The Danube (29 page)

The other important product of the Vinča culture is salt. The salt mine near Tuzla in Bosnia is two hundred kilometres to the west of Vinča. Salt from there may have been brought overland, but was most likely transported on dug-out boats down the Sava river. This is the only edible salt in the whole of the eastern Balkans, the evaporated remains of a lake left behind when the Pannonian Sea receded, sixty million years ago. Another Vinča anomaly is directly connected to salt. ‘From the beginning of the Neolithic in nearly every culture, there is a steady fall in the amount of hunted animals in the people's diet, as the proportion of meat from domesticated animals – pigs, sheep and cattle – rises. But in Vinča, exactly the opposite happens!’ said Andrej. Studies of the bones found in Vinča settlements suggest that the proportion of game, red deer in particular, increased over time. One study shows that a single settlement at Petnica, west of Belgrade, with eight to ten houses supporting around forty to fifty people, produced an astonishing seventeen tonnes of game in one year – far more than they would have needed for their own use. A lot of salt is necessary to preserve meat, although the salt can be reused several times. With the help of the salt from Tuzla, the meat was traded hundreds of kilometres up and down the Danube, Sava, Morava, and Tisza rivers. Pločnik covered 120 hectares, and supported a population of up to five thousand – one of the biggest settlements in the whole of Europe at that time. The north of the area was completely given over to copper-smelting ovens – like an industrial estate on the edge of a modern city. The technology used to hunt and
kill the deer is easily traced. There were three main sources of obsidian flint in Europe in the Copper Age: the island of Milos in the Aegean, the hill at Tokaj in Hungary and the island of Lipari off Sicily.
¹¹
Modern dating techniques study the strontium particles in flint, which vary in the natural rock in each of the three sites. Each obsidian arrowhead can now be traced back, at the laboratory of nuclear physics in the Buda hills in Hungary, to one of those three sites. And the Vinča arrowheads studied so far all came from Tokaj in Hungary, four hundred kilometres away, first down the Tisza, then the Danube. Salted red deer killed in the hills overlooking the Danube were traded for more obsidian flint, to hunt more deer.

The question of possible literacy is the hardest of the many Vinča nuts to crack. ‘However fragile the documentary bridge may seem today between the decay of writing in the Danube civilization and the earliest documentation of Linear A signs in Minoan Crete around 2500
BC
, the time gap is not so dramatic as to exclude a historical relationship by means of cultural memory between these two traditions of script use,’ wrote Harald Haarmann, of the Institute of Archaeo-mythology in California.
¹²

Andrej himself is not completely convinced. ‘I'm pretty sure that the Vinča system of signs was a kind of very structured and strict written communication. But whether we can call it an actual “script” or not is less important.’ If one accepts that these are written signs, what might they have been meant to communicate, and to whom? ‘My research as an archaeologist shows clearly that almost 90 per cent of the objects with signs found so far came from the context of everyday domestic life, from the interior of houses. From garbage pits, and not from graves, or from sanctuaries, or from ritual places. That is not so easy to explain.’ Why the great Danubian civilisations of the Copper Age died out is as big and as enigmatic a question as how they arose, and from whence. Once again, modern research is turning some of the old theories on their heads. ‘The way our teachers explained the end of Vinča was the following. Vinča as the capital started to decline, so all the other settlements inevitably followed. We now believe that the Vinča settlement near Tuzla, and the salt mines that were so central to their ability to export meat, were destroyed
first
.’ The loss of salt may have been the killer blow for the Vinča people. ‘The attackers came from the north, from the Hungarian plain. For the first time in my research on Vinča, I saw real evidence of battle, of
destruction in war. A lot of arrow heads, burnt houses, even a skeleton, left where the body fell. Then, nearby, evidence of a settlement of a completely different people – the victors.’

Skadarska Street intersects with Francuska Street in Belgrade, home to the Serbian Writers's Union and a restaurant with traditional Serbian food. The nineteenth-century villa is a well-established nest of nationalists and communists. You reach the entrance down the side of the building. In March 1999 I came here one evening with some fellow reporters. Entering the hallway, a staircase spirals down into a murky restaurant in which the brightest objects are the perfectly starched, almost fluorescent white shirts of the waiters, floating between the tables like fireflies. The gloom allows those who have been sitting here for hours a chance to survey each new arrival at their leisure, before they are identified themselves. As we reached the bottom of the steps, an elderly woman shrieked across the room: ‘Simpson is here, war is . . inevitable.’ The tall man at my side, the easily recognisable figure of the BBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson, froze in mid-step as if he had been hit by a sniper's bullet.

