BELGRADE

by Norris, David

  The Cathedral became the place for coronations, royal weddings and funerals. Both Miloš Obrenović and his son Mihailo are buried in the church, while the remains of several medieval monarchs were also interred here. Just outside the main door are the graves of two of Serbia’s most important men of letters, without whom it is difficult to imagine the modern Serbian language ever existing: Dositej Obradović and Vuk Stefanović Karadžić.

  DOSITEJ OBRADOVIĆ

  Dositej Obradović (1739–1811) was the foremost representative of Serbian culture in the eighteenth century. He was born in Vojvodina, among the community of Serbs who made their homes in the southern province of the Habsburg Empire following the great migration of families in the wake of the Austrian withdrawal at the end of the seventeenth century. The Austrians allowed the Serbs to settle in the area on condition that they provided the frontier regiments to protect the empire from the Turks across the river at Belgrade. The Serbs here lived in completely different social and cultural circumstances from their cousins in Serbia proper where people were rooted in small villages with little experience outside their locality. The Vojvodina Serbs lived in small towns and, more importantly, were granted a certain amount of local autonomy, which left them running their own affairs. They traded along the Danube and their communities became quite wealthy, opening schools and founding municipal institutions. They enjoyed a greater degree of religious freedom and were able to build new churches and monasteries, activities frowned on by the Muslim leadership to the south.

  The Serbian Church in Vojvodina opened important links with the Russian Orthodox Church, and sent priests to train in Russian seminaries. They brought back books printed in the liturgical language of the Russian Church. Over the centuries the Slavonic languages drifted further apart and the form used in the Church, although retaining many older linguistic features, followed some of these local changes. The Russian and Serbian Church Slavonic languages met and fused together in Vojvodina to produce a new, hybrid variety sharing elements of both. This new form was called Slaveno-serbski and was adopted as the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church in Vojvodina. It bore little resemblance to the vernacular language, but it emerged as the written form of Serbian in the eighteenth century. Children attended church schools in order to learn Slaveno-serbski as if it were a foreign language.

  Born in Čakov, Dositej Obradović was orphaned at an early age and brought up in Timişoara. His real name was Dimitrije, Dositej being a monastic name he received when he entered the Monastery of Hopovo in 1757, intending to train for holy orders. He never completed the required period and three years later left the cloisters and embarked on a remarkable series of journeys. These experiences were to influence his thinking and transform his outlook on the world. He initially planned to go to Russia to continue his monastic education but instead went to Croatia, Dalmatia, Corfu, southern Greece, Mount Athos—where he stayed at the Serbian monastery of Hilandar—and Smyrna. He lived in Vienna for five years between 1771 and 1776, stayed for varying lengths of time in Germany, Prague, Italy and Paris, and in 1784–85 had a six-month sojourn in London. He attended lectures at famous universities, absorbing the fresh concepts and theories sweeping across Europe with their emphasis on education, the power of rational thought, practical advances in science and learning—everything that was opposed to precepts built on blind faith and superstition. He was an accomplished linguist and would learn the language spoken in his place of residence, adding it to his repertoire. He sought out the company of like-minded people, taught their children as a private tutor of foreign languages including Latin and Classical Greek, and managed to earn for himself a living in this way. In 1783 he published his memoirs, Life and Adventures (Život i priključenija), detailing what happened to him during his journeys. He writes in a completely cosmopolitan spirit, as a European who realizes that he is from a country on the periphery of the modern age. His writing is didactic. He openly states that his intention is to teach his fellow-countrymen about the wonders he has seen abroad. In short, Dositej Obradović introduced the Serbs to the principles of the European Enlightenment.

  Intending to extend literacy and education at home, Obradović saw that the people around him were using one language for everyday communication and another as a written form. He himself tried to write in a way more closely resembling the spoken language, but there were many obstacles to be overcome, both linguistic and political. The letters of the Cyrillic alphabet were adapted for the use of Slaveno-serbski. It contained some signs redundant for the vernacular and lacked others to represent all the sounds of contemporary Serbian. Words for abstract notions, more used in writing than speech, were founded on principles common to the Church Slavonic forms but not applicable to the spoken language. Furthermore, Obradović could not simply ignore the practices of writing which had developed and how he himself had been taught to read and write. He continued to write using phrases and grammar patterns that showed Slaveno-serbski roots while at the same time trying to break through these imposed norms and create a new expression. He succeeded in introducing some element of reform into the language but it was a difficult task for which he could count on few supporters. The Church was a conservative institution with little interest in change and was slow to adopt new ideas. Its social position was to some extent guaranteed by its status as the provider of education, which included its role in the teaching of Slaveno-serbski. This was the language of the Holy Scriptures, a sacred speech, intoned at all important rituals to celebrate life and death in the community. It was the language of commemoration and celebration for which Obradović’s vernacular seemed a poor substitute.

  His name was associated with education and learning and known to all Serbs, for good or ill. In 1802 Obradović was invited to Trieste where there was a substantial community of wealthy Serbian merchants originally from Dalmatia. He stayed there until 1806, when he was invited by the rebels in Serbia to join them in Belgrade. Although elderly by now, he answered their call and arrived in the city the following year. He worked tirelessly for Karađorđe’s government as an adviser on various issues, his wide experience abroad earning him much respect. He acted as the first Minister of Education in Serbia and opened a school, the Velika škola or Great School, intended for the illiterate leaders of the rebellion. He died in Belgrade in 1811. There is a statue to him in the park opposite the Faculty of Philology (Filološki fakultet) on Student Square. His monument shows him dressed in the manner of a European gentleman of the eighteenth century, very different from the Ottoman styles prevailing in the Belgrade of his time.

