Croatia’s entry into the 2026 Eurovision final did more than entertain—it shattered a taboo.
The all-female group LELEK performed ‘Andromeda’ wearing traditional sicanje tattoos: Christian crosses and symbols once tattooed onto the skin of Catholic girls in Ottoman-ruled Bosnia and Croatia. Their performance invoked a buried chapter of European history—one modern cultural institutions prefer forgotten: centuries of Islamic conquest, forced conversion, child seizure, and sexual enslavement in the Balkans.
The song’s refrain—‘many chose the grave because our mothers did not give birth to slaves’—is not metaphorical but historical.
During Ottoman expansion into southeastern Europe, Christian populations endured the devshirme system, in which boys were taken from their families, converted to Islam, and trained as Janissaries. Girls and women were frequently abducted into harems or domestic slavery. Churches were destroyed or converted, Christian communities reduced to second-class dhimmi status, and resistance crushed through violence and taxation.
The sicanje tradition emerged from this world. Catholic families tattooed visible crosses onto their daughters’ hands, arms, and foreheads both as a sign of faith and, according to historians and ethnographers, as a deterrent against abduction and forced assimilation.
In the words of one scholarly publication dedicated to the topic:
‘The traditional tattooing of women was of the greatest importance during the Turkish occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1463 and 1878, since the tattooing of the cross as a symbol of Christianity, in addition to its primary protective function (prevention of abduction and rape by the Turks), also had the function to witnessing to religion/Catholicism. Geographically, the custom of tattooing women was most widespread among Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina…’1
Researchers documented hundreds of these motifs, almost all centered around the cross. Far from folklore, this was a survival strategy etched directly into the skin.
The reaction from Türkiye and its defenders was immediate and predictable. Turkish media condemned LELEK’s imagery as an insult to Ottoman history, while social media activists denounced the performance as ‘Islamophobic’.
But this outrage reveals something more serious—the insistence that Christian Europeans may not publicly remember their own historical suffering under Islamic rule.
Imagine demanding that African Americans stop making films or songs about slavery because it reflects poorly on modern whites. Imagine insisting Jewish communities remain silent about historical persecution in order to avoid offending Germans. Such demands would be considered grotesque.
Yet when Europeans recall centuries of conquest and enslavement under Islamic empires, they are told that remembrance itself constitutes hatred.
This double standard has become deeply entrenched in Western cultural life.
‘The message is unmistakable: some historical suffering deserves remembrance; other historical suffering deserves suppression’
Historic injustices committed by Europeans are memorialized endlessly—in museums, schools, documentaries, and political rhetoric. Entire industries exist to ensure these crimes are never forgotten. But when the victims were European Christians and the perpetrators Muslim conquerors, historical memory suddenly becomes ‘dangerous’, ‘divisive’, or ‘far-right’.
The message is unmistakable: some historical suffering deserves remembrance; other historical suffering deserves suppression.
Such is how ‘narratives’ are created.
Nor was the Balkan experience unique.
Centuries earlier, Coptic Christians in Egypt developed a nearly identical practice: tattooing crosses onto the wrists of their children under Islamic rule. Like the Croats, the Copts lived under systems of discrimination, periodic persecution, and forced separation. The tattoo served as both a declaration of faith and a means of identifying Christian children in times of chaos, abduction, or massacre.
Even today, those tattoos can and do make Copts targets. Islamist extremists, including ISIS, have used them to identify Christians for execution. Yet the practice endures as a visible symbol of continuity and defiance.
The parallel matters because it demonstrates a recurring historical pattern extending across the Middle East, North Africa, and southeastern Europe. Whether under Arab or Turkish rule—that is, under Islamic rule—Christian populations repeatedly described similar experiences: conquest justified through jihad doctrine, legal inferiority under dhimmi systems, sexual exploitation of women, child separation, and pressure to convert.
These realities are extensively documented not only in Christian accounts but in Muslim chronicles themselves.
This is precisely why LELEK’s performance provoked such hostility. Eurovision is no longer merely a music competition; it functions as a cultural ritual celebrating post-national identity, multiculturalism, and progressive orthodoxy. A performance rooted in Christian memory and resistance to Islamic imperialism disrupts that narrative. It reminds Europeans that their history was not simply one of colonial domination, but also of survival against conquest.
That memory is intolerable to institutions built upon selective remembrance.
Equally revealing is the silence surrounding the ongoing persecution of Christians throughout much of the Muslim world today. Churches are bombed or burned across parts of Africa and the Middle East. Christian girls continue to be abducted and forcibly converted in countries such as Pakistan and Nigeria. Apostasy and blasphemy laws remain tools of intimidation and violence.
Yet many of the same voices denouncing Croatia’s Eurovision entry show little interest in these realities. They are troubled by a song that refers to the historical Muslim persecution of Christians; they couldn’t care less about the ongoing Muslim persecution of Christians.
LELEK’s performance resonated precisely because it broke through this enforced amnesia. By invoking sicanje, the group reclaimed a suppressed historical memory and rejected the demand that Europeans sever themselves from their own past in order to preserve modern ideological sensitivities.
A civilization incapable of remembering its wounds cannot defend itself from repeating them.
The point is not to cultivate hatred or vengeance. History should be examined honestly, regardless of who committed the atrocities. But honesty becomes impossible when one set of historical crimes is endlessly amplified while another is aggressively suppressed.
The crosses tattooed onto Balkan, Coptic, and other Christian communities were not abstract political symbols. They were marks of endurance by people living under conquest and fear. Their descendants have every right to remember why those marks existed.
Suppressing that memory in the name of ‘tolerance’ does not produce reconciliation. It produces ignorance—and ignorance has a way of inviting history to return.
- Vesna Haluga, Znamen na koži (Mark on the Skin), p. 203. ↩︎
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