BELGRADE (3 page)

A city speaks—buildings are its words and streets are its sentences. This is the language in which the community cherishes its hopes and memories. Each road, lane, type of building material or decorative feature can tell us something about the peculiar mix of influences that make up the outward signs of that particular city and the culture which it represents. But it is not a straightforward task to find the key to read these urban texts and reconstruct from them the varied narratives and histories of that place.

Many different stories inhabit the courtyards behind the houses lining the streets. Numerous strands intersect on each corner from which we, as dwellers in our own cities, have absorbed what it is that we need to know in order to go about our daily business. We may not know all the names from the past but we possess a storehouse of knowledge on which we rarely reflect. If we were to stop and think about each detail as we walk down the street, we would be doomed to live life at a reduced pace and probably never reach our destination.

Myths and urban folklore rub alongside the facts of history to produce a virtual cacophony of voices that identify the city. I only become aware of this noise when I go somewhere new and hear only silence. If I go to a city in Britain that I do not know well, there are connections between it and other places and histories with which I am already familiar; these provide some immediate bridge, an initiation into the new sights that helps me make sense of my first impressions. As I pick my way down roads and across squares I can decipher where I am. I recognize the matronly figure of Queen Victoria in front of the town hall and the names of streets recalling distant places in a former Empire. I look at architectural features to pick out the private dwellings from the buildings that are or have been invested with some municipal function. I quickly begin to feel a historical background and establish a relationship with my surroundings based on the general cultural encyclopaedia that I carry around all the time.

Yet in a place further afield, such points, like points of a compass, are absent. It becomes more difficult to discover a basic orientation, to know in which direction to look in order to find north and other points of the compass. In those further fields, where the stories are not mine, I need more in order to appreciate the importance of a house, building, monument, to see how it fits into the larger scheme of that urban pattern, and then to understand the city as a sequence of sentences which have their own internal logic, their own grammar.

The purpose of this book is to facilitate communication with Belgrade, to achieve a fuller understanding of the connections between its different parts and its architectural and urban sights. The journey is akin to entering someone else’s memory where there exists a different set of stories underpinning the unity of the city. Chapters contain a description of the buildings and design of a certain area of central Belgrade with other sections that give historical background associated with the district and references to depictions of it in art and literature.

The book opens at the apex of Belgrade, the fortress of Kalemegdan, which overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. In the first chapter I focus on the early history of Belgrade until the nineteenth century when its strategic importance brought many different armies to this place. It was finally taken by the Ottoman Empire in 1521 when Kalemegdan became the seat of a Turkish pasha. In the eighteenth century it fell into Austrian hands only to be returned later to Islamic rule. The Serbian presence in the city was hardly felt during these centuries and change only came with local rebellions against Ottoman government.

The story of the Serbian uprisings and the changes which followed in Belgrade during the nineteenth century are told in the next two chapters. Particular attention is given to the effects of the rapid social modernization that shaped the city during this period. Modernization was synonymous with Europeanization as Belgrade cast off its oriental look, the legacy of Ottoman rule, and replaced it with western styles and fashions. The arts developed and Belgrade became a cultural centre with writers, artists and critics rubbing shoulders with one another. In these chapters I also present portrayals of life in the city and important political events of the nineteenth century as described in fiction.

In Chapters Four and Five I describe significant episodes from Belgrade in the twentieth century, first as the capital of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia then of the communist state after the Second World War with the cultural changes reflecting these political transformations. The urban landscape shifted from the ornate style of architecture practised at the beginning of the new era to the more austere principles characteristic of socialist planning after 1945. Novels and films show the experiences of the people who lived under different regimes in the city.

Chapter Six contains an examination of the period at the end of the twentieth century, after the death of President Tito. Yugoslavia began to unravel leading to a bloody civil war that was seen briefly in Slovenia in the summer of 1991 before moving to Croatia and then, finally, to Bosnia 1992–95. Many people had relatives in other parts of Yugoslavia caught up in the conflicts who were forced to flee and turned up in the city as refugees. Some went off to fight as “weekend” soldiers, leaving for short periods as members of paramilitary units to use the opportunity for brutal looting of villages and towns in Bosnia and parts of Croatia. Others, completely against violence, formed opposition groups against the government of the day and stood out as the “Other Belgrade” trying to maintain a sense of order and proportion in the middle of mayhem and confusion.

The government and supporters of Slobodan Milošević formed alliances with criminals in order to keep their positions of power and to make themselves rich. It was a time of utter chaos when international sanctions closed the borders of the country, preventing communication with the outside world and leaving the opposition bereft of support from abroad and the government safe to pursue its own agenda at home. Many commentators have described the break-up of Yugoslavia, its descent into civil war, the activities of political leaders, and the human rights issues which were raised at the time. There is a selection of such works in the bibliography at the end of the book. I focus on how the majority lived through this extreme situation in the city and how their experience has been inscribed in stories told by novelists and film directors.

