BELGRADE

  A number of important figures from the nineteenth century had their homes in or around Student Square. Alexander Karađorđević lodged for a time in a house where the Faculty of Philology now stands and where his son, Peter, was born in 1844. Gospodar Jevrem, the brother of Miloš Obrenović, and Toma Vučić Perišić were near neighbours here, while Ilija Garašanin, Knez Alexander Karađorđević’s foreign affairs minister, lived at the end of Uzun Mirko Street.

  In keeping with the intention to create a city centre fitting for a European capital, the old buildings around the square were demolished and replaced by grander constructions. In 1863 Captain Miša’s House (Kapetan Mišino zdanje) was constructed and given to the city in a philanthropic gesture by a rich merchant, Captain Miša Anastasijević, to house many of Belgrade’s cultural institutions. Dositej Obradović’s Great School was moved here and joined by the forerunners of the National Museum and the National Library. In 1905 the school became the University of Belgrade, which continued to keep its premises in Captain Miša’s House. One of the tallest buildings in the centre, a cabin sat on its roof serving as a lookout point for fires in the city. It was damaged by Austrian guns in the First World War since an antenna was fixed on the roof as part of an experiment in wireless telegraphy. The main administrative offices of the University and some academic Departments are still here at 1 Student Square. The Faculty of Philology was built next door in 1922 and the Stock Exchange in 1934, which became the Ethnographic Musuem (Etnografski muzej) when the communists took power. The square has been renamed a few times. It was called the Great Square (Veliki trg) from 1872 to 1896, when it became the Royal Square (Kraljev trg) from 1896 to 1946, and finally Student Square.

  DORĆOL

  Dorćol extends down the slope from Student Square to the Danube although most places of interest are contained between the square and Tsar Dušan Street, and from France Street to Kalemegdan. In Ottoman Belgrade this was the main residential area for wealthier merchants and officials of the pasha’s administration. It was often referred to as either the Lower Town (Donja varoš) or the Turkish Town (Turska varoš) to reflect its geographic position spreading down the slope or its demographic structure. The part of town down the slope on the other side of the hill towards the Sava, for the same reason, was called the Serbian Town (Srpska varoš).

  Dorćol resembled a typical oriental settlement of the Ottoman Empire. It appealed to foreign visitors, with gardens hidden behind high walls, winding streets and open-fronted shops with goods spilling outside. One Polish visitor, the writer Roman Zmorski (1822–67), described it as “a wonderful view of the East thrown within a hand’s reach of Europe”. During the Austrian occupation of 1717–39 Dorćol’s appearance changed considerably as the Muslim population moved out and some houses were demolished to be replaced by buildings in the baroque European style. The only house surviving from that period is at 10 Tsar Dušan Street, although it has gone through much refurbishment.

  The Turks restored the oriental look of the area after 1740 when it again became an elite part of their town. The houses of the richest and most powerful Turks were then taken over by the leaders of the First Serbian Uprising. Karađorđe moved into the palatial premises formerly belonging to one of the Dahijas, Mula Jusuf, and his lieutenants chose similar accommodation for themselves. The area never really recovered its former glory after 1813 and Dorćol became rather neglected. The Jewish quarter was an exception to this general rule as it maintained its opulent appearance during the nineteenth century in the area below Kalemegdan around today’s Jewish Street.

  The city’s Jewish community came to Belgrade at the end of the fifteenth century from Spain bringing with them their own language, Ladino. They were a solid community of merchants and artisans who comprised the third largest such enclave in the Balkans, after Istanbul and Thessalonica. There is plenty of evidence of good relations between the Serbian and Jewish communities in Belgrade; the first state printing press founded by Knez Miloš printed books both in Serbian and in Hebrew, while many Jews regarded themselves as Serbs of the faith of Moses. They were nearly all wiped out when the city was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

  One or two examples of earlier architecture remain such as the mosque at 11 Gospodar Jevrem Street and the two museums on the same street, the Museum of Theatrical Arts (Muzej pozorišne umetnosti) at no. 19 and the Museum of Vuk and Dositej (Muzej Vuka i Dositeja) next door. The Museum of Theatrical Arts was built as the house of the Belgrade merchant family Božić in 1836. The Museum of Vuk and Dositej belonged to one of the secretaries for finance in the pasha’s administration before being taken over by Dositej Obradović during the First Serbian Uprising to house the Great School from 1808 to 1813. It has served other functions in its long existence, being used as the French Consulate for a time. It was restored after the Second World War when it was decided to make it into a memorial centre to celebrate the two most prominent representatives of Serbian letters.

