BELGRADE (12 page)

Serbian society possessed a rich oral culture at the time of Miloš Obrenović, but relatively little in the form of written literature. Vojvodina was the main source of literature in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Educated Serbs came from the north to serve in Miloš’s administration, to record the laws and teach in the first schools. Jovan Sterija Popović (1806–56) was one such writer, who lived for some ten years in the city. Vuk Karadžić himself attracted a small circle of Serbs studying in Vienna who supported his attempts, and some of that number wrote poetry fusing elements from the spirit of traditional folk songs with more modern Romantic poetry like Branko Radičević (1824–53). Although not numerous, these writers represented a beginning for modern Serbian literature.

Belgrade, however, hardly featured in the Serbian cultural imagination. The Vojvodina Serbs set their works almost exclusively in their own home towns, while the presence of the folk tradition with its rural ambience far outweighed the emerging urban experience. Belgrade was still half-foreign, not fully internalized as a national environment during Miloš’s rule.

Yet despite its conspicuous absence in the cultural expression of the age, Belgrade and its early history have inspired writers in more recent times—in stories, for example, by the authors Slobodan Selenić, Svetlana Velmar-Janković, and Miroslav Josić Višnjić, all three of whom are major figures of modern Serbian literature.

Selenić (1933–95) spent a year as a postgraduate student at the University of Bristol in the 1950s before returning to Belgrade and, following an academic career, teaching drama. He published numerous novels and plays that met with wide acclaim by critics and the general reading public. He was also an active figure in cultural politics as president of the Union of Writers of Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. During the turbulent years of the early 1990s he was a founding member of one of the first coalition groups, the Democratic Movement of Serbia, to oppose the government of the ruling Socialist Party of Slobodan Milošević.

Selenić’s literary career began with the 1968 publication of his novel
The Memoirs of Pera the Cripple
(Memoari Pere Bogalja), followed in 1980 by
The Friends from Kosančić Crescent 7
(Prijatelji sa Kosančićevog venca 7). This second story is about the relationship between a sophisticated citizen of Belgrade, Vladan Hadžislavković, and an Albanian from Kosovo and newcomer to the city, Istref Veri. The major part of the novel takes the form of a manuscript sent by Vladan to Istref in the 1970s, in which he attempts to make sense of the strange relationship that has developed between the two of them since they met in 1945. He includes the story of his family and their house at 7 Kosančić Crescent, in which he and Istref lived together for a while.

At one point the manuscript describes how an ancestor, Milić, a loyal supporter of Miloš Obrenović, is planning a new house for himself. Initially intending to construct a traditional dwelling, he sees one of the new European-style houses then coming into fashion:

He walked around its unfinished walls as if it were a strange woman, stared at its large windows, pillars, entrance with stone steps, the baked bricks with their dazzling red colour, all the while his Turkish house with its foundations just completed paled in his eyes. He stopped work on it, left the cleared ground to be covered by the snow, stacked up the fallen beams, sold off the clay bricks, settled his accounts and began to imagine his new residence. With his Turkish pipe on his lips, legs crossed sitting on a silk sofa, immobile, Milić went on building and reconstructing his invisible house behind the dark, slanting slits below his eyelids. He removed the overhanging bay window from the first floor, made the windows bigger, moved the rooms about then returned them to their original order, building his fairy-tale house with great difficulty. When spring arrived and the snow melted, his new dwelling stood clearly in his mind’s eye in almost every detail.

The house ends by being both European and Ottoman, what Vladan calls “a Moslem wife in a rococo hat!” With its blending and clashing of different cultures, European and Ottoman, the architectural monument to the Hadžislavković family represents the history of Belgrade in microcosm.

At the end of the novel, Istref drives over to Kosančić Crescent. He arrives in the dark of night and looks for the house, but it is no longer there. There is no space between numbers 5 and 9. The ending is a ghostly conclusion, with the disappearance of the house symbolically representing the past slipping from view.

Velmar-Janković has written novels and stories which taken together encompass different districts of Belgrade and much of its history. She has won numerous literary prizes, including one specifically for her life’s work relating the narrative of Belgrade in her fiction. In her 1981 collection of short stories,
Dorćol
, she takes the names of some of the streets in central Belgrade, called after heroes who fought in the Serbian Uprisings such as Vasa Čarapić and Uzun Mirko, as titles. She imagines these historical personages to be spectral figures who still walk in Belgrade, but fixed to the length of the street which bears their name. In one of her tales, she includes the story of Knez Miloš and Kneginja Ljubica, adding her own stamp to Selenić’s theme of a complex and uncanny Belgrade by bringing her ghostly apparitions to street level. Ljubica ponders on her past, her marriage to Miloš, their stormy relationship and the historical times in which they lived. Velmar-Janković remarks that few people today realize that the street was named after her, and that there are “even fewer of them who can recall who, in truth, was the Kneginja”.

Josić Višnjić, born in Stapar, Vojvodina, is recognized as one of the most talented authors of his generation. After several years of difficulties with the communist authorities, he made a dramatic comeback in 1990 with his novel
The Defence and Fall of Bodrog in Seven Turbulent Seasons
(Odbrana i propast Bodroga u sedam burnih godišnjih doba). The book concerns the 1848 uprising of Serbs in Vojvodina at the fictional town of Bodrog, against Hungarian attempts to take away their autonomy. Some of the rebels go to Belgrade in order to raise support for their cause, where they meet with or hear about important people in the city such as Toma Vučić Perišić, the minister of foreign affairs Ilija Garašanin, and cultural figures like Jovan Sterija Popović.

