BELGRADE

  But what kind of a country was Serbia? The established view of the decade leading to the First World War is of a Serbian Golden Age. Belgrade was emerging as the capital city of a modern state with institutions that could support a functioning, democratic, parliamentary monarchy. Great changes had taken place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Belgrade was now a beacon for all Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and Macedonians who sought freedom from Vienna or Istanbul.

  Yet this view has been called into question, both at home and abroad, with the hindsight of the 1990s when the country disintegrated through a series of bloody wars. Some historians now question the idealized myth of Yugoslav solidarity. Serbia, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was still caught between a European future and the lingering legacy of its Ottoman past.

  When Peter was crowned in 1904, Serbia had a population of about three million, a land area of 18,725 square miles and a border stretching for 825 miles, of which 580 miles was shared with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The population was expanding at the rate of 190,000 per year as a result of increased birth rate and immigration. The size of the country increased dramatically after the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 when Turkey was driven out of the region by an alliance of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Serbia now included the southern provinces of Macedonia and Kosovo, the number of inhabitants grew by another 1.5 million and the land area by 12,355 square miles. About 87 per cent of the population was comprised of peasant farmers with a small plot of land producing barely enough food to feed the family who worked it. Most people made their own clothes, shoes and tools when possible. Consequently, the vast majority of the population played no role in the money economy of the state and paid no taxes.

  Serbia had very little industry, hardly any banking facilities, poor infrastructure in roads and communication links, and worst of all it had little prospect of being able to improve its position in the short term. Literacy rates in the villages were as low as 23 per cent, but higher in the towns at about 55 per cent. Most Serbian towns numbered between 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants, with a few larger ones: Vranje (pop. 10,600), Šabac (12,000), Požarevac (12,500), Leskovac (13,500), Kragujevac (14,500), Niš (25,000) and Belgrade.

  The capital city’s population grew from 70,000 in 1900 to 90,000 by 1910, although, in comparison to neighbouring countries, it was fairly small alongside Bucharest’s 287,000 inhabitants and Athens with 122,000. The occupations of Belgrade’s inhabitants reflected its position at the centre of political, economic and administrative life: civil servants (24 per cent), artisans (23 per cent), professional groups (21 per cent) and merchants (13 per cent). The architectural space they created attests to their cosmopolitan taste and their promotion of cultural and social activity.

  After the death of King Alexander, new opportunities opened up for public debate. An independent newspaper, Politika, began publication in 1904, founded by Vladislav Ribnikar (1871–1914), which today still has the largest circulation in Serbia and has become the longest-running daily paper in the Balkans. Coming as a breath of fresh air, it appeared as a sign of change in Belgrade’s cultural, intellectual and political life. The city’s elite, educated in the best European universities, was aware of the immediate need for a constitution defining the rights and responsibilities of the crown, ministers, the National Assembly and courts of justice. This circle of leading citizens was able to discuss the relative merits of the British and French political systems, and to debate the principles of freedom and justice to be applied via the institutions of government. However, the political culture in which these polemics were conducted at the beginning of the twentieth century remained highly specific to Belgrade, quite unlike the context of London and Paris from which the models were taken.

  An important factor in the city’s social structure was the small number of people in these upper echelons and the consequent trend for individuals to appear across a broad range of functions. It was not unusual for professors from the University of Belgrade to sit alongside professional politicians as deputies in the Assembly drafting legislation. Such people were very much aware that they needed to play an active role in order to provide a lead for the country. But where in the West there was a greater tendency toward the atomization and professionalization of institutional processes, in Belgrade there emerged a single elite group to perform the different functions normally divided among different sub-groups. This personal touch tended to distort the emergence of political parties in Serbia, giving public debates the appearance of family feuds.

  Belgrade was not a natural capital city for Serbia. The medieval centre of the state was further south, while Knez Miloš, wary of the pasha, made Kragujevac his capital. Belgrade was perched above the meeting-point of the two rivers in the north-west corner of the country, its geographic position symbolic of its western leanings. Its architectural appearance from Miloš’s time and later was influenced by the West, as were its models of government. But Serbia was a fragile entity, in constant danger of losing its independence and its identity. These fears were heightened in the decade before the First World War as the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to realize its plans to extend its territory in the region. It formally annexed Bosnia in 1908, having held administrative control since the Berlin Congress of 1878. From 1906 to 1911 Vienna closed its borders and refused to allow Serbia to export goods across its territory to the West.

  These developments no doubt influenced the Belgrade elite’s thinking about political priorities. The first step was national liberation, while the rights and freedom of the individual would follow once the safety of the collective was assured. The historian Dubravka Stojanović recognizes the weight of traditional patriarchal values in her judgment on Belgrade’s political culture. She observes that the elite were happiest when discussing the principles of democracy that they studied and experienced in the West but that they “added to these ideas local colours, translating them from the abstract utopias to the older, better-known models, much closer to the Serbian tradition”. The times, however, were difficult; and time did not appear to be on Belgrade’s side.

