Musa Ćazim Ćatić

Musa Ćazim Ćatić (12 March 1878 – 6 April 1915) was a Bosnian poet from Odžak, where he attended the mekteb before moving, after his father's death, to Tešanj; there he learned the barber's trade and studied at the madrasa under the town's mufti, acquiring Turkish, Arabic and Persian.¹ He studied in Constantinople, served three years in the army, attended Sarajevo's Sharia Judges' School — from whose dormitory his bohemian life had him expelled — and read law at Zagreb, in the circle of Antun Gustav Matoš and Tin Ujević.¹

Ćatić edited the journal Behar and, from 1912, Mostar's Biser, publishing his Pjesme od godine 1900–1908 in 1914; his verse moves between eroticism and a mysticism drawn on Turkish and Persian poets, and he began in the style of Safvet-beg Bašagić before gathering a school of followers who carried modern Bosnian poetry into its second phase.²¹ Mobilised in 1914, he contracted tuberculosis after being found half-frozen in the snow at Örkény in Hungary and died at Tešanj on 6 April 1915; his portrait now appears on Bosnia and Herzegovina's 50-convertible-mark banknote.¹²