Canada Slim and the Author’s Apartment 3: The Diplomat

Landschlacht, Switzerland, Tuesday 8 September 2020

It must be difficult for followers of this first of two blogs to remain faithful and patient with the Chronicles of Canada Slim as they are not as often written as those of Building Everest.

 

 

 

To those who are new to the Chronicles, these posts are accounts of travels prior to the calendar year and have followed an alphabetical sequence of:

• Alsace
• Italy
• Lanzarote
• London
• Porto
• Serbia
• Switzerland

 

 

 

This post in the sequence is focused on Serbia and is the continuation of my story of a remarkable man and the museum in Belgrade that commemorates his achievements and prolongs the memory of the only Serbian (to date) to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature:

Ivo Andric.

 

 

 

 

Ivo Andrić (1892 – 1975) was a Yugoslav novelist, poet and short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961.

His writings dealt mainly with life in his native Bosnia under Ottoman rule.

Born in Travnik in the Austrian Empire, modern-day Bosnia, Andrić attended high school in Sarajevo, where he became an active member of several South Slav national youth organizations.

 

 

Above: The house in which Andric was born

 

 

Following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914, Andrić was arrested and imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian police, who suspected his involvement in the plot.

 

 

Above: The first page of the edition of the Domenica del Corriere, an Italian paper, with a drawing of Achille Beltrame depicting Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo

 

 

As the authorities were unable to build a strong case against him, he spent much of the war under house arrest, only being released following a general amnesty for such cases in July 1917.

After the war, he studied South Slavic history and literature at universities in Zagreb and Graz, eventually attaining his Ph.D. in Graz in 1924.

 

 

 

 

He worked in the diplomatic service of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from 1920 to 1923 and again from 1924 to 1941.

In 1939, he became Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Germany, but his tenure ended in April 1941 with the German-led invasion of his country.

 

 

Above: Coat of Arms of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia

 

 

Shortly after the invasion, Andrić returned to German-occupied Belgrade.

He lived quietly in a friend’s apartment for the duration of World War II, in conditions likened by some biographers to house arrest, and wrote some of his most important works, including Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina).

 

 

Above: Ivo Andrić monument in Belgrade, Serbia

 

 

Following the war, Andrić was named to a number of ceremonial posts in Yugoslavia, which had since come under communist rule.

 

 

 

 

In 1961, the Nobel Committee awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, selecting him over writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Frost, John Steinbeck and E. M. Forster.

The Committee cited “the epic force with which he traced themes and depicted human destinies drawn from his country’s history“.

 

 

 

 

Afterwards, Andrić’s works found an international audience and were translated into a number of languages.

In subsequent years, he received a number of awards in his native country.

 

 

Above: Front cover art for The Bridge on the Drina written by Ivo Andrić

 

 

Andrić’s health declined substantially in late 1974.

He died in Belgrade the following March.

 

 

 

 

In the years following Andrić’s death, the Belgrade apartment where he spent much of World War II was converted into a museum and a nearby street corner was named in his honour.

It is this author’s apartment, this Ivo Andric Museum in Belgrade which I visited in the spring of 2018.

 

 

Above: Ivо Andric Museum Building, Belgrade, Serbia

 

 

A number of other cities in the former Yugoslavia also have streets bearing his name.

 

 

 

 

In 2012, filmmaker Emir Kusturica began construction of an ethno-town in eastern Bosnia that is named after Andrić.

 

 

Above: Main entrance of Andrićgrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina

 

 

As Yugoslavia’s only Nobel Prize-winning writer, Andrić was well known and respected in his native country during his lifetime.

 

 

 

 

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, beginning in the 1950s and continuing past the breakup of Yugoslavia, his works have been disparaged by Bosniak literary critics for their supposed anti-Muslim bias.

 

Above: Flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina

 

 

In Croatia, his works were long shunned for nationalist reasons, and even briefly blacklisted following Yugoslavia’s dissolution, but were rehabilitated by the literary community at the start of the 21st century.

 

Above: Flag of Croatia

 

 

He is highly regarded in Serbia for his contributions to Serbian literature.

 

 

Above: Flag of Serbia

 

 

I have aspirations of becoming a published writer and I have always been fascinated by the lives of other writers and how those lives led to the fine literature that these literary legends produced.

 

In parts one and two of the Author’s Apartment, I wrote of Andric’s life from his birth and childhood to his studies and suffering (1892 -1920).

 

 

 

 

In 1920, after a time as a civil servant with the Ministry of Religion in Belgrade, Andric was taken into diplomatic service and a new chapter of his life began.

 

 

Above: Church of St. Sava, Belgrade

 

 

On 20 February 1920, Andrić’s request was granted and he was assigned to the Foreign Ministry’s mission at the Vatican.

 

 

Above: Flag of Vatican City

 

 

The post of Ambassador was occupied by the famous linguist Lujo Bakotic.

 

 

Above: Lujo Bakotic

 

 

(Lujo Bakotić (1867 – 1941) was a Serbian writer, publicist, lawyer, lexicographer and diplomat.

Though he was Roman Catholic, Bakotić considered himself Serbian, as had his father.

He completed his high school (gymnasium) education in Split, and jurisprudence in Vienna and Graz.

He was a lawyer by profession who was also politically active, representing the Serbian Party in the Diet of Dalmatia.

 

 

Above: Coat of arms of the Kingdom of Dalmatia

 

 

Owing to his party’s ideals he had to flee to Serbia in 1913.

With the start of the Great War, he left Belgrade for Niš and then went to Paris and finally Rome, where he was made a secretary in the Vatican to work on a mission, preparing a Concordat between Serbia and the Vatican (which never materialized).

After the war, he was Yugoslavia’s envoy at the Vatican from 1920 until 1923.

 

 

Above: St. Peter’s Square, Vatican City

 

 

He represented the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at The Hague, and later he was sent by the Serbian government to Moscow.

 

Above: Kurhaus, The Hague, The Netherlands

 

 

He retired as a civil servant in 1935.

Classically educated, Bakotić spoke several languages fluently, including: French, Italian, German, English, Latin and a number of Slavic languages and dialects.)

 

 

Above: Lujo Bakotić

 

 

Andric enthusiastically read the works of Francesco Guicciardini.

 

 

 

 

(Francesco Guicciardini (1483 – 1540) was an Italian historian and statesman.

A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance.

 

 

Above: Niccolò Macchiavelli (1469 – 1527)

 

 

In his masterpiece, The History of Italy, Guicciardini paved the way for a new style in historiography with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the people and events of his time.

 

 

 

 

The History of Italy stands apart from all his writings because it was the one work which he wrote not for himself, but for the public.

In his research, Guicciardini drew upon material that he gathered from government records as well as from his own extensive experience in politics.

 

His many personal encounters with powerful Italian rulers serves to explain his perspective as a historian:

“Francesco Guicciardini might be called a psychological historian—for him the motive power of the huge clockwork of events may be traced down the mainspring of individual behavior.

Not any individual, be it noted, but those in positions of command: emperors, princes and popes who may be counted on to act always in terms of their self-interest—the famous Guicciardinian particolare.”

 

 

Above: Villa Ravà, Arcetri, the former home of the Guicciardini family, where Francesco Guicciardini wrote The History of Italy

 

 

In the following excerpt, the historian records his observations on the character of Pope Clement VII:

“And although he had a most capable intelligence and marvelous knowledge of world affairs, yet he lacked the corresponding resolution and execution.

For he was impeded not only by his timidity of spirit, which was by no means small, and by a strong reluctance to spend, but also by a certain innate irresolution and perplexity, so that he remained almost always in suspension and ambiguous when he was faced with those deciding those thing which from afar he had many times foreseen, considered, and almost revealed.“

 

 

Above: Pope Clement VII (né Giulio di Guiliano de’ Medici)(1478 – 1534)

 

 

Moreover, what sets Guicciardini apart from other historians of his time is his understanding of historical context.

 

His approach was already evident in his early work The History of Florence (1509):

“The young historian was already doubtlessly aware of the meaning of historical perspective; the same facts acquiring different weight in different contexts, a sense of proportion was called for.”

 

 

Above: Guicciardini Family Crest

 

 

In the words of one of Guicciardini’s severest critics, Francesco de Sanctis:

“If we consider intellectual power, the Storia d’Italia is the most important work that has issued from an Italian mind.“)

 

 

Above: Francesco de Sanctis (1817 – 1883)

 

 

Andric travelled through Tuscany with Milos Crnjanski.

 

 

Above: Miloš Crnjanski, 1914

 

 

(Miloš Crnjanski (1893 – 1977) was a Serbian writer and poet of the expressionist wing of Serbian modernism, author, and a diplomat.

 

 

 

 

Crnjanski was born in Csongrád, Hungary, to an impoverished family which moved in 1896 to Temesvár (today Timișoara, Romania).

He completed elementary school in Pančevo and grammar school in Timișoara.

 

Above: Images of Timisoara, Romania

 

 

Then he started attending the Export Academy in Rijeka in 1912, and in the autumn of the following year he started studying in Vienna.

 

 

Above: Harbour, Rijeka, Croatia

 

 

At the beginning of World War I, Crnjanski was persecuted as part of the general anti-Serbian retribution of Austria to Princip’s assassination in Sarajevo.

Instead of being sent to jail, he was drafted to the Austro-Hungarian Army and sent to the Galician front to fight against the Russians – where he was wounded in 1915.

Crnjanski convalesced in a Vienna war hospital, although just before the end of the war he was sent to the Italian front.

 

 

 

 

After the war, he graduated in literary studies from the University of Belgrade.

After graduating from the Faculty of Philosophy in 1922, he taught at the Fourth Belgrade Grammar School and espoused “radical modernism” in articles for periodicals including Ideje, Politika and Vreme – sparking “fierce literary and political debates“.

 

 

Above: University of Belgrade logo

 

 

He entered the diplomatic corps for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and worked in Germany (1935 – 1938) and Italy (1939 – 1941) before being evacuated during WWII to England.

 

 

Above: Flag of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1918 – 1941)

 

 

He took odd jobs and eventually became the London correspondent of the Argentinian periodical El economist.

During this period he wrote Druga knjiga Seoba (The Second Book on Migration) and Lament nad Beogradom (Lament over Belgrade).

 

 

Above. Tower Bridge, London, England

 

 

He returned to Belgrade after 20 years of exile in 1965 and shortly after published Sabrana dela u 10 tomova (“Collected works in 10 volumes”).

In 1971, he received the prestigious NIN award for Roman o Londonu.

 

 

Above: NIN Award logo

 

 

Crnjanski, aged 84, died in Belgrade on 30 November 1977.

He is interred in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens in the Belgrade New Cemetery.

He is considered a classic of Serbian literature by scholars as well as the public.

 

 

 

 

Crnjanski first books portrayed the futility of war.

He laid the foundations of the early avant-garde movement in Serbian literature, as exemplified by his 1920 Objašnjenje Sumatre (The Explanation of Sumatra):

“The world still hasn’t heard the terrible storm above our heads, while shakings come from beneath, not from political relations, not from literary dogmas, but from life.

Those are the dead reaching out!

They should be avenged.“

 

 

 

 

The Journal of Carnojevic is a lyrical novel by Miloš Crnjanski, which was first published in 1920.

 

 

 

The narrator of the novel is Petar Rajic, who tells his story in which there is no clearly established narrative flow, nor are events connected by cause and effect.

The protagonist of the book is a young Serbian soldier who lived in Vojvodina, now northern Serbia, which was, at the time, a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

When WW I began, he was, along with thousands of other young Serbs, recruited to the Austro-Hungarian army, and the war completely obliterated his image of the world.

Crnjanski himself had such a destiny, and he wrote the book right after coming back from the war – still as a young man.

The book is a combination of the present, the past and the future, strangely intertwined.

We can’t even say who he is – because of his alter ego, the sailor.

Just like the borders between the periods of life, the borders between persons are blurred and unclear.

 

“Autumn, and life without meaning.

I drag myself around taverns.

I sit by the window and stare at the mist and the yellow, wet, scarlet trees.

And where is life?”

 

“All they were doing, he said that somewhere, far away, on some island, was leaving a mark.

And when he would tell her that now, from her passionate smile, a red plant on Ceylon Island is drawing its strength to open, she would gaze at the distance.

She didn’t believe that all our actions could reach that far and that our power is so endless.

And that was the last thing he believed in.

Under the palm trees, in the hotel lobby, he told her that he didn’t believe someone could be killed, nor made unhappy.

He didn’t believe in the future.

He said his fleshly passions depended solely upon the color of the sky, and that life is being lived in vain – no, not in vain, but for the sake of a smile, with which he smiles to both plants and clouds.

He said that all his actions depended on some scarlet trees that he had seen on Ios Island.

She giggled.

Ah, he was funny and young.

So young.”

 

 

“I will go past borders and cities and villages and forests and waters and there will be nothing left on me but dust on my feet, silence in my heart and on my face a mild smile meaningless and burning.

So many are the places where something had been left, ripped out of my torn apart soul and my ragged life.“)

 

 

Above: Portrait of Milos Crnjanski

 

 

Andrić left Belgrade soon after, and reported for duty in late February.

At this time, he published his first short story, Put Alije Đerzeleza (The Journey of Alija Đerzelez).

 

 

 

 

(Gjergj Elez Alia or Đerzelez Alija is a popular legendary hero in epic poetry and literature in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Gora and in northern Albania.

