Dva vijeka, jedan vijek: Ljetopisni triptih

In the invisible chain by which Bosnian friars Anto Knežević, Josip Markušić and Ljubo Hrgić and their manuscripts connect events and people across a time spanning two centuries, empires alternate in bloody wars, crimes, human fractures and suffering. The Sultan's reforms, the surrender of Bosnia to the hands of the Viennese-Pest dynasty, the First and Second World Wars with the omnipotence of the Serbian crown, followed by the communist parties and, in between, the episodes of the wartime terror of the Independent State of Croatia take place on a centuries-old stage, in great times, and the Bosnian horizon in the life and in the text of the three living observers and incorruptible interpreters of circumstances and their companions is low, narrow, closed.

Asking himself about each of the three Franciscans "What were his days, what were his nights?", Ivan Lovrenović, in the novel, a chronicle or a kind of martyrology Two Centuries, One Century, embarks with his heroes on an intimate, social and intellectual two-century adventure. From Bosnian villages and towns to the universities of Rome, Vienna, Paris, Zagreb and Belgrade and back again, a dual world emerges before us, the earthly and the literary, and the boundary between them fades. Evil, good, human suffering, hatred, architectural undertakings and lofty aspirations in the mainstream, but also in the meanders of great history remain written down both in the friars' manuscripts and in this unique novel Two Centuries, One Century: "so that they may not be forgotten, so that the victims and sufferings may be remembered, so that they may be given the gratitude of generations, and an eternal reward".