BELGRADE (16 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.