One of the characters in Josić’s novel writes down in a diary his impressions of what he sees in the city. Recalling the adventure many years later, he remembers the excitement he and his friends felt journeying back to Serbia, which their families had left generations before. He writes, “Then, when we were young, we were all setting foot for the first time in the southern region, the motherland of our grandfathers and distant ancestors, and so we added everything that we knew from stories and books to that which our eyes saw, our ears heard, our mouths said and our fingers touched.” They arrive at the Sava quay and set about looking for somewhere to stay in the district around Karađorđe Street. Later, the diarist recalls some of what he saw in Belgrade:

Here is a list of some that kept my eyes transfixed for hours: the Prince’s Palace, the New Residence, the Customs Office, the Cathedral, the Old Hospital, the Department of State, the Great Barracks... then the Bajram Bey and the Bajrakli mosques... the Lycée, the Palilula Church, the Military Hospital, the Library, the Prussian Consulate, the District Court, the Serbian Crown Tavern and the Turkish Inn... well, there’s no end, none at all... and I can’t write them all down here.

Some of the buildings Josić Višnjić mentions still survive, while others have long since disappeared. In a world in which memory and amnesia co-exist, Belgrade appears as a city which refuses to be fixed, vanishing just as it appears to be coming into tantalizing reach. In the literary imagination the urban landscape is always on the brink of being transformed into something else, of taking a new form, and adopting a new beginning.

Belgrade was the official capital of Serbia and the site of Knez Alexander Karađorđević’s court from 1842. He continued the building programme initiated by Miloš, paying particular attention to development further away from the city and the fortress of Kalemegdan. The new regime remained in place until 1858 when Vučić Perišić was ousted, imprisoned with the same minimum of ceremonies that he showed to his rivals, and died while in prison, presumably poisoned. Miloš became Knez of Serbia for a second time in 1859, and although elderly quickly resumed his active participation in affairs of state.

Of all Serbia’s nineteenth-century rulers Miloš was among the most ruthless. He also accomplished a great deal for the young semi-autonomous state, maintaining an admirable
modus vivendi
with the Ottoman government that held sovereign power, extending the borders of his territory when able to do so, and encouraging internal developments. His many faces make him something of a paradoxical figure. He died the following year when he was succeeded by his son, Mihailo. From the time of the First Serbian Uprising to the First World War, for over a hundred years the rulers of Serbia were either forced to abdicate or were assassinated, except for Miloš who died peacefully while in office.

Mihailo, like his father, was ruler for a second time. Spending many years in exile, he was the first leader of Serbia to be educated in the West. He brought to his poor country a desire to modernize all areas of government, establish the rule of law, introduce a proper tax system, and having established secure government funding, to form a standing army and to attend to the infrastructure of his country, which demanded an ever increasing supply of educated and professional citizens: lawyers, doctors, teachers and engineers. Belgrade was the centre of his political plans for the future of Serbia. He was acutely aware of the backward nature of the society he was to govern, and of the elements within that society that were resisting the kind of progress for which he stood. The old way of life in village communities grouped around extended family systems was dying out as the state evolved. The rhythms of daily life in Belgrade were dictated by the need to be able to reach work and schools, and by the general requirements of municipal life. Belgrade was fast becoming an urban centre of modern Europe, but linked to a hinterland more used to traditional customs.

One of the fundamental aims of Mihailo’s government was to rid the capital city of the Ottoman presence. His hands were in part tied by the continuing presence of the pasha and his military garrison at Kalemegdan. Large numbers of Muslims had already left, unhappy at the way things were going. Serbs were becoming more and more important in social, economic, cultural and political affairs. When Mihailo became knez, relations were already strained between the different communities in Belgrade. The Turkish quarter was stagnating due to outward migration, while the Serbs were busy developing areas away from the old heart of the city towards Palilula, Savamala and Vračar.

Matters came to a head in 1862 when a quarrel broke out between Serbs and Turks at a water fountain not far from the Istanbul Gate where a queue of people were waiting to fill water jugs. A brawl followed in which a young Serbian boy was seriously wounded. A patrol of Serbian police went to the Ottoman police station to try to resolve the problem. The Turkish gendarmes fired shots and killed two members of the delegation, claiming that there was a large crowd behaving in a threatening manner. The Ottoman governor ordered the Istanbul Gate to be closed and his cannon opened fire on the town.

The situation was critical and negotiations began immediately with the foreign consuls based in Belgrade acting as intermediaries. The Great Powers in Europe, fearing that the Ottoman action was potentially destabilizing for the whole region, forced the sultan eventually to agree terms including the removal of the pasha and his troops from Serbia. The pasha ceremoniously handed over the keys of Belgrade to Knez Mihailo in 1867 at the spot where the commemorative stone stands today at the entrance to Kalemegdan Park. He and all his troops left Belgrade and Serbia for good, although a few more years were to elapse before the country enjoyed complete independence.

Despite this spectacular success, Mihailo also made many enemies. The knez was in intense negotiation with the other peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. In geopolitical terms these countries had much in common, principally their hostility to the Ottoman presence in their region, but also because they were all under the influence of the Great Powers over which they themselves had no control. His outlook was simple: the Balkan countries together would be better able to defend their own interests rather than allow outside forces to dictate the terms of regional relations. He was quite successful in the initial stages of his plans and reached agreements with the Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians for mutual support. He also managed to persuade some Croats who were in favour of greater autonomy from the Austrian and Hungarian presence on their territory that their best hopes for independence in the future lay in a union with Serbia.