‘Who is that woman?’ John asked me.

In the ebbing darkness, I recognised the fragile figure of Dessa Trevisan, the doyenne of the foreign press corps in Belgrade and a long-serving correspondent for the London
Times.
¹³
I whispered her name.

‘Oh, Dessa, how are you?’ he asked, and went and sat on the arm of her chair. The broken fabric of the hubbub rapidly healed. Plates of fiery red paprika baked in olive oil and stuffed with sheep's cheese bounced from the tables, hurled down by waiters who identified us as the enemy, but who were determined to maintain the tradition of Serbian hospitality to the bitter end. During the war in Bosnia, if you failed to drink enough plum brandy with the gun-toting thugs on the roadblocks, you could be killed on the spot for that reason alone. Serbia is a nation of Boy Scouts. If there's no fire, no alcohol, no meat roasting on the spit, the men get bored very easily.

Dessa Trevisan was right. A few evenings later we watched NATO missiles rain down on Batajnica, the base of the Yugoslav Air Force just outside Belgrade, and on the bridges over the Danube. The waiters of the Writers' Union, like many of their compatriots, spat fire and fury that their Second World War allies had turned against them so cruelly, so incomprehensibly.
And we were holed up in the luxury of the Hyatt Hotel, just across the Sava river in New Belgrade, being bombed by our own airforce.

The strategic importance of Belgrade, at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, is best appreciated from Kalemegdan, the fortress on the headland overlooking both rivers. In November 1990 I came to Belgrade for the first time, hoping for an interview with President Slobodan Milošević. Vladimir Stambuk, one of his minions in the Socialist Party of Serbia, met me instead. We drank freshly squeezed orange juice in the socialist headquarters in the same drab skyscraper across the river which would later be the target of NATO airstrikes. Milošević was in no way responsible for the impending collapse of Yugoslavia, the suave Stambuk explained – the leaders of the other republics, of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, were to blame.

Josip Broz Tito, the partisan leader who had defeated German forces in numerous skirmishes in the Second World War and became president of the new Yugoslavia in 1945, died of old age in 1980. He kept this disparate empire of feuding nationalities and interest groups together for so long by skilfully playing each off against the others. Without Tito there to pull the strings, every nationality set off in its own direction. Milošević offered to restore to the Serbs, as the largest nation in Yugoslavia, what many felt – especially members of the nationalistically minded Writers' Union – was their rightful position as ‘first nation’. This kindled the desire of other peoples, reluctant to live under Serbian domination, to leave the federation. First Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, then Macedonia and Bosnia in 1992, Montenegro in 2005 and Kosovo in 2008 jumped ship with varying degrees of bloodshed.
¹⁴

In 1915, another foreign correspondent, John Reed of the
New York Times
, found himself crawling over Kalemegdan, to get a better view of Austrian positions. ‘From the edge there was a magnificent view of the muddy Danube in flood, inundated islands sticking tufts of tree tops above the water, and the wide plains of Hungary drowned in a yellow sea to the horizon. Two miles away, across the Sava, the Austrian town of Semlin (Zemun) slept in radiant sunlight. On that low height to the west and south were planted the invisible threatening cannon. And beyond, following southwest the winding Sava as far as the eye could see, the blue mountains of Bosnia piled up against the pale sky. Almost immediately
below us lay the broken steel spans of the international rail bridge which used to link Constantinople to western Europe – plunging prodigiously from their massive piers into the turbid yellow water. And up-stream still was the half sunken island of Tzigalnia, where the Serbian advance-guards lay in their trenches and sniped the enemy on another island four hundred yards away across the water. The captain pointed to several black dots lying miles away up the Danube, behind the shoulder of Semlin.