Muslims from Bosnian Krajina modeled the poetic image of Alija Đerzelez after the image of Serbian (Christian) Prince Marko, based on the historic person Ali Bey Mihaloğlu.

 

 

 

 

Marko Mrnjavčević  (1335 – 1395) was the de jure Serbian king from 1371 to 1395, while he was the de facto ruler of territory in western Macedonia centered on the town of Prilep.

He is known as Prince Marko and King Marko in South Slavic oral tradition, in which he has become a major character during the period of Ottoman rule over the Balkans.

 

 

Above: Portrait of Prince Marko

 

 

Marko’s father, King Vukašin, was co-ruler with Serbian Tsar Stefan Uroš V, whose reign was characterised by weakening central authority and the gradual disintegration of the Serbian Empire.

Vukašin’s holdings included lands in western Macedonia and Kosovo.

 

 

Above: King Vukasin

 

 

In 1370, he crowned Marko “young king“:

This title included the possibility that Marko would succeed the childless Uroš on the Serbian throne.

 

 

Above: Coat of arms of the Kingdom of Serbia

 

 

On 26 September 1371, Vukašin was killed and his forces defeated in the Battle of Maritsa.

About two months later, Tsar Uroš died.

This formally made Marko King of Serbia.

 

 

Above: Maritsa Valley

 

 

However, Serbian noblemen, who had become effectively independent from the central authority, did not even consider to recognise him as their supreme ruler.

Sometime after 1371, he became an Ottoman vassal.

 

 

Above: Ottoman Empire logo

 

 

By 1377, significant portions of the territory he inherited from Vukašin were seized by other noblemen.

King Marko, in reality, came to be a regional lord who ruled over a relatively small territory in western Macedonia.

 

 

 

He funded the construction of the Monastery of Saint Demetrius near Skopje (better known as Marko’s Monastery), which was completed in 1376.

 

Above: Marko’s Monastery

 

 

Marko died on 17 May 1395, fighting for the Ottomans against the Wallachians in the Battle of Rovine.

 

 

Above: Battle of Rovine

 

 

Although a ruler of modest historical significance, Marko became a major character in South Slavic oral tradition.

He is venerated as a national hero by the Serbs, Macedonians and Bulgarians, remembered in Balkan folklore as a fearless and powerful protector of the weak, who fought against injustice and confronted the Turks during the Ottoman occupation.

 

 

Above: A Herzegovinian sings with a gusle in an 1823 drawing.

Serbian epic poems were often sung, accompanied by this traditional instrument.

 

 

South Slavic legends about Kraljević Marko or Krali Marko are primarily based on myths much older than the historical Marko Mrnjavčević.

He differs in legend from the folk poems:

In some areas he was imagined as a giant who walked stepping on hilltops, his head touching the clouds.

 

He was said to have helped God shape the Earth, and created the river gorge in Demir Kapija (“Iron Gate“) with a stroke of his sabre.

This drained the sea covering the regions of Bitola, Mariovo and Tikveš in Macedonia, making them habitable.

 

 

Above: Demir Kapija

 

 

After the Earth was shaped, Marko arrogantly showed off his strength.

God took it away by leaving a bag as heavy as the Earth on a road.

When Marko tried to lift it, he lost his strength and became an ordinary man.

 

Legend also has it that Marko acquired his strength after he was suckled by a vila.

King Vukašin threw him into a river because he did not resemble him, but the boy was saved by a cowherd (who adopted him, and a vila suckled him).

 

 

Above: Serbian epic heroes Prince Marko and Miloš Obilić, and the vila Ravijojla

 

 

In other accounts, Marko was a shepherd (or cowherd) who found a vila‘s children lost in a mountain and shaded them against the sun (or gave them water).

As a reward the vila suckled him three times, and he could lift and throw a large boulder.

An Istrian version has Marko making a shade for two snakes, instead of the children.

In a Bulgarian version, each of the three draughts of milk he suckled from the vila‘s breast became a snake.

 

 

 

 

Marko was associated with large, solitary boulders and indentations in rocks:

The boulders were said to be thrown by him from a hill, and the indentations were his footprints (or the hoofprints of his horse).

He was also connected with geographic features such as hills, glens, cliffs, caves, rivers, brooks and groves, which he created or at which he did something memorable.

They were often named after him, and there are many toponyms (place names) — from Istria in the west to Bulgaria in the east — derived from his name.

In Bulgarian and Macedonian stories, Marko had an equally strong sister who competed with him in throwing boulders.

 

 

 

 

In some legends, Marko’s wonder horse was a gift from a vila (a mountain nymph).

A Serbian story says that he was looking for a horse who could bear him.

To test a steed, he would grab him by the tail and sling him over his shoulder.

Seeing a diseased piebald foal owned by some carters, Marko grabbed him by the tail but could not move him.

He bought (and cured) the foal, naming him Šarac.

He became an enormously powerful horse and Marko’s inseparable companion.

 

 

 

 

Macedonian legend has it that Marko, following a vila‘s advice, captured a sick horse on a mountain and cured him.

Crusted patches on the horse’s skin grew white hairs, and he became a piebald.

 

 

 

 

According to folk tradition Marko never died:

He lives on in a cave, in a moss-covered den or in an unknown land.

 

 

 

 

A Serbian legend recounts that Marko once fought a battle in which so many men were killed that the soldiers (and their horses) swam in blood.

He lifted his hands towards heaven and said:

“Oh God, what am I going to do now?”

God took pity on Marko, transporting him and Šarac to a cave (where Marko stuck his sabre into a rock and fell asleep).

 

 

 

 

There is moss in the cave.

Šarac eats it bit by bit, while the sabre slowly emerges from the rock.

When it falls on the ground and Šarac finishes the moss, Marko will awaken and reenter the world.

Some allegedly saw him after descending into a deep pit, where he lived in a large house in front of which Šarac was seen.

Others saw him in a faraway land, living in a cave.

 

 

 

 

According to Macedonian tradition Marko drank “eagle’s water“, which made him immortal.

He is with Elijah in heaven.

 

 

 

Mihaloğlu Ali Bey or Gazı Alauddin Mihaloğlu Ali Bey, (1425—1507) was an Ottoman military commander in the 15th century and the first sanjakbey (provincial governor) of the Sanjak of Smederevo (the territory of Belgrade).

He was one of the descendants of Köse Mihal, a Byzantine governor of Chirmenkia and battle companion of Osman Gazi.

 

 

 

 

I am not certain of why Ali Bey is so honoured, for it seems he was continuously defeated in almost every military campaign he was involved in.

 

 

 

Songs about Đerzelez Alija were transmitted by bilingual singers from South Slavic milieu to northern Albanian milieu, where he is known as Gjergj Elez Alia.)

 

 

The year 1920 was a year of great changes:

• the First Red Scare, a widespread fear of far left extremism in the United States, continues, as do the Palmer (after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer) Raids:  on one day alone (2 January) 4,025 people were arrested in several cities across the country – mostly Italian and Jewish immigrants were targeted.

 

• the Russian Civil War still raged

 

• the League of Nations began sessions in Paris before moving to Geneva

 

• the Netherlands refused to extradite exiled German Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941)

 

• Prohibition in the United States began

 

• the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded and women’s suffragism realized in the US

 

 

• the victorious Allies carved up the former Ottoman Empire and Hungary lost 72% of its pre-WW1 territory

 

Above: The Signing of Peace in the Hall of Mirrors, by Sir William Orpen

 

• the German Workers Party renamed itself the Nazi Party

 

• Estonia, Lithuania and Syria all gain their independence this year

Above: Flag of Estonia

 

• the world’s first peaceful establishment of a social democratic government took place in Sweden

 

• the US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles claiming that it was too harsh on the defeated participants of WW1

 

• the Summer Olympics opened in Antwerp, Belgium

 

• the Mexican Revolution ended

 

• the Polish – Russian War ended in a Polish victory

Above: Five stages of the Polish-Soviet War

 

• Albanian PM Essad Pasha Toptani (1863 – 1920) was assassinated in Paris

 

• the US Postal Service ruled that children cannot be mailed

 

• three African American circus workers were lynched in Duluth, Minnesota

 

• Arthur Meighen (1874 – 1960) became the 9th Prime Minister of Canada

 

• the Irish War of Independence still raged, including “Bloody Sunday“

 

• the HIV / AIDS pandemic began in Léopoldville (today’s Kinshasa)

 

 

With the end of World War I and the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires the conditions were met for proclaiming the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in December 1918.

The Yugoslav ideal had long been cultivated by the intellectual circles of the three nations that gave the name to the country, but the international constellation of political forces and interests did not permit its implementation until then.

However, after the war, idealist intellectuals gave way to politicians, and the most influential Croatian politicians opposed the new state right from the start.

It was not certain through much of 1920 whether the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) would survive its own internal divisions.

 

 

Above: Coat of arms of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes

 

 

As for the Vatican, the Roman Question was still unresolved.

On 9 February 1849, the Roman Republic took over the government of the Papal States.

In the following July, an intervention by French troops restored Pope Pius IX to power, making the Roman Question a hotly debated one even in the internal politics of France.

 

 

 

 

In July 1859, after France and Austria made an agreement that ended the short Second Italian War of Independence, an article headed “The Roman Question” in the Westminster Review expressed the opinion that the Papal States should be deprived of the Adriatic provinces and be restricted to the territory around Rome.

This became a reality in the following year, when most of the Papal States were annexed by what became the Kingdom of Italy.

 

 

Above: the Italian peninsula, 1796

 

 

The Vatican is the religious centre of Catholicism, but the question raged as to whether it should also continue to have its own territory.

This question was not resolved until 1929.

 

 

Above: Coat of arms of the Bishop of Rome (aka the Pope)

 

 

In the midst of all this, Andric began his diplomatic career.

 

 

 

 

Andric complained that the consulate was understaffed and that he did not have enough time to write.

All evidence suggests he had a strong distaste for the ceremony and pomp that accompanied his work in the diplomatic service, but according to Hawkesworth, he endured it with “dignified good grace“.

Around this time, he began writing in the Ekavian dialect used in Serbia, and ceased writing in the Ijekavian dialect used in his native Bosnia.

 

 

 

Andrić soon requested another assignment.

 

In November, he was transferred to Bucharest.

Once again, his health deteriorated.

Nevertheless, Andrić found his consular duties there did not require much effort, so he focused on writing, contributed articles to a Romanian journal and even had time to visit his family in Bosnia.

 

 

Above: Flag of Romania

 

 

The Treaty of Bucharest was signed between Romania and the Entente Powers on 17 August 1916 in Bucharest.

The treaty stipulated the conditions under which Romania agreed to join the war on the side of the Entente, particularly territorial promises in Austria-Hungary.

The signatories bound themselves to keep secret the contents of the treaty until a general peace was concluded.

 

 

Above: Treaty of Bucharest

 

 

Romanians!

The war which for the last two years has been encircling our frontiers more and more closely has shaken the ancient foundations of Europe to their depths.

It has brought the day which has been awaited for centuries by the national conscience, by the founders of the Romanian State, by those who united the principalities in the war of independence, by those responsible for the national renaissance.

It is the day of the union of all branches of our nation.

Today we are able to complete the task of our forefathers and to establish forever that which Michael the Great was only able to establish for a moment, namely, a Romanian union on both slopes of the Carpathians.

For us the mountains and plains of Bukowina, where Stephen the Great has slept for centuries.

In our moral energy and our valour lie the means of giving him back his birthright of a great and free Rumania from the Tisza to the Black Sea, and to prosper in peace in accordance with our customs and our hopes and dreams. 

Part of the proclamation by King Ferdinand, 28 August 1916

 

Above: King Ferdinand I of Romania (1865 – 1927)

 

 

The concept of “Greater Romania“ materialized as a geopolitical reality after the First World War.

Romania gained control over Bessarabia, Bukovina and Transylvania.

As a result, most regions with clear Romanian majorities were merged into a single state.

It also led to the inclusion of sizable minorities, including Magyars (ethnic Hungarians), Germans, Jews, Ukrainians and Bulgarians — about 28% of the country’s population.

The borders established by the treaties concluding the war did not change until 1940.

The resulting state, often referred to as “România Mare” or România Întregită (roughly translated in English as “Romania Made Whole“), was seen as the ‘true’, whole Romanian state, or, as Tom Gallagher states, the “Holy Grail of Romanian nationalism“.

The Romanian ideology changed due to the demographic, cultural and social alterations, however the nationalist desire for a homogeneous Romanian state conflicted with the multiethnic, multicultural truth of Greater Romania.

From 1918 to 1938, Romania was a monarchy whose liberal Constitution was seldom respected in practice.

 

 

Above: Greater Romania (1920 – 1940)

 

 

In 1922, Andrić requested another reassignment.

He was transferred to the consulate in Trieste, where he arrived on 9 December 1922.

 

 

Above: Flag of Trieste

 

 

At the beginning of the 20th century, Trieste was a bustling cosmopolitan city frequented by artists and philosophers such as James Joyce, Italo Svevo, Sigmund Freud, Zofka Kveder, Dragotin Kette, Ivan Cankar, Scipio Slataper, and Umberto Saba.

The city was the major port on the Austrian Riviera, and perhaps the only real enclave of Mitteleuropa (i.e., Central Europe) on the Mediterranean.

Viennese architecture and coffeehouses dominate the streets of Trieste to this day.

