BELGRADE

  The second significant factor in the work of these painters is their treatment of Serbian history into which they would embroider visual effects based on legendary sources and stories in the epic ballads. Predić and Jovanović both trained in Vienna, but many of their paintings reflect such scenes. Predić’s canvas of the Kosovo Maiden (Kosovka devojka) giving comfort to fallen Serbian heroes on the battlefield of Kosovo has become an iconic representation of the tragedy of the famous battle. His Bosnian Refugees (Bosanski begunci) was based on the rebellions in Bosnia and the consequences for those who resisted Ottoman oppression in the 1870s, but given in a similarly idealized setting. In his Dušan’s Coronation (Krunisanje Dušanovo) Jovanović painted the Serbian knights greeting the new Emperor Dušan in highly stylized suits of armour, looking like Hollywood actors preparing for a scene of medieval jousting. Yet some of their depictions were highly effective, such as the same artist’s Migration of the Serbs (Seoba Srba), showing the departure of the Serbs for Vojvodina in 1691 led by their patriarch on horseback. The stoical attitude of the figures represented on the canvas is a moving declaration of the meaning of the event. These painters were drawing and fixing images for a revived collective memory of the new urban middle classes. They were transforming a folk memory into a more modern vehicle for the invention of a new national ideology based on the Serbian struggle for freedom from foreign domination.

  Photography also made its appearance in Serbia in the nineteenth century with Anastas Jovanović (1817–99) as its first representative. His talent was recognized at an early age by no less than Knez Miloš who sponsored him to study in Vienna. During his studies, and like many other young Serbs in the Austrian capital in the 1840s, Jovanović met Vuk Karadžić who encouraged him in his work. He was one of the pioneers in this new field and experimented with different methods for producing images. He has left behind a vast number of pictures representing a catalogue of nineteenth-century Serbia with his scenes from Belgrade, Novi Sad, Kragujevac and elsewhere.

  Special praise is usually reserved for his portraits, however. His sitters included not only public figures from the world of culture and politics, but also anonymous men and women from all walks of life. His work has value both as a series of social documents and as a collection of images of people who, by their expression and the manner in which they pose, reveal something of themselves. His famous picture of Toma Vučić Perišić shows a man of the old school, an Ottoman urban type with a fez and clothing to match. At the same time, his face expresses the cautious reserve of a cruel man who does not easily trust people, with a firm mouth and one eye slightly squinting.

  Conversely, Jovanović’s many portraits of Knez Mihailo reveal a different individual, not only through his fashionable European attire, but also in the intelligence and inquisitive nature visible in his open countenance. Jovanović was loyal to the family of his first benefactor, and when Mihailo became knez in 1860, he was not only his photographer but also worked as his secretary, managing the day-to–day running of the court. After Mihailo’s murder in 1868, he retired from life at the palace and devoted more of his time to photography.

  NINETEENTH–CENTURY LITERATURE

  As with education and painting, literature underwent many changes and developments. Belgrade was no longer an environment for singers of epic songs. Filip Višnjić might have celebrated the First Uprising in song, but there was little room for him in the mid-century city. Young people who went abroad to study not only brought back their professional qualifications and diplomas, but also new styles and tastes in literature. The first influences of modern European literature came from the Romantics, especially German and Hungarian models. Branko Radičević first combined these more sophisticated verse forms with elements from folk lyrics to forge a new poetic style with a much broader thematic base. He was followed by Đura Jakšić and Jovan Jovanović–Zmaj, both born in Vojvodina but who also settled in Belgrade. Jakšić took part in the Serbian rebellion of 1848 against the Hungarians which ended in failure and left him for most of his life a disappointed and frustrated figure. His favourite themes of nature and the national cause show a clear Byronic influence. Jovanović–Zmaj was a more prolific writer whose poetry was more lyrical than Jakšić’s tendency to heroic reflection. Later Romanticism, promoted by Laza Kostić (1841–1910), went further in adapting foreign poetic models to the Serbian language, and Kostić’s poetry took the Belgrade reading public much closer to a modern feeling for rhythms and symbolic expression.

  The last three decades of the nineteenth century were dominated by prose and Realist literary trends, although poetry in a late Romantic style continued to find a space for itself. The period of prose, mainly short stories, coincided with that of greatest political and social change. Most of this generation of writers were born in Serbia and received at least their grammar-school education in Belgrade, although like the Romantic poets many of them had university training abroad.

  Svetozar Marković (1846–75) was not so much a writer himself, but he promoted many of the ideas that influenced his generation. At university in Russia he read the works of radical Russian thinkers and brought their ideas of social progress with him back to Belgrade where he founded the movement of United Youth. He and his followers were early socialists, opponents of the alienating effect of modern capitalism on the fabric of society. Idealistic and uncompromising they were often at odds with the authorities. Milovan Glišić (1847–1908), one of the writers influenced by Marković’s ideas, wrote short stories often based on village settings, reflecting traditional patriarchal values contrary to the dehumanizing effect of rapid urbanization and early industrialization.