  VUK STEFANOVIĆ KARADžIĆ

  Karadžić (1787–1864) represents a continuation of the work begun by Obradović and a break with tradition. He was born in Tršić, in western Serbia near the border with Bosnia. Being lame he could not work on the land, so was sent to school where he was taught his letters. As one of the few literate people at the time he served in the first Uprising as a clerk in Karađorđe’s government in Belgrade, where he also attended the Great School. With the defeat of the rebels in 1813, he fled with the main force into Habsburg territory and made his way to Vienna. There he made the acquaintance of a Slovene, Jernej Kopitar, a linguist who worked in the Vienna Court Library and also as a censor of Slavonic and Greek books.

  Kopitar was interested in helping promote the transformation of the various Slavonic languages spoken in the Habsburg Empire into more modern forms of communication. Since German or Hungarian were the official languages of government and the courts, the other languages had not enjoyed the same advantages that such status bestows. Kopitar was encouraging the Czechs, for example, to reform their alphabet, and was keen to pursue a similar plan for Serbian. With his support, Vuk Karadžić began a series of tasks which were to become his life’s work.

  Unlike Dositej Obradović, Karadžić knew that change could only come about by a wholesale shift in thinking about the standard form of Serbian. He adopted the principle of “write as you speak”�
��that is, words should be spelt as they are pronounced, as phonetically as possible. He was not going to reform the written language, but rather take the vernacular as the model for the written form. To this end, he set about devising a Cyrillic alphabet appropriate to the task for which he intended it. He discarded letters for which there was no sound in the modern spoken language, and introduced new ones to represent sounds for which there were no signs. He used his own native dialect and pronunciation as a base from which to begin his work, which caused some teething problems. For example, in his region people did not use the sound “h” and would often omit it from words where it should etymologically be employed. Gradually, he produced an orthography that was a compromise among different local variations and which could function across the territories where the Serbs lived.

  Besides the alphabet, he worked on a dictionary and grammar books in order to codify the rules of the vernacular language. For the first time, the spoken Serbian language was made into an instrument fit for all the tasks required in the modern world. Today’s standard Serbian is the legacy of Karadžić’s programme of reforms and he is widely regarded as the father of the language.

  He is equally well known as the first person to begin a systematic collection of Serbian folk songs. This aspect of his work was linked to his linguistic project, as songs provided him with examples of the usage and meanings of words and phrases that acted as models. It was also part of his ethnographic aims to produce a record of Serbian customs and traditions. He began by writing out the songs he could remember from childhood. He published later volumes by visiting Serbian villages, where he would sit and listen to local singers with pen and paper in hand. He knew and recorded some of the more celebrated bards of the time, both men and women. For example, he noted down the song about the First Serbian Uprising, “The Start of the Revolt against the Dahijas”, from Filip Višnjić himself. This aspect of his work met with great success. His collections were celebrated in Europe where he was rewarded with an honorary doctorate from the University of Leipzig while receiving a pension from the Russian Tsar.

  There was also a reading public thirsty for such poetry brought from the margins of Europe, a kind of exotic fancy for the educated imagination of an audience that had long forgotten its own origins in oral culture. This reception of Serbian epic ballads was really the response of a western public anxious to know more about a primitive culture. The figures from these narratives represented heroes lost in the mists of battles fought long before, in a land existing more in the realms of a fairy tale than a real place with real people. In their poetry the Serbs appeared as warlike children, not quite ready for civilized society. These images of Serbian society have survived in the negative traits associated with the Balkans today. Karadžić brought a Serbian cultural presence into the wider European mainstream but at the risk of a twisted interpretation.

  It was not possible to promote reforms that would encourage the modernizing tendencies in Serbian society without making enemies. The Orthodox Church was opposed to Karadžić’s objectives for the written language. It mounted a campaign to protect the dominant position of the liturgical language as the standard written form, and also in defence of its social prestige and political position as the foremost national cultural institution. The Church’s response to his translation of the New Testament in 1847 was swift and sharp, condemning it as inappropriate to the scriptures. Karadžić was called a crypto-Catholic, and proof was offered in his alphabet when he added the letter “j” as a Serbian Cyrillic letter to represent the sound “y” (as in “yes”). The letter was adopted from non-Slavonic languages, but combined with the fact that his wife was herself Austrian and a Catholic only served to support the Church’s argument that his reforms were undermining the authentic origins of Serbian culture.

  His other opponent was Miloš Obrenović, suspicious of the motives of this man who had once been loyal to his rival, Karađorđe. As time passed, however, more people began to appreciate the sense of his proposals, and the principles he advocated for the new orthography gradually found acceptance even in official circles. By the time of his death in Vienna in 1864, his reforms had achieved widespread approval as the modern norm for use in schools and in publishing. There is a statue to Vuk Karadžić today on King Alexander Boulevard near the Library of the University of Belgrade.

  MILOš’S BELGRADE IN LITERATURE

  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 window
s 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”.