 

 

Above: Images of Trieste

 

 

Italy, in return for entering World War I on the side of the Allied Powers, had been promised substantial territorial gains, which included the former Austrian Littoral and western Inner Carniola.

Italy therefore annexed the city of Trieste at the end of the war, in accordance with the provisions of the 1915 Treaty of London and the Italian-Yugoslav 1920 Treaty of Rapallo.

 

 

Above: Flag of the Kingdom of Italy (1861 – 1946)

 

 

The Treaty of Rapallo was a treaty between the Kingdom of Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (renamed Yugoslavia in 1929), signed to solve the dispute over some territories in the former Austrian Littoral in the upper Adriatic and in Dalmatia.

The treaty was signed on 12 November 1920 in Rapallo, near Genoa, Italy.

 

Above: Rapallo

 

 

Tension between Italy and Yugoslavia arose at the end of World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved and Italy claimed the territories assigned to it by the secret Treaty of London of 1915.

According to the treaty signed in London on 26 April 1915 by the Kingdom of Italy and the Triple Entente, in case of victory at the end of World War I, Italy was to obtain several territorial gains including former Austrian Littoral, northern Dalmatia and notably Zadar, Šibenik, and most of the Dalmatian islands (except Krk and Rab).

These territories had an ethnically mixed population, with Slovenes and Croats composing over the half of the population of the region.

The treaty was therefore nullified with the Treaty of Versailles under pressure of President Woodrow Wilson, making void Italian claims on northern Dalmatia.

The objective of the Treaty of Rapallo was to find a compromise following the void created by the non-application of the Treaty of London of 1915.

 

 

 

 

While only a few thousands Italians remained in the newly established South Slavic state, a population of half a million Slavs, including the annexed Slovenes, were cut off from the remaining three-quarters of total Slovene population at the time and were subjected to forced Italianization.

Trieste had a large Italian majority, but it had more ethnic Slovene inhabitants than even Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana at the end of 19th century.

 

 

 

 

Andric’s Trieste assignment meant he was representing Slovenes in a predominantly Slovene-populated territory now under Italian control.

 

 

Above: Peter Kozler’s map of the Slovene Lands, designed during the Spring of Nations in 1848, became the symbol of the quest for a United Slovenia.

 

 

The Italian lower middle class—who felt most threatened by the city’s Slovene middle class—sought to make Trieste a città italianissima, committing a series of attacks led by the Black Shirts against Slovene-owned shops, libraries, and lawyers’ offices, even burning down the Trieste National Hall, a central building to the Slovene community.

On 13 July 1920, the building was burned by the Fascist Blackshirts, led by Francesco Giunta.

 

 

 

The act was praised by Benito Mussolini, who had not yet assumed power, as a “masterpiece of the Triestine Fascism“.

It was part of a wider pogrom against the Slovenes and other Slavs in the very centre of Trieste and the harbinger of the ensuing violence against  Slovenes and Croats.

 

 

Above: Fascist logo

 

 

By the mid-1930s several thousand Slovenes, especially members of the middle class and the intelligentsia from Trieste, emigrated to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia or to South America.

Among the notable Slovene émigrés from Trieste were the author Vladimir Bartol, the legal theorist Boris Furlan and the Argentine architect Viktor Sulčič.

The political leadership of the around 70,000 émigrés from the Julian March in Yugoslavia was mostly composed of Trieste Slovenes: Lavo Čermelj, Josip Vilfan and Ivan Marija Čok.

 

 

Above: Flag of modern Slovenia

 

 

In 1926, claiming that it was restoring surnames to their original Italian form, the Italian government announced the Italianization of German, Slovene and Croatian surnames.

In the Province of Trieste alone, 3,000 surnames were modified and 60,000 people had their surnames amended to an Italian-sounding form.

The psychological trauma, experienced by more than 150,000 people, led to a massive emigration of German and Slavic families from Trieste.

Despite the exodus of the Slovene and German speakers, the city’s population increased because of the migration of Italians from other parts of Italy.

Several thousand ethnic Italians from Dalmatia also moved to Trieste from the newly created Yugoslavia.

 

 

 

 

The city’s damp climate only caused Andrić’s health to deteriorate further.

On his doctor’s advice, he transferred to Graz in January 1923.

 

 

Above: Hauptplatz, Graz, Austria

 

 

Graz is the capital city of Styria and second-largest city in Austria after Vienna.

 

 

Above: Graz

 

 

Emerging from the war, Austria had two main political parties on the right and one on the left.

 

 

Above: Flag of Austria

 

 

The right was split between clericalism and nationalism.

The Christian Social Party, (Christlichsoziale Partei, CS), had been founded in 1891 and achieved plurality from 1907–1911 before losing it to the socialists.

Their influence had been waning in the capital, even before 1914, but became the dominant party of the First Republic, and the party of government from 1920 onwards.

The CS had close ties to the Roman Catholic Church and was headed by a Catholic priest named Ignaz Seipel (1876–1932), who served twice as Chancellor (1922–1924 / 1926–1929).

While in power, Seipel was working for an alliance between wealthy industrialists and the Roman Catholic Church.

The CS drew its political support from conservative rural Catholics.

In 1920 the Greater German People’s Party (Großdeutsche Volkspartei, GDVP) was founded from the bulk of liberal and national groups and became the junior partner of the CS.

 

 

 

On the left the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs, SDAPÖ) founded in 1898, which pursued a fairly left-wing course known as Austromarxism at that time, could count on a secure majority in “Red Vienna” (as the capital was known from 1918 to 1934), while right-wing parties controlled all other states.

The SDAPÖ were the strongest voting bloc from 1911 to 1918.

 

 

Between 1918 and 1920, there was a grand coalition government including both left and right-wing parties, the CS and the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Österreichs, SDAPÖ).

This gave the Social Democrats their first opportunity to influence Austrian politics.

The coalition enacted progressive socio-economic and labour legislation, such as the vote for women on 27 November 1918, but collapsed on 22 October 1920.

 

In 1920, the modern Constitution of Austria was enacted, but from 1920 onwards Austrian politics were characterized by intense and sometimes violent conflict between left and right.

The bourgeois parties maintained their dominance but formed unstable governments while socialists remained the largest elected party numerically.

Both right-wing and left-wing paramilitary forces were created during the 20s.

The Heimwehr (Home Resistance) first appeared on 12 May 1920 and became progressively organised over the next three years and the Republikanischer Schutzbund was formed in response to this on 19 February 1923.

 

 

 

 

From 2 April 1923 to 30 September there were violent clashes between Socialists and Nazis in Vienna.

On 2 April, referred to as Schlacht auf dem Exelberg (Battle of Exelberg) involved 300 Nazis against 90 Socialists.

Further episodes occurred on 4 May and 30 September 1923.

A clash between those groups in Schattendorf, Burgenland, on 30 January 1927, led to the death of a man and a child.

 

Above: Schattendorf

 

 

Right-wing veterans were indicted at a court in Vienna, but acquitted in a jury trial.

This led to massive protests and a fire at the Justizpalast (Palace of Justice) in Vienna.

In the July Revolt of 1927, 89 protesters were killed by the Austrian police forces.

Political conflict escalated until the early 1930s.

 

 

Above: the Palace of Justice, Vienna, before the fire

 

 

Whether the violence that Vienna viewed was reflected in Graz was never recorded by Andric during his time there as both vice-consul and student.

 

Andric arrived in the city on 23 January 1923 and was appointed vice-consul.

Andrić soon enrolled at the University of Graz, resumed his schooling and began working on his doctoral dissertation in Slavic studies.

 

 

Above: University of Graz logo

 

 

In August 1923, Andrić experienced an unexpected career setback.

A law had been passed stipulating that all civil servants had to have a doctoral degree.

As Andrić had not completed his dissertation, he was informed that his employment would be terminated.

 

 

 

 

Andrić’s well-connected friends intervened on his behalf and appealed to Foreign Minister Momčilo Ninčić, citing Andrić’s diplomatic and linguistic abilities.

 

Above: Momčilo Ninčić (1876 – 1949), Serbian politician and economist, and president of the League of Nations (1926 – 1927)

 

 

In February 1924, the Foreign Ministry decided to retain Andrić as a day worker with the salary of a vice-consul.

This gave him the opportunity to complete his Ph.D.

 

 

 

 

Three months later, on 24 May, Andrić submitted his dissertation to a committee of examiners at the University of Graz, who gave it their approval.

This allowed Andrić to take the examinations necessary for his Ph.D to be confirmed.

He passed both his exams, and on 13 July, received his Ph.D.

 

The committee of examiners recommended that Andrić’s dissertation be published.

Andrić chose the title Die Entwicklung des geistigen Lebens in Bosnien unter der Einwirkung der türkischen Herrschaft (The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia Under the Influence of Turkish Rule).

In it, he characterized the Ottoman occupation as a yoke that still loomed over Bosnia.

“The effect of Turkish rule was absolutely negative,” he wrote.

“The Turks could bring no cultural content or sense of higher mission, even to those South Slavs who accepted Islam.“

 

 

 

 

Several days after receiving his Ph.D, Andrić wrote the Foreign Minister asking to be reinstated and submitted a copy of his dissertation, university documents and a medical certification that deemed him to be in good health.

In September, the Foreign Ministry granted his request.

 

Above: Bust of Ivo Andric, Graz

 

 

Andrić stayed in Graz until 31 October 1924, when he was assigned to the Foreign Ministry’s Belgrade headquarters.

 

 

 

 

During the two years he was in Belgrade, Andrić spent much of his time writing.

His first collection of short stories was published in 1924, and he received a prize from the Serbian Royal Academy (of which he became a full-fledged member in February 1926).

 

 

Above: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts plaque

 

 

The reader who takes the collected works of one writer, reads them as a connected whole, despite all the contradictions and breaks that the work of one writer carries within itself. 

He passes through that work as through a well-arranged street in which the facades of houses are interconnected, and everything comes to him as one more or less planned and well-connected whole. 

Because such a reader stands at the end point of the writer’s work, looks in the opposite direction from the one in which those works were created, observes them as a whole and continuity that they could not have when, one by one, they were slowly and difficultly created in long and restless periods of life.

Ivo Andrić
Signs by the Roadside

 

 

 

 

And what is, basically, a story?

How, in the shortest outline, could a story be described rather than precisely defined?

 

One of the most important features of the story is its size, ie the measure of its conciseness.

It depends on the extent of the compression of the form how the writer will arrange his material, how he will construct the plot and how to introduce his theme into it or network more motives, how he will explain his linguistic potential.

There is no doubt that the narrative is based on the categories of selection and summarization, on giving a restrictive, reduced form to the process of narration.

The concentration of attention, conciseness and interestingness of the narration must be in the foreground in order to achieve the impression of a unique whole.

That is why the story relies on a “limited world“, on a clearly emphasized detail, a motivated situation or an emphasized character.

 

 

 

 

But, the core, the essence, the justification of the existence of every story cannot be reduced only to its formal characteristics, because the most important thing is the story, the process of telling, the narration.

 

It gives meaning to human existence and its torment to reach the meaning and reason for the existence of the world.

 

From time immemorial, humanity has been telling stories, stories about heroism, love, suffering, betrayal, loyalty and friendship, the story is inherent in man, an integral part of his position in an interactive relationship with the world.

 

 

 

 

And it is no coincidence that Andrić put the words of his “uncle“, the late Fr. Rafa, into the mouth of his hero, Fr. Petar, who always joked:

“I could still do without bread, but without talking I can’t.“

 

 

 

 

In a thousand different languages, in various living conditions, from century to century, from ancient patriarchal stories in huts, by the fire, to modern narrators who are coming out of publishing houses in major world centers at the moment, the story of human destiny is being told, which people tell people without end and interruption.

The way and forms of that story change over time and circumstances, but the need for storytelling and storytelling remains, and the story flows on and the storytelling has no end.

So sometimes it seems to us that humanity, from the first flash of consciousness, through the centuries, tells itself, in a million variants, along with the breath of its lungs and the rhythm of its being, constantly the same story.

And that story seems to want, like the story of the legendary Scheherazade, to deceive the executioner, to postpone the inevitability of the tragic accident that threatens us, and to prolong the illusion of life and duration.

 

 

Above: Scheherazade, painted in the 19th century by Sophie Anderson

 

 

Perhaps the goal of that story is to light up, at least a little, the dark paths that life often throws us on, and to tell us something more about that life, which we live but which we do not always see and understand, than we, in our weakness, can know and understand.

Often only from the words of a good narrator do we learn what we have done and what we have missed, what we should do and what we should not.

Perhaps these stories, oral and written, also contain the true history of mankind, and perhaps one could at least sense, if not find out, the meaning of that history.

And that regardless of whether they are dealing with the past or the present.

Perhaps one could at least infer from them, if not find out, the meaning of that history.

 

 

Above: History by Frederick Dielman (1896)

 

 

Andrić in his imaginary “Conversation with Goya” in 1935, Andrić’s hero Goja, the narrator’s interlocutor, sees life and story as creatively intertwined.

Because without a story there is no real life.

And how to get to the story, that key to everything that “happened and is happening“, which is repeated in countless different forms?

Legends should be listened to:

“Those traces of collective human efforts through the centuries and the meaning of our destiny should be deciphered from them as much as possible”, says Andrićev Goja in one place, and further adds that the meaning should be sought “in those layers of humanity. ”

 

 

 

 

In 1924, the same year when he defended his doctoral dissertation in Graz, The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of Turkish Rule, Andrić published his first collection of stories under the simple title Pripovetke (Tales) in the Belgrade Serbian Literary Association.

