BELGRADE (8 page)

The story opens with the arrival of a group of children from a school in Vojvodina to the north of Belgrade. Andrić writes:

The day was very warm, and the column of pupils, led by their teacher, felt a sense of relief when they arrived at Kalemegdan and when they could hide and rest in the shade of the park around the Military Museum. Their teacher sat on a bench and wiped inside his heavy black hat with his handkerchief. The young boys and girls spread themselves out among the uneven shadows of the bushes and trees in a happy throng. Their new surroundings, the glare and greenery of a summer’s day, the wide rivers flowing under a tall sky—everything was exciting and goaded them into laughter and movement.

Then the focus falls on two girls, Ana and Olga, who are looking at the
turbe
:

The two girls spend the night at the house of Ana’s aunt in Belgrade. When they fall asleep Olga has a nightmare in which she is visited by the spirit of Damid Ali Pasha. Scared out of her wits, she is woken by Ana who has heard her whimpering cries. Andrić finishes his story on an altogether different note—that of the resilience of children in the face of their worst fears:

The girls held one another tightly and both of them at the same time burst into peals of laughter. They laughed so much, so loudly and long, sitting in their white illuminated bed. Their heads were bent towards one another as if they were singing a happy duet. The whole room filled with their clear, carefree laughter.

The girls in their own childish way have caught the spectral echoes that resound softly through the old fortress. Ivo Andrić, like Sveta Lukić and the poets, evokes an image of Kalemegdan both haunting and haunted, captured in the innocent laughter of children.

Republic Square marks the outer limit of Ottoman Belgrade. Here, at a point in front of the equestrian statue to Knez Mihailo and across the road from the National Theatre (Narodno pozorište), stood the massive main gate into the city known as the Istanbul Gate (Stambol-kapija). In Turkish times the road out of town from here took the traveller down through Serbia and to the sultan’s court at Istanbul, while inside the city it led to the Inner Istanbul Gate and the Upper Town of the fortress. Always heavily guarded to control traffic entering and leaving Belgrade, it was, according to eye-witness accounts, a most impressive structure. It formed part of a defensive system that ran up the hill from the Danube roughly along the line of what is now France Street, by the National Theatre and into the square. On the other side of the gate, the perimeter defences pushed over the brow of the hill and curved their way down to the bank of the Sava. The city was cradled between the two rivers behind a broad and deep trench further supported by earthworks and on top of them a wooden palisade.

The Istanbul Gate was not the only door into Belgrade through these outer defences. Two other gates gave passage into and out of the town: the Vidin Gate (Vidin-kapija) watched over the entrance on the slope leading down to the Danube, while the Town Gate (Varoš–kapija) guarded the Sava slope. These two structures, however, were overshadowed by the Istanbul Gate. The Austrians gave it its final shape by rebuilding it during their occupation at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The gate had three openings, a wide central way for carts and horses with two smaller ones on either side for pedestrians. Just behind it lay the execution ground where Serbs who threatened the Ottoman order were beheaded and their heads placed on spikes above the gate as a warning to others. Descriptions from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century rarely fail to mention the packs of feral dogs which roamed this gory place, attracted by blood and human remains scattered on the ground. The gate’s massive stone blocks were a constant reminder that Belgrade was a seat of colonial power where the pasha had his residence and who, at times, exercised a most cruel and arbitrary authority. The Istanbul Gate in the eyes of the Serbs was an iconic representation of Turkish oppression and became their main target when they launched their attack on the city in 1806.

The First Serbian Uprising began in 1804 and lasted until the insurgents were finally defeated in 1813 and forced to flee. Its causes and the wider circumstances against which it has to be understood go back a little further. The fortunes of the Serbs waxed and waned according to the policies of the Great Powers towards the Balkans. Russia and Austria were always looking for ways to take advantage of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire. In 1774 the Russians concluded the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji with the Turks, which gave them the right to represent the interests of the Christians living in the Ottoman Empire, most of whom were members of the Orthodox Church. War between Russia and Turkey broke out again in 1787, and the Habsburg Empire, suspicious of Russian motives in its backyard, joined in and captured Belgrade, holding it for a brief period between 1788 and 1791. In Serbia this brief conflict is known as Koča’s War after the name of the leader, Koča Andjelković, who led the local contingents of Serbs in support of the Austrian forces.

International interest in Serbia was not generally guided by principles of Christian or Slav solidarity. The Russians and Austrians only intended to further their own interests. In 1791 the Austrians made peace with the Ottoman Empire and left their erstwhile allies to the Turks’ mercies. The Russians continued to insist on their right to speak on behalf of the Serbians as protectors of the Orthodox Church but actually did very little. Nonetheless the policies of the Great Powers were of fundamental significance for the Serbs who could not hope to defeat the Ottoman Empire on their own. Their next chance came with the rise of Napoleon who invaded Egypt, an Ottoman province, in 1798. The Napoleonic Wars provided the Serbs with the ideal conditions with which to pursue their bid for independence.