  There are other museums in the area: the Jewish Historical Museum (Jevrejski istorijski muzej) at 71 King Peter I Street and the Gallery of Frescos (Galerija fresaka) at 20 Tsar Uroš Street. The latter offers exhibitions of copies of medieval church art, painting and sculpture from Serbia. There is a monument on Gospodar Jevrem Street marking the spot where the young boy was wounded during a fight between Turkish soldiers and Serbian youths, eventually leading to the freedom of the city in 1867.

  The liberation of Belgrade from the Turks that year gave an opportunity to a new generation of architects and planners trained in the West to put into action the proposals drawn up by Emilijan Josimović for the redevelopment of the centre of Belgrade. Dorćol was completely transformed. The old Ottoman quarter was pulled down and replaced by the present geometric shape; a set of streets runs down the slope toward the Danube with intersecting ones across in the direction of Kalemegdan. The Sava slope descends over the brow at the top of the hill. The central feature in this area is formed by the three connecting sweeps of the crescents called Obilić, Toplica and Kosančić. These three roads curve over the old trench that marked the city limits of Ottoman Belgrade. They are, appropriately enough given their position, named after three legendary heroes who fought the Turks (Miloš Obilić, Milan Toplica, Ivan Kosančić).

  Opinions vary regarding these changes to the city centre. Some see the result as too planned to the extent that it seems artificial. Angles, widths and heights are too carefully measured and inhibit any sense of organic growth. Others differ and point to the elegance that these proportions lend to the overall effect of the central district. And, they argue, construction has continued to add new textures and contours to the urban skyline. No doubt, the debates will continue and constantly expand the dialogue between the urban setting and the people who inhabit it.

  SKADARLIJA

  Skadar Street, known to all as Skadarlija, has long been famous for its kafanas, nightlife and bohemian atmosphere. It is positioned just outside the old town, parallel to France Street. In the early nineteenth century it was a Romany district with a reputation for hard drinking, where both Serbian and Turkish young men would come beyond the reach of their parents and “civilization”. Houses were poor and flimsy, looking rather like a shanty town. From the middle of the century more solid houses were built following traditional Balkan designs, the street was cobbled and in 1872 received its official title as Skadar Street. A large number of kafanas remained but the street’s reputation was transformed from a den of iniquity to a place for a respectable evening out. It particularly attracted customers from the arts, actors, writers and painters.

  About 1890 Skadar Street boasted the greatest concentration of restaurants and drinking houses in Belgrade, some of which remain today: the Golden Jug (Zlatni bokal), the Three Hats (Tri šešira) and the Two Stags (Dva jelena). At no. 34 is the house of Đura Jakšić (1832–78), a poet and painter who had a reputation for falling out with the authorities. Many of his paintings hang in the National
Museum and his house is often used as an exhibition centre or for literary evenings where writers read from or discuss their work. His poetry, and the work of others such as Jovan Jovanović–Zmaj (1833–1904) and Vojislav Ilić (1860–94), was typical of later Serbian Romanticism. Zmaj is also well known as a poet for children. His verses are still read to them, and it is not unusual for adults remembering their earliest contacts with literature to be able to quote at length from his work.