 

 

 

 

In his dissertation, Andrić himself points out that “in its content and in its basic idea, this discussion is related to other works” that he prepared “in another form and on other occasions.”

We cannot help but wonder what that connection is.

What works does Andrić’s statement refer to?

How much did the research of the history of Bosnia in connection with the dissertation help Andrić to see the nature of life in the Bosnian backwater during the Turkish occupation?

Apparently, the research undertaken by the young doctoral student, and the insights he gained, became an inexhaustible source and raw material for his short stories, and not only for those printed in 1924.

“These tales about the Turks and about ours are only a part of one work, which began with the tale ‘The Way of Alija Đerzelez’,” Andrić wrote in the introductory note for Tales.

 

 

 

 

From the moment he went to study in Zagreb and then Vienna and Krakow, Andrić traveled frequently. 

Working as a diplomatic official in the Yugoslav embassies in some European cities, the writer got to know the people and regions of the countries in which he resided well.

 

 

 

 

Andrić published his first travelogue in 1914 under the title “Letter from Krakow” in the Croatian Movement, during his studies at the Jagiellonian University.

 

Above: Jagiellonian University logo

 

 

Living and studying in Graz, in 1923, Andrić translated his impressions of life and the country in the form of “notes from the road” into the text Through Austria.

 

 

 

 

Living in many capitals of interwar Europe inspired Andrić to write down his impressions.

However, he did not rely only on his own senses and observations, but carefully prepared for each trip and wrote in notebooks data from books on the history, culture and traditions of the country.

In his travelogues, Andrić primarily states what makes a country and its way of life specific.

 

Above: Europe, 1923

 

 

This is how I seek to write my travelogues.

 

In October 1926, he was assigned to the consulate in Marseille and again appointed vice-consul.

 

 

Above: Vieux Port, Marseille, France

 

 

On 9 December 1926, he was transferred to the Yugoslav embassy in Paris.

 

 

 

France suffered heavily during World War I in terms of lives lost, disabled veterans and ruined agricultural and industrial areas occupied by Germany as well as heavy borrowing from the United States, Britain, and the French people.

However, postwar reconstruction was rapid, and the long history of political warfare along religious lines was finally ended.

Parisian culture was world-famous in the 1920s, with expatriate artists, musicians and writers from across the globe contributing their cosmopolitanism, such as jazz music, and the French empire was in flourishing condition, especially in North Africa, and in Subsaharan Africa.

 

 

Above: Josephine Baker dances the Charleston at the Folies Bergère (1926)

 

 

Although the official goal was complete assimilation, few colonial subjects were actually assimilated.

Major concerns were forcing Germany to pay for the war damage by reparations payments and guaranteeing that Germany, with its much larger population, would never be a military threat in the future.

Efforts to set up military alliances worked poorly.

Relations remained very tense with Germany until 1924, when they stabilized thanks to large American bank loans.

 

Above: Germany (1919 – 1937)

 

 

France was part of the Allied force that occupied the Rhineland following the armistice.

Ferdinand Foch supported Poland in the Greater Poland Uprising and in the Polish–Soviet War and France also joined Spain during the Rif War.

 

Above: Ferdinand Foch

 

 

From 1925 until his death in 1932, Aristide Briand, as prime minister during five short intervals, directed French foreign policy by using his diplomatic skills and sense of timing to forge friendly relations with Weimar Germany as the basis of a genuine peace within the framework of the League of Nations.

He realised France could not contain the much larger Germany by itself or secure effective support from Britain or the League.

 

 

Above: Aristide Briand (1862 – 1932)

 

 

In January 1923, after Germany refused to ship enough coal as part of its reparations, France and Belgium occupied the industrial region of the Ruhr.

Germany responded with passive resistance, which included printing vast amounts of marks to pay for the occupation, which caused runaway inflation.

That heavily damaged the German middle class, whose savings became worthless, but also damaged the French franc.

 

 

 

 

The intervention was a failure, and in the summer of 1924, France accepted the American solution to the reparations issues, as expressed in the Dawes Plan.

It had American banks make long-term loans to Germany, which used the money to pay reparations.

The United States demanded repayment of the war loans although the terms were slightly softened in 1926.

All loans, payments and reparations were suspended in 1931, and everything was finally resolved in 1951.

 

 

 

 

In the 1920s, France built the Maginot Line, an elaborate system of static border defences that was designed to stop any German invasion.

However, it did not extend into Belgium, and Germany attacked there in 1940 and went around the French defenses.

Military alliances were signed with weak powers in 1920–21, called the “Little Entente“.

 

 

 

 

Domestic politics in the 1920s were a product of unresolved problems left by the war and peace, especially the economics of reconstruction and how to make Germany pay for it all.

The great planners were Raymond Poincaré, Alexandre Millerand and Aristide Briand.

France had paid for the war with very heavy borrowing at home and from Britain and the United States.

 

 

 

Heavy inflation resulted, and in 1922, Poincaré became Prime Minister.

He justified his strong anti-German policies:

Germany’s population was increasing, her industries were intact, she had no factories to reconstruct, she had no flooded mines.

Her resources were intact, above and below ground.

In fifteen or twenty years Germany would be mistress of Europe.

In front of her would be France with a population scarcely increased.

Poincaré used German reparations to maintain the franc at a tenth of its prewar value and to pay for the reconstruction of the devastated areas.

 

 

Above: Raymond Poincaré (1860 – 1934)

 

 

Since Germany refused to pay nearly as much as Paris demanded, Poincaré reluctantly sent the French army to occupy the Ruhr industrial area (1922) to force a showdown.

The British strongly objected, arguing that it “would only impair German recovery, topple the German government, and lead to internal anarchy and Bolshevism, without achieving the financial goals of the French.“

 

 

 

 

The Germans practiced passive resistance by flooding the economy with paper money that damaged both the German and French economies.

The standoff was solved by American dollars in the Dawes Plan.

New York banks lent money to Germany for reparations to France, which then used the same dollars to repay the Americans.

 

 

Above: Wall Street, New York City

 

 

Throughout the early postwar period, Poincaré’s political base was the conservative nationalist parliament elected in 1920.

However, at the next election (1924), a coalition of Radical Socialists and Socialists called the “Cartel des gauches” (“Cartel of the Left“) won a majority, and Herriot of the Radical Socialist Party became prime minister.

He was disillusioned by the imperialist thrust of the Versailles Treaty, and sought a stable international peace in rapprochement with the Soviet Union to block the rising German revanchist movement.

 

 

Above: Édouard Herriot (1872 – 1957)

 

 

Andrić’s time in France was marked by increasing loneliness and isolation.

His uncle had died in 1924, his mother the following year, and upon arriving in France, he was informed that his aunt had died as well.

“Apart from official contacts,” he wrote Alaupović, “I have no company whatever.“

Andrić spent much of his time in the Paris archives poring over the reports of the French consulate in Travnik between 1809 and 1814, material he would use in Travnička hronika (The Travnik Chronicle), one of his future novels.

 

 

 

 

(The Travnik Chronicle (1945) is a historical novel written during the Second World War, based on the model of a European realistic novel. 

It covers the period from 1807 until 1814 and therefore represents a classic novel more than any other Andrić’s novel.

The novel is narrated in the 3rd person and consists of a prologue, epilogue and 28 chapters.

Chronicle of Travnik is a seven-year fiction chronicle that deals with the stay of foreign consuls in that vizier’s city.

It begins with the arrival of the French consul, and ends with the departure of the second-appointed Austrian consul.

The novel is turned to history.

In the process of creating the Travnik Chronicle, Andrić used rich documentary material from the field of the history of civilization, ethnology and authentic writings about historical figures that are presented in the novel.)

 

 

Above: Travnik Fort

 

 

In April 1928, Andrić was posted to Madrid as vice-consul.

 

 

Above: Gran Via, Madrid, Spain

 

 

Spain’s neutrality in World War I spared the country from carnage, yet the conflict caused massive economic disruption, with the country experiencing at the same time an economic boom (the increasing foreign demand of products and the drop of imports brought hefty profits) and widespread social distress (with mounting inflation, shortage of basic goods and extreme income inequality).

 

 

Above: Flag of Spain

 

 

A major revolutionary strike was called for August 1917, supported by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the UGT and the CNT, seeking to overthrow the government by means of a general strike.

The Dato government deployed the army against the workers to brutally quell any threat to social order, sealing in turn the demise of the cabinet and undermining the constitutional order.

The strike was one of the three simultaneous developments of a wider three-headed crisis in 1917 that cracked the Restoration regime, that also included a military crisis induced by the cleavage in the Armed Forces between Mainland and Africa-based ranks vis-à-vis the military promotion (and ensuing formation of juntas of officers that refused to dissolve upon request from the government), and a political crisis brought by the challenge posed by Catalan nationalism, whose bourgeois was emboldened by the economic upswing caused by the profits from exports to Entente powers during World War I.

 

 

 

 

During the Rif War, the crushing defeat of the Spanish Army in the so-called “Disaster of Annual” in the summer of 1921 brought in a matter of days the catastrophic loss of the lives of about 9,000 Spanish soldiers and the loss of all occupied territory in Morocco that had been gained since 1912.

 

 

 

 

This entailed the greatest defeat suffered by an European power in an African colonial war in the 20th century.

 

 

Above: Images of the Rif War

 

 

Spanish King Alfonso XIII tacitly endorsed the September 1923 coup by General Miguel Primo de Rivera that installed a dictatorship led by the latter.

 

 

Above: Spanish Alfonso XIII (1886 – 1941)

 

 

The regime enforced the State of War all over the country from September 1923 to May 1925 and, in permanent violation of the 1876 Constitution, wrecked with the legal-rational component of the constitutional compromise.

Attempts to institutionalise the regime (initially a Military Directory) were taken, in the form of a single official party (the Patriotic Union) and a consultative chamber (the National Assembly).

Preceded by a partial retreat from vulnerable posts in the interior of the protectorate in Morocco, Spain (in joint action with France) turned the tides in Morocco in 1925, and the Abd el-Krim-led Republic of the Rif started to see the beginning of its end after the Alhucemas landing and ensuing seizure of Ajdir, the heart of the Riffian rebellion.

The war had dragged on since 1917 and cost Spain $800 million.

The late 1920s were prosperous until the worldwide Great Depression hit in 1929.

 

 

Above: Miguel Primo de Riviera (1870 – 1930)

 

 

While in Madrid, Andric wrote (though did not then publish) essays on Simón Bolívar and Francisco Goya.

 

Above: Simón Bolívar (1783 – 1830)

 

 

Above: Francisco Goya (1746 – 1828)

 

 

That year he published the stories “Olujaci”, “Ispovijed” (Confession) and Most na Žepi (Bridge on the Žepa).

 

 

Bridge on the Zepa describes the construction of the bridge on Žepa, a river that often swells, and which the inhabitants have not yet managed to tame with the bridge.

So far, the river has taken away several wooden bridges (a similar theme, 20 years later, is dealt with in the Nobel Prize-winning novel On the Drina Bridge, so the story on the Bridge on the Žepa is considered an overture to the novel.

The narrator tells us the whole story in clear sentences.

The different segments of the story are firmly connected, although the vizier, as a narrator, often returns to the past and recalls his childhood in retrospect.

 

 

 

 

In Most na Žepi, Ivo Andrić describes many values, but also universal truths. 

He emphasizes the efforts of man to adapt the world to himself and to fight against the forces of nature that sometimes destroy everything in front of him.

In a story such as The Bridge on Zepa, the symbolism of the bridge is reflected in the emphasized human urge to subdue the world and nature around it, but also to bring order to oneself – which the Grand Vizier Yusuf failed to do.

In the story, we can also see how art outlives the man who creates it, so it seems to overcome death itself.

On the other side of the story, we have a builder who does not seek friendship, praise or help from anyone.

He does not even crave material things, but lives for his work.

He did not ask for much, but with his work he provided a lot and made life easier for many people.

 

 

 

The story describes a number of difficulties encountered by the builder in the construction of the bridge, but in the end the successful outcome is successful. 

The bridge was built, but the two characters end tragically.

Neymar dies of the plague, and the vizier suffers from the traumas experienced during his captivity, which lead him on a path of self-destruction.

In a figurative sense, the narrative is about man’s search for meaning.

Even after the goal was achieved (the construction of the bridge was completed), the characters did not achieve a sense of life satisfaction.

The story is written in the 3rd person.

 

 

 

 

Andric began work on the novel Prokleta avlija (The Cursed Court).

In Andrić’s novel, The Cursed Court is the name of the famous Constantinople dungeon, which Fr. Petar from Bosnia came to for unjustified reasons, when they sent him to Istanbul to do some monastic work.

It happened that the Turkish authorities caught a letter addressed to the Austrian internment in Constantinople, in which the persecution of the faithful by the Turkish authorities was described and the suspicion fell on Fr. Peter.

He was arrested and imprisoned in the pre-trial prison – “the Cursed Court“, where he remained for two months until he was sent on.

In The Cursed Court, Fra-Petar meets several people, who in this novel turn into a gallery of interesting characters.

There is the warden of the “Cursed Court” of Latifaga called Karadjoz , a prisoner of Chaim, a Jew from Smyrna, and then the central character from this novel is the prisoner Ćamil-effendi, a rich young Turk from Smyrna.