The situation closer to home was also changing for the Serbs. The new Sultan Selim III (1789–1807) was a reformer who was anxious to halt the declining influence of his imperial authority. To this end, he introduced certain of the modernizing tendencies in administration and the military that he saw had already brought benefits to the European states that were now threatening him. Recognizing that many of the problems in the border outpost of Serbia were caused by the greed and unruly behaviour of the janissaries, he decided to curb their influence. He installed a new pasha, Hadji Mustafa, who ruled with a benign attitude towards the sultan’s subjects, earning him a reputation as a friend of the Serbs. Even so, his enemies were numerous and very strong. In 1801 the janissaries returned to Belgrade, murdered Hadji Mustafa and returned to their previous vicious ways.

The Serbian rebellion began as a reaction against the harsh treatment meted out by the new regime. Intolerable burdens were placed on the local Christian population through taxes and new obligations to the authorities, while any kind of resistance met with the severest penalties. The most powerful men in the province were now those who commanded the janissaries, the Dahijas: Mehmed Aga Fočić, Kučuk Alija Đevrlić, Mula Jusuf and Aganlija. Toward the end of January 1804, Fočić left Belgrade with a retinue of armed men to meet one of the local leaders, Aleksandar Nenadović, at the village of Ljubenino Polje. They were to travel to Valjevo together, but Fočić had received intelligence that Nenadović was planning a rebellion and was importing arms across the River Sava from Habsburg territory. Nenadović was arrested and executed, the first of many to suffer in quick succession as the Dahijas turned on the most important Serbs in the district with the intention of killing them all. The Serb leaders rallied round and nominated as their commander Đorđe Petrović (1752–1817), more popularly known as Karađorđe or Black George. He was a man with military experience who had fought in Koča’s War and whose descendants were to derive their surname from him as the royal Karađorđević dynasty.

In February 1804 the rebels met at Orašac, not far from Belgrade, and offered the leadership of their small and rudimentary force to Karađorđe. According to legend, he at first refused the offer on the grounds that he had a hot, at times uncontrollable, temper and could not vouch for his conduct. The Serbs, however, took this as a sign of his resolve to defeat the Turks and continued to clamour for him to accept the commission. He took the proffered office and the insurgents enjoyed initial success against the vast resources of the Ottoman Empire, which was embroiled in the consequences of the Napoleonic Wars.

The rebels laid siege to Belgrade in 1806 with around 25,000 men and forty cannon. Karađorđe put his cannon around the area of today’s St. Mark’s Church (Crkva svetog Marka) and the adjoining park of Tašmajdan since, from there, his guns were in range of the citadel. He deployed his main camp on the more distant plateau at Vračar. The fighting around the city was fierce, with much at stake on both sides. The defenders resisted as far as they could but the Ottoman Empire could not afford to send them much-needed reinforcements. On the night of the 29 November the Serbs launched their biggest attack on the city. A small force led by Uzun Mirko began the action by taking the Town Gate on the Sava slope. The legend goes that one of his men then climbed on top of the Turkish cannon by the gate and sang out as a signal that the gate was securely in their hands and that the main force led by Vasa Čarapić should strike at the Istanbul Gate. Čarapić was fatally wounded in the offensive, but the attempt was successful and the rebels broke through. The Ottoman commander had no choice but to surrender the city into the hands of the insurgents.

The First Serbian Uprising is pivotal in the development of Serbia and
had much wider repercussions for the whole region; Misha Glenny concludes that “the rebellion marked the beginning of modern history on the Balkan peninsula.” Another historian, however, is more circumspect in his judgment of these events. While not disregarding the impact which the rebellion was to have on Serbia, Stevan Pavlowitch draws our attention to its original aims: “The First Serbian Rising—as historians would call it—was hardly the outcome of revolutionary ideological thinking or political planning.” Instead, he emphasizes the odd alliances that were formed at what was nothing more than a time of national and international chaos. The traditional landowners who supported the rule of Hadji Mustafa were Muslims and not Serbs by origin. They held land which had been granted to them by grateful sultans for their services to the empire. Conversely, the Dahijas were Serbs who had gained powerful positions in the local hierarchy, which they exploited for their own ends. The rebels initially saw their fight to be a struggle against local tyranny imposed by the janissaries and their leaders, not a national rebellion against the authority of the sultan. As time went on they began to change their ultimate goal and began to think of their efforts more as a war for independence.

Local conditions were, moreover, subject to the vagaries of events happening on a much bigger stage. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe were diverting the attention of the Great Powers from any consideration they might have given to Serbian aspirations. The Ottoman Empire was facing pressure on a number of fronts, from the French in North Africa and the Russians around the Black Sea. It suited the Russians to add their encouragement to the rebels in Serbia, although their support was not translated into men and money.