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA

  In 1914 the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo, the principal town of the newly-acquired province of Bosnia. His stay happened to coincide with the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo. A small band of conspirators planned his assassination, led by Gavrilo Princip who at seventeen was one of the oldest among them. They were helped by a secret society in Belgrade called “Unification or Death”, or sometimes the “Black Hand”, which provided arms and money. One of the leading figures in the society was the same Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević–Apis who had been active in the plot against Alexander in 1903. Both Princip and the colonel met their ends in 1917; Princip died in jail and Apis was put on trial before a military tribunal engineered by his many enemies and shot for treason in Greece. After the death of the archduke and his wife in Sarajevo, Vienna demanded that Serbia take responsibility for the assassination. The Austrian demands, however, were formulated in such a way that Belgrade was bound to reject them, since acceptance would require Serbia to surrender its sovereignty.

  The first shell of the war was aimed at Belgrade on 29 July 1914. Much to everyone’s surprise, the first Austrian invasion was repulsed, but after a renewed attack the country was occupied by enemy forces the following year. The city suffered greatly in the bombardment of 1915 with great loss of life and much damage to its infrastructure. The Austrian authorities, once in control, were determined to eradicate as far as possible all outward forms of Serbian identity. The Cyrillic alphabet was banned from public use, printing presses were smashed, street signs and destination boards on trams were changed into the Latin alphabet, and history books in schools were rewritten to downplay national achievements.

  Belgrade became a cultural desert with most of its pre-war intelligentsia retreating with the army and taking refuge on Corfu from where t
he government-in–exile continued its work. The poor health of King Peter forced his retirement from an active role and his son, Alexander, was made prince-regent. After the Allied victory in 1918, Serbia was joined by Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Vojvodina in an enlarged state of South Slavs. The creation of this first Yugoslavia, known officially as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, was announced by Prince Alexander in Belgrade on 1 December 1918.

  In the immediate post-war period, Belgrade suffered all the problems common to other urban societies in the aftermath of large-scale conflict. The old town families suddenly found themselves surrounded by thousands of newcomers. Some of them were poor, dispossessed refugees, while others lived by their wits taking advantage of the anarchic conditions into which Belgrade was plunged at the end of the war. It was the capital of a country without internationally recognized borders, not even a name. The author Ivo Andrić describes the atmosphere in the city in his novel Gospođica (1945), translated into English under the title The Woman from Sarajevo:

  Life in Belgrade in the year 1920 was gaudy, lusty, unusually complex, and full of contrasts. Countless diverse vital forces flowed parallel with obscure weaknesses and failings; old methods of work and the strict discipline of patriarchal life existed side by side with a motley jigsaw of new and still unformed habits and chaos of all kinds; apathy side by side with intensity, modesty and every kind of moral beauty with vices and ugliness. The panting and reckless bustle of various profiteers and speculators took place alongside games of intelligence and the dreaming of visionaries and bold ideologists.

  Down the worn and partially destroyed streets came this foaming and swelling flood of people, for each day hundreds of newcomers dived into it head first, like pearl fishers into the deep sea. Here came the man who wanted to achieve distinction and the man bent on hiding himself. Here mingled those who had to defend their possessions and their status, threatened by the changing conditions. Here were many young people from all parts of a state that was still in the process of formation, who looked forward to the next day and expected great things of the changed circumstances, and also a number of older people who looked for a means of adjustment and for salvation in this very flood, hiding the fears and the loathing which it inspired in them. There were many of those whom war had thrown up to the surface and made successful, as well as those it had rocked to their foundations and changed, who now groped for some balance and for something to lean on.

  The new country was greeted enthusiastically by almost all, although initial euphoria was soon replaced by disappointment. Croats especially had been hoping for a greater degree of autonomy than the government in Belgrade was prepared to allow. Following their political traditions, Belgrade’s politicians assumed that the new state would be a parliamentary monarchy with centralized institutions in the capital city. Unfortunately, neither the Karađorđević dynasty nor Belgrade held the same emotional resonance for all the population. The Croat deputies were mostly elected from the ranks of the Croat Peasant Party under the leadership of Stjepan Radić. Denied their home rule, the Croats initially boycotted the National Assembly, but eventually agreed to take up their seats. Shortly afterwards, however, in the summer of 1928 Radić was shot and killed during a debate in the Assembly by a Montenegrin deputy, Puniša Račić. All possibility of compromise was now gone and the ordinary operation of government proved impossible. Faced with an extreme situation, King Alexander dissolved parliament and took power in his own hands on 6 January 1929. In the same year, he renamed the country the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in preference to the title that had emphasized the presence of three different and by then reluctant partners.