Fra-Petar learns from Haim, a young man’s fellow citizen, that he was imprisoned on suspicion that his study of consciousness was aimed at a rebellious plot against the sultan’s court, which was completely untrue.

Young Camil, the son of a rich Turk and a Greek woman, devoted himself to science and the solitary and ascetic way of life from an early age, which was especially emphasized by an unhappy and unhealthy love.

Namely, Camil fell in love with the daughter of a young Greek merchant, but for nationalistic and religious reasons, he did not want to give her to a Turk for a wife, but forcibly married her to a Greek outside Smyrna.

After that event, Ćamil completely closed himself in and became a kind of individual.

He surrounds himself with books and throws himself into science, showing a special interest in the consciousness of the Turkish Empire, of which he is particularly interested in one particular period – the time of Bayezid II and Jam-Sultan, his brother, whom Bayezid defeated twice in battle for the throne.

Then Jam sought refuge on the island of Rhodes, where Christian knights ruled.

From then on, the odyssey of Cem begins, who as a prisoner passes from the hands of various European rulers, and even the Pope himself, and they all use him as a trump card against the Turkish Empire, that is they threaten Bayazit that he will release him if he does not satisfy their various demands.

Ćamil is suspected of studying precisely that historical period, because it has similarities with the current situation at the court, where the sultan also has a rival brother, whom he declared insane and holds him captive. Jamil was sent to the Cursed Court, where he met Fr. Peter and told him about the life of Jam-Sultan, claiming that his life was identical with Jamil’s and that their destinies were the same.

After a while, they took him to a special prison, and one night during the interrogation, a fight broke out between him and the police.

It is not known whether the camels are taken out – alive or dead.

Fra-Peter never saw him again.

 

 

 

 

In June 1929, Andric was named secretary of the Yugoslav legation to Belgium and Luxembourg in Brussels.

 

 

Above: Images of Brussels, Belgium

 

 

Belgian King Albert returned from exile as a war hero, leading the victorious army and acclaimed by the population.

 

 

Above: King Albert I of Belgium (1875 – 1934)

 

 

In contrast, the government and other exiles came back discreetly.

Belgium had been devastated—not so much by combat, but rather by German seizure of valuable machinery.

Only 81 operable locomotives remained, out of the 3,470 available in 1914.

46 of 51 steel mills were damaged, with 26 destroyed totally.

More than 100,000 houses had been destroyed, as well as more than 120,000 hectares (300,000 acres) of farmland.

 

 

Above: Flag of Belgium

 

 

Waves of popular violence accompanied liberation in November and December 1918 and the government responded through the judicial punishment of collaboration with the enemy conducted between 1919 and 1921.

Shop windows were broken and houses sacked, men were harassed, and women’s heads were shaved.

Manufacturers who had closed their businesses sought the severe repression of those who had pursued their activities.

Journalists who had boycotted and stopped writing called for harsh treatment of the newspapers that submitted to German censorship.

Many people stigmatized profiteers and demanded justice.

Thus in 1918, Belgium was already confronted with the problems associated with occupation that most European countries only discovered at the end of World War II.

 

 

 

 

However, despite the status quo, Belgium recovered surprisingly quickly.

The first postwar Olympic Games were held in Antwerp in 1920.

In 1921, Luxembourg formed a customs union with Belgium.

 

 

 

 

German reparations to Belgium for damage incurred during the First World War was set at £12.5 billion pounds sterling.

 

In 1919 under the Treaty of Versailles the area of Eupen-Malmedy, along with Moresnet was transferred to Belgium.

“Neutral Moresnet” was transferred to Belgium, as well as the Vennbahn railway.

 

 

Above: Map of the route of the Vennbahn

 

 

An opportunity was given to the population to “oppose” against the transfer by signing a petition, which gathered few signatures, in large part thanks to intimidation by local authorities, and all regions remain part of Belgium today.

Belgian requests to annex territory considered as historically theirs, from the Dutch, who were perceived as collaborators, was denied.

 

 

 

 

Between 1923 and 1926, Belgian and French soldiers were sent to the Ruhr in Germany to force the German government to agree to continue reparation payments.

The Occupation of the Ruhr led the Dawes Plan which allowed the German government more leniency in paying reparations.

 

 

 

 

The League of Nations in 1925 made Belgium the trustee for the former German East Africa which bordered the Belgian Congo to the east.

It became Rwanda-Urundi (or “Ruanda-Urundi“) (modern day Rwanda and Burundi).

 

 

Above: Coat of arms of Ruanda-Urundi

 

 

Although promising the League it would promote education, Belgium left the task to subsidised Catholic missions and unsubsidised Protestant missions.

As late as 1962, when independence arrived, fewer than 100 natives had gone beyond secondary school.

 

 

Above: The Cathedral of Our Lady of Wisdom at Butare (formally Astrida) in Ruanda

 

 

The policy was one of low-cost paternalism, as explained by Belgium’s special representative to the Trusteeship Council:

“The real work is to change the African in his essence, to transform his soul, and to do that one must love him and enjoy having daily contact with him.

He must be cured of his thoughtlessness, he must accustom himself to living in society, he must overcome his inertia.”

 

 

 

 

On 1 January 1930, Andric was sent to Switzerland as part of Yugoslavia’s permanent delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, and was named deputy delegate the following year.

 

 

Above: Geneva, Switzerland

 

 

The League of Nations, abbreviated as LON (French: Société des Nations, abbreviated as SDN or SdN), was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace.

It was founded on 10 January 1920 following the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War.

In 1919 US President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as the leading architect of the League.

The organisation’s primary goals, as stated in its Covenant, included preventing wars through collective security and disarmament, and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.

Other issues in this and related treaties included labour conditions, just treatment of native inhabitants, human and drug trafficking, the arms trade, global health, prisoners of war, and protection of minorities in Europe.

The Covenant of the League of Nations was signed on 28 June 1919 as Part I of the Treaty of Versailles, and it became effective together with the rest of the Treaty on 10 January 1920.

The first meeting of the Council of the League took place on 16 January 1920, and the first meeting of Assembly of the League took place on 15 November 1920.

The diplomatic philosophy behind the League represented a fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years.

The League lacked its own armed force and depended on the victorious First World War Allies (France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Japan were the permanent members of the Executive Council) to enforce its resolutions, keep to its economic sanctions, or provide an army when needed.

The Great Powers were often reluctant to do so.

Sanctions could hurt League members, so they were reluctant to comply with them.

 

 

 

 

Following accusations of forced labour on the large American-owned Firestone rubber plantation and American accusations of slave trading, the Liberian government asked the League to launch an investigation.

The resulting commission was jointly appointed by the League, the United States, and Liberia.

In 1930, a League report confirmed the presence of slavery and forced labour.

The report implicated many government officials in the selling of contract labour and recommended that they be replaced by Europeans or Americans, which generated anger within Liberia and led to the resignation of President Charles D. B. King and his vice-president.

The Liberian government outlawed forced labour and slavery and asked for American help in social reforms.

 

 

Above: Flag of Liberia

 

 

The Mukden Incident, also known as the “Manchurian Incident“, was a decisive setback that weakened the League because its major members refused to tackle Japanese aggression.

Japan itself withdrew.

Under the agreed terms of the Twenty-One Demands with China, the Japanese government had the right to station its troops in the area around the South Manchurian Railway, a major trade route between the two countries, in the Chinese region of Manchuria.

In September 1931, a section of the railway was lightly damaged by the Japanese Kwantung Army as a pretext for an invasion of Manchuria.

The Japanese army claimed that Chinese soldiers had sabotaged the railway and in apparent retaliation (acting contrary to orders from Tokyo) occupied all of Manchuria.

They renamed the area Manchukuo, and on 9 March 1932 Japan set up a puppet government, with Pu Yi, the former emperor of China, as its executive head.

 

 

 

This new entity was recognised only by the governments of Italy, Spain and Nazi Germany.

The rest of the world still considered Manchuria legally part of China.

The League of Nations sent observers.

The Lytton Report appeared a year later (October 1932).

It declared Japan to be the aggressor and demanded Manchuria be returned to China.

 

 

Above: Chinese delegate addresses the League of Nations after the Mukden Incident in 1932

 

 

The report passed 42–1 in the Assembly in 1933 (only Japan voting against), but instead of removing its troops from China, Japan withdrew from the League.

In the end, as British historian Charles Mowat argued, collective security was dead:

The League and the ideas of collective security and the rule of law were defeated; partly because of indifference and of sympathy with the aggressor, but partly because the League powers were unprepared, preoccupied with other matters, and too slow to perceive the scale of Japanese ambitions.

 

 

Above: The Mukden Incident Museum (literally, “September 18th History Museum“) in Shenyang, China

 

 

The League failed to prevent the 1932 war between Bolivia and Paraguay over the arid Gran Chaco region.

Although the region was sparsely populated, it contained the Paraguay River, which would have given either landlocked country access to the Atlantic Ocean, and there was also speculation, later proved incorrect, that the Chaco would be a rich source of petroleum.

Border skirmishes throughout the late 1920s culminated in an all-out war in 1932 when the Bolivian army attacked the Paraguayans at Fort Carlos Antonio López at Lake Pitiantuta.

Paraguay appealed to the League of Nations, but the League did not take action when the Pan-American Conference offered to mediate instead.

The war was a disaster for both sides, causing 57,000 casualties for Bolivia, whose population was around three million, and 36,000 dead for Paraguay, whose population was approximately one million.

It also brought both countries to the brink of economic disaster.

By the time a ceasefire was negotiated on 12 June 1935, Paraguay had seized control of most of the region, as was later recognised by the 1938 truce.

 

 

Above: Paraguayan soldiers at Alihuatá, 1932

 

 

In 1933, Andrić returned to Belgrade.

Two years later, he was named head of the political department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On 5 November 1937, Andrić became assistant to Milan Stojadinović, Yugoslavia’s Prime Minister and Foreign Minister.

 

 

Above: National Assembly, Belgrade

 

 

Yugoslavia was a country in Southeast Europe and Central Europe for most of the 20th century.

It came into existence after World War I in 1918 under the name of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by the merger of the provisional State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs (it was formed from territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the Kingdom of Serbia, and constituted the first union of the South Slavic people as a sovereign state, following centuries in which the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary.

Peter I of Serbia was its first sovereign.

The kingdom gained international recognition on 13 July 1922 at the Conference of Ambassadors in Paris.

The official name of the state was changed to Kingdom of Yugoslavia on 3 October 1929.

 

 

 

 

On 20 June 1928, Serb deputy Puniša Račić shot at five members of the opposition Croatian Peasant Party in the National Assembly, resulting in the death of two deputies on the spot and that of leader Stjepan Radić a few weeks later.

 

Above: Punisa Racic (1886 – 1944)

 

 

On 6 January 1929, King Alexander I got rid of the constitution, banned national political parties and assumed executive power and renamed the country Yugoslavia.

He hoped to curb separatist tendencies and mitigate nationalist passions.

He imposed a new constitution and relinquished his dictatorship in 1931.

However, Alexander’s policies later encountered opposition from other European powers stemming from developments in Italy and Germany, where Fascists and Nazis rose to power, and the Soviet Union, where Joseph Stalin became absolute ruler.

None of these three regimes favored the policy pursued by Alexander I.

In fact, Italy and Germany wanted to revise the international treaties signed after World War I, and the Soviets were determined to regain their positions in Europe and pursue a more active international policy.

Alexander attempted to create a centralised Yugoslavia.

He decided to abolish Yugoslavia’s historic regions, and new internal boundaries were drawn for provinces or banovinas.

The banovinas were named after rivers.

Many politicians were jailed or kept under police surveillance.

The effect of Alexander’s dictatorship was to further alienate the non-Serbs from the idea of unity.

During his reign the flags of Yugoslav nations were banned.

Communist ideas were banned also.

 

Above: King Alexander I (1888 – 1934)

 

 

The king was assassinated in Marseille during an official visit to France in 1934 by Vlado Chernozemski, an experienced marksman from Ivan Mihailov’s Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization with the cooperation of the Ustaše, a Croatian fascist revolutionary organisation.

Alexander was succeeded by his eleven-year-old son Peter II and a regency council headed by his cousin, Prince Paul.

 

 

Above: The funeral of King Alexander at Belgrade

 

 

The international political scene in the late 1930s was marked by growing intolerance between the principal figures, by the aggressive attitude of the totalitarian regimes and by the certainty that the order set up after World War I was losing its strongholds and its sponsors were losing their strength.

Supported and pressured by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Croatian leader Vladko Maček and his party managed the creation of the Banovina of Croatia (Autonomous Region with significant internal self-government) in 1939.

The agreement specified that Croatia was to remain part of Yugoslavia, but it was hurriedly building an independent political identity in international relations.

The entire kingdom was to be federalised, but World War II stopped the fulfillment of those plans.

 

 

Above: Vladko Macek (1879 – 1964)

 

 

On 1 April 1939, Andrić was appointed Yugoslavia’s ambassador to Germany, presenting his credentials of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler on 19 April. 

This appointment, Hawkesworth writes, shows that he was highly regarded by his country’s leadership.

 

 

Above: Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945)

 

 

As previously mentioned, Yugoslavia’s King Alexander had been assassinated in Marseille in 1934.

He was succeeded by his ten-year-old son Peter, and a regency council led by Peter’s uncle Paul was established to rule in his place until he turned 18.