“Those are Austrian monitors,” he said. “And that low black launch that lies close in to shore down there to the east, she is the English gunboat. Last night she stole up the river and torpedoed an Austrian monitor. We expect the city to be bombarded any moment now. The Austrians usually take it out on Belgrade.”
¹⁵

The military museum on Kalemegdan is defended from the elements by a line of obsolete pieces of Serbian, German and Russian artillery. The first room is lined with the spears and helmets of Thracians, Celts and Illyrians, from 1000 to 400
BC
.
¹⁶
There is a good selection of Turkish weaponry from the sixteenth century, including a bow of Tatar maple, the tree much favoured by Ottoman bow-makers over the European yew. There is a muzzle-loading Austrian regimental gun, with the inscription ‘I was cast by Balthasar Heroldt in Vienna, 1655’. And a display case with the title ‘Weapons of the unequal opponents’, with the pick axes and scythes of the Serbian peasants used during their first uprising against Ottoman rule in 1806, arrayed beside the cold, carved steel of their Turkish oppressors. Room 16 is given over entirely to ‘Battles against the Turks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, including a German-language map entitled ‘Victorien der Christen über den Erbfeind’, which translates as ‘Victories of the Christians against the eternal enemy’.

In another room, the haunted features of Gavrilo Princip gaze down from the wall, the assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in June 1914 in Sarajevo, whose shots sparked the First World War. The subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia arrived at the Moskva Hotel, the smartest place in town, because the Serbian government did not yet have a telegraph machine of its own. The machine still sits proudly in a case behind the reception desk. In the museum, next to the photograph of Princip and his fellow conspirators, is an official telegram from Sarajevo – ‘Execution of the verdict in the assassination case of Veljko Čubrilović, Misko Jovanović
and Danilo Ilić accomplished without mishap this morning between 9 and 10.’ There are also items from the two aerial bombardments of Belgrade, in the spring of 1941 by the Germans and the spring of 1999 by NATO. There are fragments in the Cyrillic script from books burnt when an incendiary bomb hit the National Library. Beside this is a photograph of the
Drava Monitor
, a ship of the Yugoslav navy, in action on the Danube near Bezdan against the invading Germans in April 1941.

From more recent wars, there's a laptop captured from the Kosovo Liberation Army on Mount Pastrik in Kosovo in December 1998, and the cheerfully yellow shells of two cluster bombs, banned under international law, dropped on the city of Niš by NATO planes in May 1999, which killed sixteen and wounded twenty-seven civilians, according to the caption. And finally the combat fatigues of a US airforce pilot named Carpenter, whose F-16 plane was shot down the same month.

Overloaded by so many mementoes of war, I stumble out into the Kalemegdan sunshine – to yet more war monuments. Ivo Meštrović's giant sculpture nurses a falcon on his left hand and a sword in his right, and gazes down on the Sava river from roughly the spot where John Reed must have crawled in 1915. Beyond the red maple trees, perhaps the descendants of those planted by the Turks, there's a stone to commemorate the feat of arms of János Hunyadi in saving Belgrade in July 1456, decorated with a fresh wreath from a primary school in Hungary. And on the far side of the hill overlooking the Danube stands a statue to the Despot Stefan Lazarević, my old friend from Golubac.

At one time the hills of cities such as Belgrade and Buda were thick with Turkish gravestones. So few remain today in either city one wonders what these particular men did to deserve the honour of their enemies, or whether it was just their good fortune, and the efforts of the Turkish authorities in later years to restore occasional reminders that their rule was not as bad as it is depicted in local history books.

One of the most interesting buildings on Kalemegdan is the hexagonal tomb of Damat Ali Pasha the martyr, killed during the battle for Petrovaradin fortress opposite Novi Sad in August 1716. There are little red ribbons tied by the Muslim faithful on the bars across the windows of the tomb against the admonitions of the imams, just as they are on the bushes around Koyun Baba's tomb at Babadag. The sunlight bursts through
the bars, and gives a fleeting impression that the green-decked tomb radiates light. The Serbs won the battle for Petrovaradin, and the Turks continued their long retreat across the Balkans.

A stumpy ship called the
Dunav
, carrying what looks like fuel, pushes purposefully down the Sava, then carves a wide loop to head upriver on the Danube towards Zemun, past Great War Island. The Danube north of Belgrade is broad and sluggish, especially in summer, moving self-confidently south-eastwards, not a river to be trifled with. In Zemun, a suburb of Belgrade, a friend takes me to his favourite restaurant, right on the shore, to drink walnut brandy and white wine, and eat catfish basted with garlic, and watch the world go by. There's a canoe pulled up on the bank, belonging to a Frenchman in his seventies on his way to the delta. But the paddler himself is nowhere to be seen – stocking up on provisions in town perhaps.