  Opinion is divided over Alexander’s actions. Was he genuine in his stated aim to reunite the country, or was he another Serbian public figure who could not understand the nature of the political problems facing the enlarged country? The question was never answered as he was assassinated during a state visit to France in 1934 after landing in Marseille. Both internal and external enemies were implicated in the plot, in particular the Croatian fascist movement the Ustaše, banned in Yugoslavia, which was in turn supported by Mussolini’s Italy. Alexander’s son, Peter, was still a schoolboy and too young to take the throne so the late king’s cousin, Prince Paul (or Knez Pavle), became regent. The prince never expected nor wanted to be a political figure. He was a connoisseur of art, an Anglophile whose brother-in–law was the Duke of Kent, and clearly was not prepared for the huge task ahead.

  TERAZIJE

  The street leading from the end of the pedestrian-only Knez Mihailo Street to the Slavija Square is a long straight road actually made up of two parts: Terazije and King Milan Street. In Ottoman times the main water supply to Belgrade flowed under here toward Kalemegdan. At certain intervals stood tall towers made of wooden boards marking little reservoirs for drawing water. These towers were called terazije in Turkish and one was placed in front of where the Hotel Moskva now stands—hence this street’s name.

  In the 1830s this area just beyond the city perimeter was marshland with a reputation as a good spot for hunting wild ducks. The only sign of human activity was the road that curved up from the Istanbul Gate and divided here, one route leading down what is now King Alexander Boulevard for Smederevo and ultimately Istanbul, the other following King Milan Street and the road to Kragujevac and central Serbia. The land formed a small plateau with a view down to the River Sava and the first Serbian district of Belgrade around the Town Gate.

  The first development on Terazije was at the initiative of Knez Miloš to expand beyond the confines of the Ottoman town. He had the idea of giving free parcels of land to Serbs living further down the slope on condition that they build homes and workshops on the plateau above. Priority was given to craftsmen like blacksmiths and wheelwrights since these trades would be useful on the highways for travellers, merchants and their caravans arriving or leaving with their goods. In time it became a busy stopping point with people plying their trade, repairing carts, fixing horseshoes and other businesses. It was also possible to link this new development directly with the Town Gate without going through Belgrade’s Turkish quarter.

  Terazije has always raised many issues for urban planners. The problem can be boiled down to one question: is it a thoroughfare or a city square? Its shape is marked by its original purpose, with space for carts to pull off the roads to be repaired. Rather than having straight sides, Terazije is actually egg-shaped with bulging curves, adding to the sense that this is more than a space for traffic to pass through. Its width gives the feeling that it is waiting to be filled with a greater purpose. Knez Alexander Karađorđević decided that the old Turkish water tower was no longer a fitting marker for the new district and planned to replace it with a fountain. But he lost power before the monument was finished and the project was taken over by Miloš who completed it in 1860. The fountain is inscribed on all four sides with Miloš’s initials and the year of his second inauguration.

  Terazije was given a face-lift in 1911 when a more decorative water feature was installed. The original was moved to Topčider and put next to the church and Miloš’s residence there, before being returned to its present position in 1975. As part of the same renovations the middle of the road was laid with lawns and flower beds, surrounded by an ornamental fence with elegant street lamps. It was, in effect, treated as a square with traffic allowed to pass down either side. Much thought was also given to the space between the two hotels, the Moskva and the Balkan, and how best to set off the view down to the Sava. After the First World War it was proposed that the gap be filled with a series of statues to celebrate the victory and commemorate those who fell in the conflict. Unfortunately, the sculptor produced an effigy of a naked man holding a sword and a hawk as the centrepiece of the arrangement, forcing a quick change of mind; the Victor was placed in its present position in Kalemegdan facing away from the centre of town.

  After the Second World War the new regime introduced a different
solution to the Terazije issue. They removed all the pre-war non-functional decorations, widened the pavements, pulled up the tram lines and replaced them with an overhead power supply for trolleybuses, turning it into the practical thoroughfare of today. The street now became an important point in the route of the annual May Day parade. This was a significant highlight in the calendar of communist Yugoslavia, an opportunity to put on display the latest technological developments, military hardware, and the support of the masses for the Party. Terazije maintained the theatrical purpose of a grand square, but without its stage props and scenery.

  Terazije is now one of the city’s main traffic arteries connecting the central part of the old town to residential areas beyond. At the gap between the Moskva and the Balkan hotels is a junction of two roads. One goes to the right and down to the main bridge across the Sava to New Belgrade. This direction also links to the underpass that takes vehicles under Terazije and helps avoid congestion in the city centre. The other road is a steep hill, Balkan Street, leading to the railway and bus stations. The other side of Terazije has been closed off by the later addition of more modern buildings, reducing the sense of its open space. A little further down, the broad and imposing King Alexander Boulevard sweeps round and away from the main street.

  At the crossroads is the Monument to the Patriots (Spomenik rodoljupcima) commemorating the Serbs who were hanged here by the German Army in 1941. The sight of the bodies swinging from the lamp posts was meant as a warning to others not to resist the armed occupation of the country. In the distance, above Slavija Square at the end of King Milan Street, rises the cupola of the massive St. Sava’s Church (Hram svetog Save), which stands on the plateau at Vračar, offering a towering presence visible down the length of both streets.