Paul’s government established closer economic and political ties with Germany.

 

 

Above: Prince Paul of Yugoslavia (1893 – 1976)

 

 

In March 1941, Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging support for Germany and Italy.

Though the negotiations had occurred behind Andrić’s back, in his capacity as ambassador he was obliged to attend the document’s signing in Berlin.

Andrić had previously been instructed to delay agreeing to the Axis powers’ demands for as long as possible.

He was highly critical of the move, and on 17 March, wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking to be relieved of his duties.

 

 

Above: Signing ceremony for the Axis Powers Tripartite Pact

Seated at front left (left to right) are Japan’s Ambassador Saburō Kurusu, Italy’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Galeazzo Ciano and Germany’s Führer Adolf Hitler.

 

 

Ten days later, a group of pro-Western Royal Yugoslav Air Force officers overthrew the regency and proclaimed Peter of age.

This led to a breakdown in relations with Germany and prompted Adolf Hitler to order Yugoslavia’s invasion.

 

 

Above: King Peter II of Yugoslavia (1923 – 1970)

 

 

Given these circumstances, Andrić’s position was an extremely difficult one.

Nevertheless, he used the little influence he had and attempted unsuccessfully to assist Polish prisoners following the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

 

 

Above: Images of the German invasion of Poland

 

 

Prior to their invasion of his country, the Germans had offered Andrić the opportunity to evacuate to neutral Switzerland.

He declined on the basis that his staff would not be allowed to go with him.

 

Above: Ivo Andric

 

 

On 6 April 1941, the Germans and their allies invaded Yugoslavia.

The country capitulated on 17 April and was subsequently partitioned between the Axis powers.

 

 

Above: The invasion of Yugoslavia

 

 

In early June, Andrić and his staff were taken back to German-occupied Belgrade, where some were jailed.

Andrić was retired from the diplomatic service, but refused to receive his pension or cooperate in any way with the puppet government that the Germans had installed in Serbia…..

 

 

 

 

The greatest part of the interwar period, Andric had spent abroad.

Living in Europe’s capital cities broadened his views and offered him the opportunity to improve his language skills, to meet men of letters and have an immediate access to literature of the countries in which he served as a diplomat, as well as to gather materials for his future novels and stories.

 

 

 

 

Inside the Ivo Andric Museum, the years of the writer’s diplomatic service are documented by original archival material – appointment and government decrees, certificates, acts of the Ministries of Religion and Foreign Affairs, issued to Andric as a civil servant and a chargé d’affaires.

The exhibited archival materials are arranged so as to illustrate, year by year, his advancement in the civil service, transfers and appointments, vacation and sick leaves.

Photos taken of him in Bucharest in 1922, Marseilles in 1927, Geneva in 1931, and Belgrade in 1937, capture visitors’ attention because they show not only an officer in the diplomatic service of the Kingdom, but also a rising writer and a newly elected member of the Serbian Royal Academy.

Andric’s diplomatic passport, issued for 1939 to 1941, is particularly interesting both as an exhibition item and a historic document.

The same applies to the photos of Andric taken in Berlin in 1939, because they remind us of times and events in the eve of World War II fateful for the Kingdom – the Tripartite Pact and demonstrations in Belgrade on 27 March 1941.

Andric’s career as a diplomat ended prematurely in the Third Reich Germany and was accompanied with his unsuccessful attempts to help prominent Polish intellectuals exiled from Krakow after the occupation of Poland in 1939 using his position as an ambassador and diplomatic channels.

Ivo Andric’s diplomatic uniform with gold embroidery, a feathered hat and a sword in an elaborately decorated scabbard, as well as his travel case with leather and wooden reinforcements – a witness to the diplomat’s journeys to Europe’s capitals and back to Belgrade – occupy the central, open area of the Museum’s exhibition room.

 

 

 

 

It is very important to point out that throughout this period of life and diplomatic service Andric was involved in literary work, gathering historical evidence in foreign archives, intensive cooperation with Yugoslav literary reviews and publishers, and correspondence with writers and friends from Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade, including Zdenko Markovic, Julije Benesic, Tugomir Alaupovic, Borivoje Jevtic, Isak Samokovlija, Isidora Sekulic, Jovan Ducic, Milos Crnjanski and Dr. Miodrag Iborvac.

 

 

Above: Bust of Ivo Andric, Ivo Andric Museum, Belgrade

 

 

(Tugomir Marko Alaupović (1870 – 1958) was a Yugoslav professor at First Grammar School ,Sarajevo, as well as a poet, storyteller and politician.

In addition to his rich political biography, he was also Minister of Religion in the government of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.

He has written several literary works that have been translated into French, German, Czech and Italian.

He was one of the initiators of the Croatian Society for the “Setting up of Children in Crafts and Trade” in Sarajevo and later initiated the change of the society name to Napredak.

He was a member of the Main Board of the Serbian St. Sava Society in Belgrade.

On 16 January 1934, after a serious operation, in a letter to Tihomir Djordjevic, a prominent Serbian ethnologist, he said:

“Unfortunately, my hopes have not been fulfilled and I will have to stay long or maybe even definitely in Zagreb.

It hurts and I’m sorry that for these reasons, I have to resign as a member of the Main Board of the St. Sava Society.

But rest assured that for the rest of my life, I will remain faithful to that beautiful and noble saying:

‘Everyone is my dear brother, be he any religion’“.)

 

 

Above: Tugomir Alaupovic

 

 

(Isak Samokovlija (1889 – 1955) was a prominent Bosnian Jewish writer.

By profession he was a physician.

His stories describe the life of the Bosnian Sephardic Jews.

 

 

Above: Isak Samokovlija

 

 

Samokovlija was born into a Sephardi Jewish family in Goražde, Bosnia and Herzegovina at the time of the Austro-Hungarian occupation.

While one side of his family came from Spain after the expulsion of Jews from Spain, “his great-grandfather moved to Bosnia from the town of Samokov in Bulgaria“, which led to the surname Los Samokovlis in Ladino or Samokovlija in Bosnian.

 

 

Above: Samokov Historical Museum with the statue of Zahari Zograf

 

 

After completing primary school Samokovlija went to Sarajevo.

He attended high school with Ivo Andric, the first Yugoslav to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

 

Above: Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina

 

 

After graduating high school in 1910, he receive a scholarship from local Jewish charity La Benevolencija to study medicine in Vienna.

Later he worked as a doctor in the towns Goražde and Fojnica (1921–1925) before beginning a regular job at Sarajevo’s Koševo hospital in 1925.

 

 

 

 

At the beginning of the Second World War, he was a department head at the Koševo hospital.

In April 1941 he was discharged from service as well as other Jews, but soon he was mobilized as a medical doctor fights against a typhus epidemic.

It was not until 1945, he managed to escape Yugoslavia and hide until the country was liberated.

 

 

 

 

After the end of World War II, he held various positions in the Bosnian and Yugoslav literary circles.

From 1948 to 1951 he edited the magazine Brazda, and then, until his death he was an editor at the publishing company Svjetlost.

His first short story Rafina avlija was published in 1927 and two years later his first collection of stories, Od proljeća do proljeća, came out.

 

Several of his stories were made into television films and his book Hanka was made into a film of the same name directed by Slavko Vorkapić in 1955.

He did not live to see the film, dying at age 65 in January 1955.

 

 

 

He was buried in the old Jewish cemetery on the slopes of Trebević mountain, near Sarajevo.)

 

 

 

 

(Isidora Sekulić (1877 – 1958) was a Serbian writer, novelist, essayist, polyglot and art critic.

She was “the first woman academic in the history of Serbia“.

 

 

 

 

Sekulić was born in Mošorin, a village of Bács-Bodrog County, which is now in the Vojvodina.

Apart from her studies in literature, Sekulić was also well versed in natural sciences as well as philosophy.

She graduated from the pedagogical school in Budapest in 1892, and obtained her doctorate in 1922 in Germany.

 

Above: View of Baudapest, Hungary

 

 

Her travels included extended stays in England, France and Norway.

Her travels from Oslo through Bergen to Finnmark resulted in Pisma iz Norveške (Letters from Norway) meditative travelogue in 1914.

 

 

Above: Flag of Norway

 

 

Her collection of short stories, Saputnici, are unusually detailed and penetrating accomplishment in self-analysis and a brave stylistic experiment.

She also spoke several classical as well as nine modern languages.

Sekulić’s lyrical, meditative, introspective and analytical writings come at the dawn of Serbian prose writing.

Sekulić is concerned with the human condition of man in his new, thoroughly modern sensibility.

 

Above: Isidora Sekulić

 

 

In her main novel, The Chronicle of a Small Town Cemetery (Кроника паланачког гробља), she writes in opposition to the usual chronological development of events.

Instead, each part of the book begins in the cemetery, eventually returning to the time of bustling life, with all its joys and tragedies.

Characters such as Gospa Nola, are the first strong female characters in Serbian literature, painted in detail in all their courage, pride and determination.

Isidora Sekulić also wrote critical writings in the areas of music, theatre, art, architecture and literature and philosophy.

She wrote major studies of Yugoslav, Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Norwegian and other literature.)

 

 

Above: The Chronicles of a Small Town Cemetery (Serbian original)

 

 

(Jovan Dučić (1871 – 1943) was a Herzegovinian Serb poet-diplomat.

He is one of the most influential Serbian lyricists and modernist poets.

Dučić published his first collection of poetry in Mostar in 1901 and his second in Belgrade in 1908.

He also wrote often in prose, writing a number of literary essays, studies on writers, letters by poets from Switzerland, Greece and Spain and the book Blago cara Radovana for which he is most remembered when it comes to his writing.

Dučić was also one of the founders of the Narodna Odbrana, a nationalist non-governmental organization in the Kingdom of Serbia and he was a member of the Serbian Royal Academy.

 

 

Above: Jovan Ducic

 

 

Jovan Dučić was born in Trebinje, at the time part of Bosnia Vilayet within the Ottoman Empire.

In Trebinje he attended primary school.

 

Above: Jovan Ducic Monument, Trebinje, Bosnia and Hercegovina

 

 

He moved on to a high school in Mostar and trained to become a teacher in Sombor.

He worked as a teacher in several towns before returning to Mostar, where he founded (with writer Svetozar Ćorović and poet Aleksa Šantić) a literary magazine called Zora (Dawn).

 

 

Above: Mostar, Bosnia and Hercegovina

 

 

Dučić’s openly expressed Serbian patriotism caused difficulties with the authorities – at that time Bosnia and Herzegovina was de facto incorporated into the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and he moved abroad to pursue higher studies, mostly in Geneva and Paris.

 

 

 

He was awarded a law degree by the University of Geneva and, following his return from abroad, entered Serbian diplomatic service in 1907.

 

 

 

 

Although he had previously expressed opposition to the idea of creating a Yugoslavia, he became the new country’s first ambassador to Romania (in 1937).

 

 

 

 

He had a distinguished diplomatic career in this capacity, serving in Istanbul, Sofia, Rome, Athens, Cairo, Madrid and Lisbon.

Dučić spoke several foreign languages and is remembered as a distinguished diplomat.

 

 

Above: Images of Lisbon, Portugal

 

 

It was as a poet that Dučić gained his greatest distinctions.

He published his first book of poetry in Mostar in 1901 and his second in Belgrade, 1908.

He wrote prose as well: several essays and studies about writers, Blago cara Radovana (Tsar Radovan’s treasure) and poetry letters from Switzerland, Greece, Spain and other countries.

 

 

Above: Tsar Radovan’s Treasure by Jovan Ducic (Serbian original)

 

 

Dučić’s work was initially heavily influenced by that of Vojislav Ilić, the leading Serbian poet of the late 19th century.

 

 

Above: Vojislav Ilic (1860 – 1894)

 

 

Ducic’s travels abroad helped him to develop his own individual style, in which the Symbolist movement was perhaps the greatest single influence.

In his poetry he explored quite new territory that was previously unknown in Serbian poetry.

He restricted himself to only two verse styles, the symmetrical dodecasyllable (the Alexandrine) and hendecasyllable—both French in origin—in order to focus on the symbolic meaning of his work.

He expressed a double fear, of vulgarity of thought and vulgarity of expression.

 

 

Above: Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs.

The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration “anywhere, out of the world“.

 

 

In the autumn of 1893, during the party in the newly built Hotel Drina in Bijeljina, a young and ambitious teacher Dučić met recent School of Commerce graduate Magdalena Živanović.

 

 

Above: Assembly Building, Bijeljina, Bosnia and Hercegovina

 

 

They got engaged with on 5 November 1893, and their correspondence continued even Dučić’s departure from Bijeljina to Mostar to teach from 1895 to 1899.

A part of the correspondence is kept safe up to this day, as well as the letter which Dučić’s friend and poet Aleksa Šantić redirected to Magdalena on 6 April 1901, asking for help in collecting a subscription for his songs.

 

 

Above: Aleksa Santic (1868 – 1924)

 

 

Ljiljana Lukić, a retired professor, keeps a personal copy of the correspondence between Dučić and Magdalena.

Professor Ljiljana Lukić states that Dučić lived for a short time in the house of Magdalena Nikolić who lived with her sister.

After her break up with Dučić, Magdalena shouted that she would never leave home again.

 

Above: Zivanovic and Ducic

 

 

“Like a novel heroine, she lived by her memories and the only happy moments she had was in reading the letters and songs of the man she loved“, as Professor Lukić concludes.