  Laza Lazarević (1851–91) was an advocate for the progressive United Youth, but later in life adopted a more conservative political position. He studied medicine in Berlin before returning home to practise as a doctor, eventually becoming personal physician to the king. He was also a writer, although his main profession took up much of his time and he only completed some nine stories, but each is a small masterpiece of its genre, style and theme. Critics have often drawn attention to his sentimental attitude toward the past and the disappearing traditions of the countryside. Lazarević saw the world in which he grew up dissolving under the demands of modern society, his work hovering between nostalgia and a harsh picture of inevitable transformation.

  Lazarević includes Belgrade in one of his short stories, “The First Morning Service with Father” (“Prvi put s ocem na jutrenje”), set in a small Serbian town and narrated as a childhood recollection. The narrator tells us about his family, dominated by his father, a silent man occasionally very generous and sometimes inexplicably absent. It turns out that he has a passion for gambling. One night, he returns home with his cronies and they begin to play cards. The atmosphere in the house becomes more and more oppressive as the night progresses, and the child, unsure of what is happening, feels a rising sense of fear and panic. The family loses everything through the gambling and the father is prepared to commit suicide for the disgrace he has brought on them. He is stopped by the boy’s mother who points out that they began their married life with nothing and can begin again. The father, as an act of repentance, takes his son to church that morning.

  What is not clear from the story is why the narrator remembers these events from so long ago. Then, in a final sentence, he tells us that he has seen again the man whom he blames for leading his father too far in his gambling obsession, a character called Zelembać. “When I went to Belgrade last year to buy some goods I saw Pera Zelembać in Topčider, in convicts’ clothes: he was breaking stones!” It is significant that the narrator travels from his village to Belgrade, which has negative moral associations opposed to traditional rural values. Lazarević shows us a modern interpretation of the city in a society, which in the space of one hundred years, from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, moved a distance of some four centuries in terms of its cultural trajectory.

  DORĆOL AND KNEZ
MIHAILO IN MODERN FICTION

  In her collection of stories Dorćol Svetlana Velmar-Janković offers images of figures taken from Serbian history, characters involved in creating a sense of cultural identity: Vasa Čarapić, Uzun Mirko, Dositej Obradović, Vuk Karadžić, Captain Miša, Jovan Jovanović–Zmaj and others. The name of each character is also the name of a street in the district of Dorćol. The stories are organized around a rough geographical pattern, so that as the reader reads each one he is taken on a journey.

  The first story, “Francuska ulica”, is named after France Street, which borders the district. The next few tales refer to streets at the top and bottom of the slope as it faces the Danube, while the remainder cut across them in an east-west direction. Their order in the text gradually leads deeper into the district until the last story, “Stara čaršija”, a name for the central part of the district and the crossroads of King Peter I and Tsar Dušan Streets. The name of the whole quarter is taken from this crossroads, or in Turkish dort jol.

  Each story begins by introducing the eponymous historical figure after whom the street is named. They are spectral images who invisibly tread their eternal paths down their street, every day the same, observing the life of the city, reflecting on their historical roles and looking out for the ghosts of others who used to live on their streets. Their individual reflections coincide and conflict, building up a complex picture of Serbian culture. There is a fundamental distinction between the figures of Karađorđe and Knez Miloš Obrenović. The former is a heroic figure finally defeated by the greater numbers of the Ottoman forces, forced into exile, betrayed by Miloš and then murdered by him. Miloš Obrenović uses cunning and stealth to achieve his political ambitions, even turning against Serbs when he suspects them of not supporting his tyrannical rule. This is the source of cycles of success, deceit and failure typifying the representation of Serbian history in her fiction.

  There are numerous other details in Velmar-Janković’s work that draw attention to the constant return of destructive forces. In the story about the brawl around the water fountain leading to the Ottoman withdrawal from Belgrade, there is a description of the 1862 Turkish cannonade on the city, immediately followed by reference to later bombardments in the First and Second World Wars: “The bombs exploded, truly at intervals, yet nevertheless one after the other (it is still not 1915, nor 1941, nor 1944, but it is a beginning).” The narrator remarks on such coincidences by simply commenting “that some dates are repeated”. History is not governed by relationships of cause and effect, but by coincidence and accident, the result of the contiguity of events.

  Isolation is another dominant theme in Velmar-Janković’s work. The characters seek out other historical figures where their streets intersect or yet others whose lives are associated with their streets. Gospodar Jevrem, brother to Miloš Obrenović, waits in vain each day for Vuk Karadžić and Dositej Obradović on their respective corners but he never meets them. They try to speak to each other but their voices do not carry from one to another. Individuals and historical eras appear as so many unconnected moments, with each character trapped in the age in which he lived. The statue of Vasa Čarapić watches from his vantage point people crossing the road in front of the National Theatre to Republic Square. He notes a connection between the alternating green, red and yellow traffic lights and the movement of the pedestrians from which he concludes that the people are somehow dependent on the lights. All that remains is a series of haphazard links based on inexplicable parallels.