  The Three Hats is about half-way down on the corner with Gospodar Jevrem Street. Opened in 1864, it took over from the Dardanelles when that establishment was pulled down and its artist customers needed a new local. Branislav Nušić (1864–1938), a writer of plays and short stories, also penned many witty and satirical articles, one of his favourite subjects being the city’s kafanas. Writing about one in Skadar Street, he noted:

  The Three Hats is today the most popular kafana in Skadarlija. It has been in its time the seat of Belgrade’s bohemians, but another kind of public has joined them... It used to be the house of the father of Đoka Dimović who ran the Imperial. The father was a milliner repairing and applying dye to old hats. His house, in which he lived and worked, had a sign on which were painted three hats, each of a different style. The kafana has taken its name from that sign.

  His article offers a fascinating introduction to this Belgrade social institution. The term comes from a combination of two Turkish words, kafa and han, a place for drinking coffee. The Serbs introduced alcohol but there is no evidence that the move was resisted by the Turkish inhabitants of the city. Most also serve food, tending towards traditional Serbian dishes rather than international cooking. Nušić analyzes the names of kafanas. The early ones were simply named after their owner, then later by reference to their location or to historical events or figures. The latest craze in the city centre in Nušić’s time was to adopt foreign names such as Union, Splendid, Excelsior and Palace—a trend of which he disapproved as they often replaced older names. He writes scathingly of one called the New Age (Novi vek) which had undergone what he clearly regarded as needless “modern refurbishment”, with—of all things—a jazz band and dancing. Obviously for him a kafana was not intended for such frivolous amusements, but a place for drinking, cards and conversation.

  A public water fountain, a copy of one in the centre of Sarajevo and a gift from that town to Belgrade in 1989, stands at the bottom of Skadarlija. The Bajloni brewery used to function here, next to the restaurant Skadarlija, built by a Czech immigrant Ignjat Bajloni on the site of a fresh spring of mineral water—an important ingredient in his beer. The brewery has recently been sold and is waiting for redevelopment. The current look of the street, with cobbles, fountains and refurbished restaurants, was completed in the 1960s. The work was the project of the Belgrade architect Uglješa Bogunović, a labour of love one suspects as much as for financial gain, in which he was enormously assisted by his wife, Milica Ribnikar, herself an accomplished sculptress.

  Across the road from Skadarlija is a market named after the founder of the brewery. Behind the market, a former evangelical church has been used for BITEF, the Belgrade International Theatre Festival, since 1989. The festival was founded in 1967 and has grown into a large showcase for contemporary performance, with theatre companies coming from all over the world to take part.

  EDUCATION IN NINETEENTH–CENTURY BELGRADE

  Knez Miloš Obrenović laid the foundations for the development of culture in Belgrade by his founding of and support for various institutions during the 1830s. He established the state printing press in 1831, a year later Gligorije Vozarević opened the city’s first bookshop in the new Serbian district around the Town Gate, and the first newspaper the Serbian News (Novine Srbske) appeared in 1834. The knez recognized that the new state would need to train its young people although there were precious few facilities at home. Consequently, at his initiative, the Serbian authorities began to make grants available for young people to study at universities abroad from 1835. In 1838 he built the Lycée in Kragujevac, which was transferred to the Konak kneginje Ljubice four years later. The Lycée was intended in these early years to provide the kind of pragmatic education needed for civil servants in the growing administration; in 1815 there were just 24 government officials, but this number grew to 672 by 1839. Its first teachers were Atanasije Teodorović and Petar Radovanović, later joined by Jovan Sterija Popović when he came to Belgrade in 1840. Sterija wrote textbooks for schools as well as working on his own plays and novels during his eight years in Belgrade.

  The number of schools and pupils enrolled increased dramatically during the second half of the nineteenth century. The figures also show a changing view of the role of women in society as the old traditions of Serbia came under pressure. In the school year 1879/80 there were 558 primary schools for boys and 56 for girls, with 817 teachers of whom just 56 were women. This disproportionate distribution of school places was not reflected in Belgrade where there was an equal division of eight schools for boys and eight for girls. Twenty years later the country could boast 936 schools for boys and 165 for girls, with 1,940 teachers of whom 916 were women; all had the right to a full pension after 35 years employment in the profession. The larger towns also had premises for a gimnazija, or grammar school, for more advanced education, and training colleges for teachers. The first leaders of nineteenth-century Serbia were themselves often without education but they valued its development and encouraged its growth, so that by the end of the century the country was in a position to offer almost universal schooling for all.