Dučić’s secret fiancé left the following words to be written after her death on her monument, which can still be read today on the Bijeljina graveyard:

Maga Nikolić-Živanović, 1874–1957,

the poet herself and first inspiration of poet Jovan Dučić.

 

 

 

Twenty years before Magdalena’s death, while Dučić was the authorized minister of Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a request was received that testifies of the deep trace which Dučić left in Bijeljina.

Singing society Srbadija asked the minister to help in building a home for the needs of the society.

 

 

Above: Museum of Semberija, Bijeljina

 

 

The Embassy of Serbia in Hungary is in the house which Jovan Dučić received from a Hungarian woman, and then donated it to the state.

 

 

Above: Embassy of Serbia in Hungary, Budapest

 

 

Dučić went into exile in the United States in 1941 following the German invasion and occupation of Yugoslavia, where he joined his relative Mihajlo (Michael) in Gary, Indiana.

 

 

 

From then until his death two years later, he led a Chicago-based organization, the Serbian National Defense Council (founded by Mihailo Pupin in 1914) which represented the Serbian diaspora in the US.

 

 

 

 

During these two years, he wrote many poems, historical books and newspaper articles espousing Serbian nationalist causes and protesting the mass murder of Serbs by the pro-Nazi Ustaše regime of Croatia.

In Yugoslav school anthologies immediately after WWII he had been declared persona non grata and widely viewed as a Serbian chauvinist.

He died on 7 April 1943.

His funeral took place at the Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Gary, Indiana and he was buried in the Saint Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery cemetery in Libertyville, Illinois.

He expressed a wish in his will to be buried in his home town of Trebinje, a goal which was finally realized when he was reburied there on 22 October 2000 in the newly built Hercegovačka Gračanica monastery.

His Acta Diplomatica (Diplomatic Letters) was published posthumously in the United States and in the former Yugoslavia. )

 

 

Above: Dučić’s grave site in the Hercegovačka Gračanica monastery in Trebinje

 

 

(Miodrag Ibrovac (1885 – 1973) was a Serbian and Yugoslav literary historian, novelist, academic and professor at the University of Belgrade.

He graduated from college in 1907, and from 1911 he taught at the Belgrade Lyceum.

From 1924 to 1958, Ibrovac was a full professor at the Faculty of Philology of the University of Belgrade in the Department of French Language and Literature where he succeeded Bogdan Popović.

He was a corresponding member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1968 and a full professor in 1970.

He was a member of the Serbian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference that brought an end to the Great War with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

The delegation from Serbia consisted of Nikola Pašić, Slobodan Jovanović, Milenko Radomar Vesnić, Miodrag Ibrovac and others.

He is one of the founders of the Serbian PEN Center.

He was president of the Society for Cultural Co-operation Yugoslavia-France.)

 

 

Above: Miodrag Ibrovac

 

 

Andric’s years-long correspondence with Svetislav B. Cvijanovic, a Belgrade publisher, bookseller, writers’ great patron and Andric’s first publisher in Belgrade, is of particular significance.

 

There is much I learned from my visit to the Ivo Andric Museum, especially from his years as a diplomat:

• the importance of travel
• the importance of networking
• the importance of lifelong learning
• the importance of maintaining writing ambitions despite the demands of gainful employment
• the significance of the individual, especially in positions of persuasion

 

 

Above: Ivo Andric in his study in Belgrade

 

 

Andric, from penniless origins to highly educated academic, from obscure contributor to vice-consul to Nobel prize winner, is an inspiration.

 

Truly the record of a man is worthy of note.

 

 

Above: Ivo Andric

 

 

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / Belgrade Memorial Museum of Ivo Andric / Ivo Andric, Signs by the Roadside

 

Canada Slim and the Author’s Apartment 1: Learning

Landschlacht, Switzerland, Thursday 13 June 2019

In everyone’s life there are marker moments that separate who you were from who you are, as significant to the individual as BC and AD are to the Western calendar.

I have had my share of such moments in my own life.

Some are as obvious as scar tissue from accidents and operations.

Others are so subtle, so intimate, that they are as soft as a lover’s whisper in the night, and are no less important, nay, sometimes are far more important, than moments that clearly marked and marred you in the eyes of others.

Who we were, who we are and who we will become are often determined by what happens where we happen to be.

 

 

Certainly there are those who argue that we make our own destiny, that we create our own karma, but it is usually those who have known little hardship who wax poetically upon how they would have acted differently had they been in situations alien to their experience and understanding.

Their songs of self-praise usually play to the tune of “had I been there I would have….“.

“If I had been living in Germany during the Second World War I would have sheltered Jews.”

“If my country suffered a famine I would not remain.”

“If I lived in North Korea I would rise in revolt against the Kim dynasty.”

 

 

Truth be told, we may have the potential to freely make such brave decisions, but in the harsh chill of grim reality whether we would actually possess the needed courage and have the opportunity to successfully act is highly debatable.

If the consequence of helping others might lead to your death and the death of your loved ones, would you really risk everything to shelter those whom your government deems enemies of the state?

Would you be able to abandon your family to famine to save yourself?

Would you really defy your entire country’s military might to speak truth to power and say that what is being done in the name of nationalism is wrong for the nation?

 

 

It is easy to condemn the Germans of the National Socialist nightmare, the starving masses in Africa and India, the North Koreans under the Kims, and suggest that they were weak to allow themselves to be dominated by circumstances.

The self-righteous will argue with such platitudes like “Evil can only triumph when the good stay silent.“, but martyrdom’s recklessness is not easily embraced by everyone.

 

 

I was born in an age and have lived in places where I have never personally experienced the ravages of war firsthand.

I have known hunger and thirst but have never been hungry or thirsty to the brink of my own demise.

I have been fortunate to live in places where democracy, though imperfectly applied at times, dominated society rather than being sacrificed for security.

As a Canadian born in the 60s, who has never been in a military conflict, it is not easy for me to fully appreciate the difficulties of others that I myself have never experienced.

 

 

I count former refugees among my circle of friends, but I cannot claim to fully comprehend what they have endured or what they continue to quietly endure.

I have known those who chose not to be part of a military machine, despite the accusation of treason and disloyalty to their nation this suggests, because they chose not to act in the name of a nation that does not respect a person’s rights to choose not to kill their fellow human beings.

 

 

I love my homeland of Canada but I have never been called to defend her, have never had to choose between patriotism and humanity.

Canada’s leaders I have known may not have been great statesmen, but neither have they been as reprehensible as the leadership of other nations.

Can it be easy to be a true believer in Turkey under a tyrant like Erdogan?

 

 

Can it be easy to be a patriotic American with an amateur like Trump?

Can it be easy to call yourself a native of a nation whose government does things that disgust the conscience and stain the soil?

 

 

I grew up in Québec as an Anglophone Canadian and fortunately I have never been forced to choose between the province and the nation.

 

 

I now live in a nation that certainly isn’t a paradise for everyone within its boundaries, but its nationalism has not tested my resolve nor has it required the surrender of my conscience.

 

 

Oh, what a lucky man I have been!

Others have not been so fortunate.

 

 

I have visited places that have reminded me of my good fortune because of their contrast to that good fortune.

I have seen the ruins of the Berlin Wall and the grim reality of Cyprus’s Green Wall.

 

 

I have stood inside an underground tunnel between the two nations of South and North Korea, where two soldiers stand back-to-back 100 meters apart, and though they share the same language and the same culture, they are ordered to kill the other should the other speak.

 

 

I have seen cemeteries of fallen soldiers and the ravaged ruins that wars past have left behind.

 

 

I have seen the settings of holocaust and have witnessed racism firsthand.

I have heard the condemnation of others for the crime of being different.

 

 

How dare they love who they choose!

How dare they believe differently than we!

How dare they look not as we do!

How dare they exist!

 

Some places are scar marks on the conscience, wounds on the world.

Some places whisper the intimate injury of injustice and barely breathe the breeze of silent bravery against insurmountable obstacles.

I have not lived in a nation torn against itself where bully bastards hide their cruelty behind an ideological -ism that is a thinly disguised mask for their sadism.

 

 

What follows is the tale of one man who did, a man who lived in Belgrade, Serbia’s eternal city, and gave the world an image of the place’s perpetuity, the mirage of immortality….

A man’s whose life has made me consider my own….

 

Above: Belgrade

 

“Some folk tales have such universal appeal that we forget when and where we heard or read them, and they live on in our minds as memories of our personal experiences.

Such is, for example, the story of a young man who, wandering the Earth in pursuit of happiness, strayed onto a dangerous road, which led into an unknown direction.

To avoid losing his way, the young man marked the trees along the road with his hatchet, to help him find his way home.

That young man is the personification of general, eternal human destiny on one hand, there is a dangerous and uncertain road, and on the other, a great human need to not lose one’s way, to survive and to leave behind a legacy.

The signs we leave behind us might not avoid the fate of everything that is human: transience and oblivion.

Perhaps they will be passed by completely unnoticed?

Perhaps nobody will understand them?

And yet, they are necessary, just as it is natural and necessary for us humans to convey and reveal our thoughts to one another.

Even if those brief and unclear signs fail to spare us all wandering and temptation, they can alleviate them and, at least, be of help by convincing us that we are not alone in anything we experience, nor are we the first and only ones who have ever been in that position.”

(Ivo Andric, Signs by the Roadside)

 

 

Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, 5 April 2018

The weather was worsening but my spirits were high.

I was on a mini-vacation, a separate holiday without my spouse, in a nation completely alien to me.

My good friend Nesha had graciously offered me the use of his apartment while he was away on business in Tara National Park, and so I was at liberty to come and go as I pleased without any obligations to anyone else but myself.

 

Above: Flag of Serbia

 

The day had started well.

I had visited Saint Sava Cathedral, the Nikola Tesla Museum and had serendipitiously stumbled upon a second-hand music store that sold Serbian music that my guidebooks had recommended I discover.

 

Above: Saint Sava Cathedral

 

Above: Nikola Tesla Museum

 

(For details of these, please see Canada Slim and….

• the Land of Long Life
• the Holy Field of Sparrows
• the Visionary
• the Current War
• the Man Who Invented the Future)

 

I was happy and so I would remain in the glorious week I spent in Belgrade and Nis.

I was learning so much!

(I still am.)

This journey I was making reminded me once again of just how ignorant I was (and am) of the world beyond my experience.

 

 

Before I began travelling the existence of life outside my senses remained naught more than rumours.

For example, I remember distinctly reading of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but it was far removed from my life until I moved to Germany and later visited Berlin before I began to understand why this had been a significant event, a big deal.

 

 

I partially blame my ignorance on the circumstances of my life in Canada.

Canadian news dominates Canadian media, which isn’t surprising as we are more interested in that which is closest to our experience.

English-language literature remains more accessible in Anglophone parts of Canada than other languages and so that is mostly what we know.

Too few Canadians speak more than their native tongues of either English or French.

Only 10% of Canadians are truly bilingual and not necessarily in the other official Canadian language.

How sad it is that so many North Americans know so little of the outside world unless there is a military conflict or diplomatic gesture in which they are involved.

Send a Canadian soldier or the Canadian Prime Minister to Serbia then a few Canadians might make a curious effort to find Serbia on a world map.

 

 

Part of the problem and the reason why world peace and true unity eludes humanity is nationalism.

Why care about those who are not us?

If “us” is defined and limited by our national boundaries then how can we include “them” in our vision of fellow human beings?

Only the truly exceptional of that which is foreign grabs our momentary attention.

How can we understand one another if that which has shaped us is unknown by others and that which has shaped them is alien to us?

 

 

Can a Serbian truly understand a Canadian without knowing of Terry Fox and Wayne Gretzky, Robert W. Service and Margaret Atwood, Just for Laughs and Stephan Leacock, the Stanley Cup and the CBC, Sergeant Renfrew and Constable Benton Fraser?

 

 

Can a Canadian truly understand a Serbian without knowing of Novak Djokovic and Nemanja Vidic, the Turija sausage fest and the Novi Sad Exit, the Drina Regatta and the Nisville Jazz Festival, Emir Kusturica and Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac and Ivo Andric?

 

Above: Ivo Andric (1892 – 1975)

 

Possibly not.

 

I often think that it would be a good idea for the young to not only read what is / was written in their own tongue but as well to read Nobel Prize winning books translated from other languages.

It might even be a step towards world unity.

In my school years I was exposed to the writing of Nobel Prize winners Kipling, O’Neill, Buck, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Bellow.

I had to travel to discover other Nobel laureates like Pamuk, Jelinek, Saramango, Neruda, Sartre, Camus, Marquez, Solzhenitsyn, Gidé, Mann and Andric by accident.

How much we miss when we stick to only our own!

How can we possibly have world peace when we are so ignorant of the world’s music, art and literature?

 

 

The street that runs beside Belgrade’s New Palace, now the seat of the President of Serbia, is named Andrićev venac (Andrić’s Crescent) in his honour.

It includes a life-sized statue of the writer.

 

 

The flat in which Andrić spent his final years has been turned into a museum.

 

 

Several of Serbia’s other major cities, such as Novi Sad and Kragujevac, have streets named after Andrić.

Streets in a number of cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Tuzla, and Višegrad, also carry his name.

 

 

Andrić remains the only writer from the former Yugoslavia to have been awarded the Nobel Prize.

