There are words I do not forget, and lessons I keep returning to. I try to give the texts order – monuments of letters and breath. There are poems that could always have been written better. From them I build a fortress, my Alamut, a space in time where I am the perfect man who kills. There is you, found anew each time, shamelessly ignoring swans on the banks of every river that lays itself bare. The heavens foretell rain, and the rivers carry me in their grace. Certain questions never grow old. At last, I am lost enough to forget where I was heading. Answers are only fragments of a shifting solution. This is a return to old writings. For a woman, for a poem, for the dust we shall become. For the body that wearies, and the mind that sears. This is the celebration of the last book’s flame.

Mehmed Meša Begić

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Meša’s poem Alamut inherits Vladimir Bartol’s metaphor from the novel with the same name but turns it inward: the fortress is no longer a site of political deception but a structure built from language itself — “monuments of letters and breath.” Where Bartol’s Hasan controls others through illusion, Begić’s speaker seeks refuge from illusion through writing. The act of constructing Alamut becomes a paradoxical discipline of survival — a private architecture of truth rising from the ruins of failed poems and exhausted faith.
In an age of ideological masquerades and manufactured spectacles, the story of Hasan-i Sabbah — the master of the fortress Alamut — feels strangely contemporary.

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Mehmed Begić is a poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina. He spent his early youth in his hometown, as well as in Mostar and Sarajevo. He is one of the founders and editors of the cultural magazine Kolaps – A guide for urban sleepers (1999–2010).

In 2000, together with Marko Tomaš, Nedim Ćišić, and Veselin Gatalo, he published a joint poetry collection titled L’amore al primo binocolo with the Italian publisher L’Obliqua in Brescia.

His translations of Leonard Cohen’s poetry into Bosnian appeared in the published collection Moj život u umjetnosti (Leonard Cohen – My Life in Art), released by Alternativni institut Mostar in 2003. He is featured in the interview and poetry collection Jer mi smo mnogi by Croatian poet Marko Pogačar.

Begić has collaborated with the band Vuneny and singer-songwriter Sanel Marić Mara. He occasionally contributes to online publications such as Žurnal (Sarajevo), Blesok (Skopje), and magazines like Tema (Zagreb). Together with Damir Šodan, he translates Hispanic poetry in the Divlji detektivi series.

He has an ongoing cooperation with Sarajevo-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Basheskia, resulting in several albums. In 2015, the album Savršen metak, blending his poetry and music, was released.

He also participated in the album Iznad tame – Pjesme za Viktora Haru (2023) with the collective Novi odmetnici. All lyrics were written by Begić.

He lived for many years in both Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. As of 2024, he lives in Madrid.

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Vladimir Bartol’s Alamut (1938) is a philosophical novel set in eleventh-century Persia, revolving around Hasan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Assassins and ruler of the fortress Alamut. Its central idea — “Nothing is an absolute truth; everything is permitted” — anchors a study of manipulation, faith, and the architecture of belief, as Hasan constructs an artificial paradise to convince his followers that dying for him will lead them to heaven. In the twenty-first century — in a triumph of metathesis and anachronism worthy of Jorge Luis Borges — the allegory has become more real than the events it once portrayed.

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