipation of collective degradation, is difficult to explain through the much-celebrated traditional religiosity that is supposedly under attack.

It was not enough for the young man to be dismissed as a fool, a traitor, or a degenerate. Beneath the comments lurked something far older: a cannibalistic hunger to skin the transgressor alive in the town square, to drag him through the dust like a carcass, to purge him from the community—as if that very community had not produced him exactly as he is.

One almost feels tempted to protect the Prince of Darkness from such believers.

His reputation has suffered serious damage.