  Alongside basic education, it was recognized from an early stage that a modern state also needed a system of higher learning. The Society of Serbian Literary Education (Društvo srpske slovesnosti) was founded in 1841 to promote the codification of the modern Serbian language and to spread literacy and teaching throughout the country. Knez Mihailo suspended the activity of the society in 1864 as he suspected some of its members of using its offices to spread ideas politically too liberal for his taste. He replaced it with the Serbian Learned Society (Srpsko učeno društvo), which moved beyond the limited expectations of the former society and began to develop as an independent institution dedicated to the development of critical thinking, a fully-fledged learned society. King Milan took the step in 1886 of founding the Royal Serbian Academy (Kraljevska srpska akademija), which eventually absorbed the Learned Society. The Great School was reformed as the University of Belgrade in 1905 with four faculties: Philosophy for languages and the humanities; Law, including economics and politics; Technical Faculty for engineering and architecture; and finally there was a Medical Faculty.

  The university could boast an international scholarly reputation. During the First World War some of its professors lived in exile and were invited to join academies abroad while Serbia was under Austrian occupation. The geographer and anthropologist Jovan Cvijić (1865–1927) spent the war years in Paris where he published in French his book on the Balkans, La Péninsule balkanique: géographie humaine (1918). Pavle Popović (1868–1939), a literary scholar, was in Britain when he published his major study of the history of Yugoslav literature as a combination of Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian literatures, Yugoslav Literature (Jugoslavenska književnost, 1918). Belgrade was no longer a Turkish city on the periphery of the Ottoman Empire but becoming a sophisticated centre of European learning.

  PAINTING AND PAINTERS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  Changes were also evident in Belgrade’s nineteenth-century visual arts. At the beginning painting was restricted to decorating the walls of churches, producing icons and other religious objects, and conditions were not really conducive for the development of visual arts in the first half of the nineteenth century. Infrastructure for the provision of materials was lacking, as were studios for working, space for exhibiting and a circle of patrons willing to buy the finished article. There were some Serbian painters outside Serbia, including the successful female artist Katarina Ivanović (1817–82) in
Vienna, and a handful of painters from Vojvodina came to Belgrade in the wake of the general movement of educated Serbs going south to offer their services to the new principality. Two of the better known among these migrants are Uroš Knežević (1812–72) and Jovan Popović (1820–64). They have left behind many portraits of Belgrade’s more prominent citizens, merchants, politicians and participants in the two rebellions. They also worked on canvases with motifs taken from folk epics and Serbian history. Many of their paintings can be seen in the National Museum.

  The generation of painters in the second half of the nineteenth century continued the development of portraits and also themes from the legends and myths of the past. Greater sophistication in their use of colour and range of expression is evident in the works of Đura Jaksić, Steva Todorović (1832–1925), Mina Vukomanović (1828–94), who was the daughter of Vuk Karadžić, Uroš Predić (1857–1953) and Paja Jovanović (1859–1957).

  There are two factors of particular interest in the work of these painters. The first is the way in which they chart social changes. In the early portraits the sitters are dressed in clothes corresponding to Ottoman styles, revealing the Turkish role model that dominated in Belgrade. Knez Miloš and other leading members of Serbian society at this time would wear a fez or turban, and this practice continued more or less to the 1860s. The newcomers from Vojvodina were the exception in Belgrade, since they all wore western clothes, the Sava and Danube marking the division between two different cultural worlds. The clothing of the men from Vojvodina led the Serbs of the south to refer to them as Švabe, a derogatory term for Germans. Knez Mihailo brought with him ideas to transform Serbia politically, but also a sense of western dress and taste. Pictures of him in frock coat, wing collar, bow tie and leather shoes are in sharp contrast to the Ottoman style of the previous generation.