  Velmar-Janković’s image of Belgrade is one of a sinister ambiguity. The last story focuses on the crossroads from which Dorćol derives its name. We are told that executions used to be carried out on this spot in a most peculiar manner. The condemned man would be led out to the centre of the place and then decapitated while still standing. His head, the narrator observes, flies from his shoulders and his body “already dead, still alive staggers toward oblivion”. The transformation from life to death is the passing of a frontier in which, for a brief moment, opposites co-exist.

  The city is never permitted to develop and emerge fully whole before its evolution is arrested again by another war or other dramatic event. Belgrade’s history is a narrative of different identities which co-exist in a confusing pattern expressing the simultaneous existence of opposites.

  In one of her later novels, The Abyss (Bezdno, 1995), Velmar-Janković offers a fictional account of the last years of Knez Mihailo. It is written in the form of personal diaries and letters left behind by him, his wife Kneginja Julija and the manager of the court’s affairs, the artist and photographer Anastas Jovanović. It is a historical novel in the best sense of the word. The image and atmosphere of the age in which the action is set is captured and expressed.

  The first part of the work is a diary written by Mihailo during his exile abroad in 1858. He is happy living with his wife on their estates in Hungary and mixing in fashionable circles in Vienna, Paris and London. The following year, turbulent times return to Serbia, and his father, Miloš, is invited back to Belgrade to rule again. Mihailo’s peaceful existence is about to change when he becomes knez on his father’s death. His diary is now accompanied by notes written without dates by his friend, Jovanović, in whom he entrusts the running of his court. These two voices tell in tandem the pressures on the new state, relations with the foreign consuls who are constantly implicated in plots and intrigues, and the activities of the pasha in Kalemegdan. We are now in a position to be told not only what the knez is thinking and feeling in the confessional tones of his diary, but also the changes in the man as observed by someone who knew him well.

  The transformation in Mihailo’s new life as knez is most vividly seen in the relationship between him and his Hungarian wife, Julija. By 1862 the prince’s voice is rarely heard in the book. Instead, Jovanović’s notes and comments are joined by letters from Julija to her family. In her loneliness and incomprehension at the transformation of her husband into someone she barely recognizes she has begun an affair with a foreign aristocrat. Her family admonish her for the scandal she is causing, while she defends herself by blaming circumstances: Mihailo is abandoning her for affairs of state, the court treats her as a potential enemy, the city to which she has been brought is alien and in complete contrast to the sophistication to which she has been accustomed. Mihailo’s return from exile becomes for her a form of banishment.

  Julija describes the troubles of 1862, which began around the water fountain with a trivial incident:

  On that Sunday afternoon in June, while I was reading and sipping my tea, and Belgrade’s good families were out taking a stroll in the countryside, a few young Serbs, boys really, servants in nearby houses, came to the Čukur fountain to fetch water. At the same time and with the same intention, several officers from the Turkish police arrived. As the Turkish authorities had become arrogant recently, so the officers began to behave in an overbearing manner. They would not wait their turn for water but shoved the Serbian boys aside. In the ensuing mêlée an earthenware jug, which one of the soldiers was carrying, broke. He struck the nearest boy about the head with the shattered remains. Covered in blood he began to wail, his friends began to call for help, Serbs and Turks flew from the surrounding houses, a Serbian constable turned up with some gendarmes, and a fight broke out. The Turkish soldiers who provoked it tried to flee but were prevented by the Serbian gendarmes.

  Her depiction of events introduces a note of incredulity to the unfolding drama in the city. After Turkish soldiers shoot and kill the interpreter sent to help with negotiations and another Serbian representative, a mob attacks the gates leading into the Turkish part of town and the pasha orders his cannon to fire on the city. She comments: “I had already learnt that, here, one death invokes revenge, and that revenge is followed by another killing. In the Orient, that tragic sequence can be a very protracted affair, multiplied hundredfold or even thousandfold. And Serbia is still the Orient, although Mihailo will not allow himself to say so.�
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  The meaning of this “Orient” in Velmar-Janković’s fictional world of 1860s Belgrade is evident on multiple levels. The city’s oldest quarter, Dorćol, is exotic with its colourful gardens, mosques and meandering streets that lead nowhere but can lure an unsuspecting foreigner into danger. It presents a mixed face to the outsider, both demure and gaudy. It is a spectacle offering fascination and fear, the promise of hope and the betrayal of expectations. Belgrade, in Velmar-Janković’s fictional universe, represents both a bridge between different cultures and, in her words, an abyss into which its inhabitants may fall.

  Chapter Four

  TERAZIJE AND KING MILAN STREET: CAPITAL OF SERBIA AND YUGOSLAVIA

  BELGRADE SOCIETY BEFORE THE FIRST WORLD WAR

  After the assassination of King Alexander Obrenović, Peter Karađorđević was invited to take the throne. He was modest, unassuming and diplomatic, a man with a completely different nature to his predecessor. Trained as a soldier, he appreciated the need for an esprit de corps and held a high sense of duty.