One of the themes that I introduce in this book concerns the viewpoints of foreign journalists and travel writers who have come to Belgrade and left behind their impressions of the city. In Chapter Seven I look at what seem to be typical perceptions of the city. These tend to see Belgrade through romantic eyes, depicting it either as a primitive world in danger of reverting to some atavistic barbarism, or as overly modern and on the brink of losing its authentic identity. This perspective has influenced internal Serbian views of the city largely because these attitudes have been expressed by representatives from that western world to which a significant part of Belgrade aspires.

The final chapter moves away from the central districts and crosses the River Sava to New Belgrade and Zemun. The history of the relationship between Belgrade and Zemun is important for what it tells us of the cultural position of the city on the border between East and West, the Balkans and Europe. Zemun, now part of Belgrade, used to be the last post of the Central European power of Austria-Hungary before entering the Ottoman Empire at Belgrade. It represented an image of the West just on the other bank of the river.

New Belgrade was built after the Second World War on the marshy land between Zemun and the river. An achievement of socialist urban planning which quickly became a dormitory area, it is now one of the most desirable districts in the city. With its modern architecture, space for new mega-stores and with fewer of the traffic problems encountered in the old centre, people are now beginning to see it with different eyes. The final chapter also looks at NATO’s bombing of Belgrade in the Kosovo campaign, the political defeat of Slobodan Milošević in October 2000 and the problems faced by the democratic forces that took over.

The capital city of Serbia, then Yugoslavia, then Serbia again, has been both praised and reproached by public and governments abroad. The murders of King Alexander Obrenović and his wife Queen Draga in 1903 caused an international outcry and the imposition of the first sanctions against the country when foreign governments withdrew their ambassadors. But a few years later in the First World War Britain and France warmly regarded their Balkan ally as “gallant Serbia”. This positive perspective dissolved when the communists came to power in 1945 and generated mistrust in the West where it was thought of as pro-Stalinist.

The writer Lawrence Durrell served as a diplomat in Belgrade for three years from 1949 and he wrote to a friend from there: “Just a brief line to tell you we’ve arrived safely. Conditions are rather gloomy here—almost mid-war conditions, overcrowding, poverty. As for Communism—my dear Theodore, a short visit here is enough to make one decide that Capitalism is worth fighting for. Black as it may be, with all its bloodstains, it is less gloomy and arid and hopeless than this inert and ghastly police state.”

Yugoslavia’s reputation as hostile enemy changed dramatically when it became more of an ally under Tito. Standards of living were much higher than elsewhere in Eastern Europe, there was no visible sign of totalitarianism and thousands of foreign tourists holidayed on Adriatic beaches. Fitzroy Maclean’s view in his biography of Tito gives an insight into the perception of this western-friendly country, and therefore its people too. He wrote:

For Yugoslavia Tito’s death signified the end of an era, which had started four decades earlier with the epic years of Partisan resistance and continued after the war with thirty-five years of stoutly sustained independence. That Tito’s own personality and force of character played a decisive part in the events of these forty years is indisputable. But Tito could not have done what he did without the support of the Yugoslav people. A typical Yugoslav, his indomitable courage, independent spirit, steady nerves, and intense national pride found from the first a ready echo in the ordinary Yugoslav man in the street or on the hillside.

The ordinary person in the West may not have been familiar with the political and historical events which lay behind this changed view, but they knew that Yugoslavia was not like other communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe.

The negative image returned once more with the beginning of civil war in Yugoslavia and the break-up of the country. Belgrade was internationally isolated when the UN imposed an embargo on economic, cultural and political ties, leaving just a few road links as the only way in or out of the country. President Milošević was regarded as the political leader with most responsibility for the conflicts and violence of the 1990s. His style of criminal rule and his government’s record on human rights combined to give the country the status of international pariah. He was branded a war criminal during NATO’s military campaign directed against him and his government’s policies towards Kosovo in 1999. He was finally ousted from power in October 2000 in a largely bloodless coup in favour of the democratic opposition forces under Vojislav Koštunica. Western governments welcomed the change and Milošević was sent for trial at The Hague for his crimes, but he died while in custody before any judgment could be brought. The perspective from abroad seems favourable at the present, and Belgrade may soon be in a position to establish a place for itself in European and other world institutions.

Such discussion concerns a metaphoric Belgrade, a synecdoche for a nation, a state, a government, for which it stands symbolically at the head. The streets, buildings and people of Belgrade are parts of many other stories and memories. I write about architectural and urban developments, influences in art and culture, the historical background to events. I present portraits of the city from the works of its writers and filmmakers. These imaginative works go beyond a picture of Belgrade and narrate the city as an experience in itself. Belgrade is more than the sum total of its buildings and inhabitants; like other large cities, it is a small world in itself. It has its own history and unique identity that set it apart from other places and even acts upon the people who live there, shaping their lives as it is shaped by them.

City on Two Rivers