Given his use of the Ekavian dialect, and the fact that most of his novels and short stories were written in Belgrade, his works have become associated almost exclusively with Serbian literature.

 

(I asked my good friend Nesha whether Serbians can communicate with Bosnians and Croatians in a similar language, whether there was a Slavic tongue that unites the three.

He responded that it is all one Serbo-Croatian language with a difference in dialects that changes from region to region and divided by three different accents: Ekavica, Jekavic and Ijekavica

Even though Slovenians and Macedonians speak a little differently, they all understand and speak a Serbian-type speech.)

 

 

The Slavonic studies professor Bojan Aleksov characterizes Andrić as one of Serbian literature’s two central pillars, the other being Njegoš.

“The plasticity of his narrative,” Moravcevich writes, “the depth of his psychological insight, and the universality of his symbolism remain unsurpassed in all of Serbian literature.“

 

 

Though it has been said that the Serbian novel did not begin with Ivo Andric – (that honour lies with Borisav Stankovic (1867 – 1927) who explored the contradictions of man’s spiritual and sensory life in his 1910 work Bad Blood, the first Serbian novel to receive praise in its foreign translations) – it was Andric who took Serbian literature’s oral traditions and epic poetry and developed and perfected its narrative form.

 

 

To this day, Andric remains probably the most famous writer from former Yugoslavia.

And, sadly, I had never heard of him prior to this day.

A visit to the Memorial Museum of Ivo Andric (to give its official title) this day helped correct this imbalance….

 

 

By a decision of the Belgrade City Assembly, the property of Ivo Andric was heritage-listed and entrusted to the Belgrade City Museum immediately following Andric’s death on 13 March 1975.

It was an act meant to express the city’s deep respect for Andric as a writer and as a person.

In accordance with the practice common all over the world, Belgrade wished to preserve the original appearance of the writer’s apartment, surrounded by the Belgrade Old and New Courts and Pionirski Park, in its picturesque environment, to honour its famous citizen.

The establishment of this Memorial Museum also throws light on a very remarkable period in history encompassing the two world wars, as well as the post-war years, on which Andric left a strong personal and creative impact.

The holdings of Ivo Andric’s legacy chiefly consist of items found and inventoried at his apartment after his death – the underlying idea being to reflect the spirit and atmosphere of privacy and nobility surrounding him.

Andric’s personal library contains 3,373 items, along with archival materials, manuscripts, works of fine and applied arts, diplomas and decorations, 1,070 personal belongings and 803 photographs.

The apartment covers an area of 144 square metres (somewhat larger than my own apartment) and is divided into three units:

• the authentic interior, encompassing an entrance hall, a drawing room and Andric’s study
• the exhibition rooms, created by the adaptation of two bedrooms
• the curators’ and guides offices and the museum storerooms, occupying the former kitchen, the maid’s room, the bathroom and the lobby

It is both an unusual and a subtle combination of ambiguously private and unabasedly public, presenting an overview of Andric’s private life while depicting his vivid diplomatic, national, cultural and educational activities.

Ivo Andric was an unusual man who lived in unusual times, a life captured by a small apartment museum that like Andric himself is deceptively normal in appearance….

 

 

The original appearance and the function of the entrance hall have been preserved to a great extent.

The showcase with publications and souvenirs of the Belgrade City Museum is the only sign indicating that a visitor, though in residential premises, is actually in a Museum.

Already at the entrance to the Museum, an open bookshelf populated with thick volumes of Serbo-Croatian and foreign language dictionaries and encyclopedias and literary works in French, German and English, symbolizes Andric’s communication with European and world literature, history and philosophy as well as his own creative endeavours.

This is where the story of the writer begins to unfold….

 

 

Ivan Andrić was born in the village of Dolac, near Travnik, on 10 October 1892, while his mother, Katarina (née Pejić), was in the town visiting relatives.

 

Above: The house in which Andric was born, now a museum

 

(Travnik has a strong culture, mostly dating back to its time as the center of local government in the Ottoman Empire.

Travnik has a popular old town district however, which dates back to the period of Bosnian independence during the first half of the 15th century.

Numerous mosques and churches exist in the region, as do tombs of important historical figures and excellent examples of Ottoman architecture.

The city museum, built in 1950, is one of the more impressive cultural institutions in the region.

Travnik became famous by important persons who were born or lived in the city.

The most important of which are Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Ćiro Blažević (football coach of the Croatian national team, won third place 1998 in France), Josip Pejaković (actor), Seid Memić (pop singer) and Davor Džalto (artist and art historian, the youngest PhD in Germany and in the South-East European region).

 

Above: Images of Travnik

 

One of the main works of Ivo Andrić is the Bosnian Chronicle, depicting life in Travnik during the Napoleonic Wars and written during World War II.

In this work Travnik and its people – with their variety of ethnic and religious communities – are described with a mixture of affection and exasperation.

 

 

The Bosnian Tornjak, one of Bosnia’s two major dog breeds and national symbol, originated in the area, found around Mount Vlašić.)

 

 

Andrić’s parents were both Catholic Croats.

He was his parents’ only child.

(I too was raised as an only child.)

 

His father, Antun, was a struggling silversmith who resorted to working as a school janitor in Sarajevo, where he lived with his wife and infant son.

(The Museum disagrees with Wikipedia, describing Antun as a court attendant.)

 

At the age of 32, Antun died of tuberculosis, like most of his siblings.

Andrić was only two years old at the time.

(My mother died, of cancer, when I was three.)

 

Widowed and penniless, Andrić’s mother took him to Višegrad and placed him in the care of her sister-in-law Ana and brother-in-law Ivan Matković, a police officer at the border military police station.

The couple were financially stable but childless, so they agreed to look after the infant and brought him up as their own in their house on the bank of the Drina River.

Meanwhile, Andrić’s mother returned to Sarajevo seeking employment.

Andrić was raised in a country that had changed little since the Ottoman period despite being mandated to Austria-Hungary at the Congress of Berlin in 1878.

Eastern and Western culture intermingled in Bosnia to a far greater extent than anywhere else in the Balkan peninsula.

Having lived there from an early age, Andrić came to cherish Višegrad, calling it “my real home“.

Though it was a small provincial town (or kasaba), Višegrad proved to be an enduring source of inspiration.

It was a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional town, the predominant groups being Serbs (Orthodox Christians) and Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks).

 

Above: Images of Visegrad

 

(Like Andric, I was born elsewhere than the place I think of as home, though to Andric’s credit he lovingly wrote about his birthplace in The Travnik Chronicle.

I could imagine writing about St. Philippe, my childhood hometown, but I feel no intimate connection to St. Eustache, my birthplace, whatsoever, despite the latter having a larger claim to fame than the “blink-or-you’ll-miss-it” village of my youth.)

 

Above: St. Eustache City Hall

 

(My imagination plays with the notion of St. Philippe as “St. Jerusalem” and St. Eustache described during the Rebellion of 1837.)

 

Above: The Battle of St. Eustache, 14 December 1837

 

From an early age, Andrić closely observed the customs of the local people.

These customs, and the particularities of life in eastern Bosnia, would later be detailed in his works.

Andrić made his first friends in Višegrad, playing with them along the Drina River and the town’s famous Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge.

 

 

(The area was part of the medieval Serbian state of the Nemanjić dynasty.

It was part of the Grand Principality of Serbia under Stefan Nemanja (r. 1166–96).

In the Middle Ages, Dobrun was a place within the border area with Bosnia, on the road towards Višegrad.

After the death of Emperor Stefan Dušan (r. 1331–55), the region came under the rule of magnate Vojislav Vojinović, and then his nephew, župan (count) Nikola Altomanović.

The Dobrun Monastery was founded by župan Pribil and his family, some time before the 1370s.

 

Above: Dobrun Monastery

 

The area then came under the rule of the Kingdom of Bosnia, part of the estate of the Pavlović noble family.

The settlement of Višegrad is mentioned in 1407, but is starting to be more often mentioned after 1427.

In the period of 1433–37, a relatively short period, caravans crossed the settlement many times.

Many people from Višegrad worked for the Republic of Ragusa.

Srebrenica and Višegrad and its surroundings were again in Serbian hands in 1448 after Despot Đurađ Branković defeated Bosnian forces.

 

Above: Durad Brankovic (1377 – 1456)

 

According to Turkish sources, in 1454, Višegrad was conquered by the Ottoman Empire led by Osman Pasha.

It remained under the Ottoman rule until the Berlin Congress (1878), when Austria-Hungary took control of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

 

 

The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge was built by the Ottoman architect and engineer Mimar Sinan for Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha.

Construction of the bridge took place between 1571 and 1577.

It still stands, and it is now a tourist attraction, after being inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list.

 

 

The Bosnian Eastern Railway from Sarajevo to Uvac and Vardište was built through Višegrad during the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Construction of the line started in 1903.

It was completed in 1906, using the 760 mm (2 ft 5 ¹⁵⁄₁₆ in) track gauge.

With the cost of 75 million gold crowns, which approximately translates to 450 thousand gold crowns per kilometer, it was one of the most expensive railways in the world built by that time.

This part of the line was eventually extended to Belgrade in 1928.

Višegrad is today part of the narrow-gauge heritage railway Šargan Eight.

 

The area was a site of Partisan–German battles during World War II.

Višegrad is one of several towns along the River Drina in close proximity to the Serbian border.

The town was strategically important during the Bosnian War conflict.

A nearby hydroelectric dam provided electricity and also controlled the level of the River Drina, preventing flooding downstream areas.

The town is situated on the main road connecting Belgrade and Užice in Serbia with Goražde and Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a vital link for the Užice Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) with the Uzamnica camp as well as other strategic locations implicated in the conflict.

 

 

On 6 April 1992, JNA artillery bombarded the town, in particular Bosniak-inhabited neighbourhoods and nearby villages.

Murat Šabanović and a group of Bosniak men took several local Serbs hostage and seized control of the hydroelectric dam, threatening to blow it up.

Water was released from the dam causing flooding to some houses and streets.

Eventually on 12 April, JNA commandos seized the dam.

 

 

The next day the JNA’s Užice Corps took control of Višegrad, positioning tanks and heavy artillery around the town.

The population that had fled the town during the crisis returned and the climate in the town remained relatively calm and stable during the later part of April and the first two weeks of May.

On 19 May 1992 the Užice Corps officially withdrew from the town and local Serb leaders established control over Višegrad and all municipal government offices.

 

Soon after, local Serbs, police and paramilitaries began one of the most notorious campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the conflict.

There was widespread looting and destruction of houses, and terrorizing of Bosniak civilians, with instances of rape, with a large number of Bosniaks killed in the town, with many bodies were dumped in the River Drina.

Men were detained at the barracks at Uzamnica, the Vilina Vlas Hotel and other sites in the area.

Vilina Vlas also served as a “brothel“, in which Bosniak women and girls (some not yet 14 years old), were brought to by police officers and paramilitary members (White Eagles and Arkan’s Tigers).

 

Above: Vilina Vlas Hotel today

 

Bosniaks detained at Uzamnica were subjected to inhumane conditions, including regular beatings, torture and strenuous forced labour.

Both of the town’s mosques were razed.

According to victims’ reports some 3,000 Bosniaks were murdered in Višegrad and its surroundings, including some 600 women and 119 children.

According to the Research and Documentation Center, at least 1,661 Bosniaks were killed/missing in Višegrad.

 

With the Dayton Agreement, which put an end to the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina was divided into two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska, the latter which Višegrad became part of.

 

Above: Flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina

 

Before the war, 63% of the town residents were Bosniak.

In 2009, only a handful of survivors had returned to what is now a predominantly Serb town.

On 5 August 2001, survivors of the massacre returned to Višegrad for the burial of 180 bodies exhumed from mass graves.

The exhumation lasted for two years and the bodies were found in 19 different mass graves.

The charges of mass rape were unapproved as the prosecutors failed to request them in time.

Cousins Milan Lukić and Sredoje Lukić were convicted on 20 July 2009, to life in prison and 30 years, respectively, for a 1992 killing spree of Muslims.

 

Above: Milan Lukic

 

The Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge was popularized by Andric in his novel The Bridge on the Drina.

A tourist site called Andricgrad (Andric Town) dedicated to Andric, is located near the Bridge.

Construction of Andrićgrad, also known as Kamengrad (Каменград, “Stonetown“) started on 28 June 2011, and was officially opened on 28 June 2014, on Vidovdan.)

 

Above: Main Street, Andricgrad

 

Throughout his life Andric was tied to Visegrad by pleasant reminiscences and bright memories of childhood.

 

Above: First edition of The Bridge on the Drina (Serbian)

 

At the age of ten, he received a three-year scholarship from a Croat cultural group called Napredak (Progress) to study in Sarajevo.

In the autumn of 1902, he was registered at the Great Sarajevo Gymnasium (Serbo-Croatian: Velika Sarajevska gimnazija), the oldest secondary school in Bosnia.

While in Sarajevo, Andrić lived with his mother, who worked in a rug factory as a weaver.

 

 

(Today Sarajevo is the capital and largest city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a population of 275,524 in its administrative limits.

The Sarajevo metropolitan area,  is home to 555,210 inhabitants.

Nestled within the greater Sarajevo valley of Bosnia, it is surrounded by the Dinaric Alps and situated along the Miljacka River in the heart of the Balkans.

Sarajevo is the political, financial, social and cultural center of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a prominent center of culture in the Balkans, with its region-wide influence in entertainment, media, fashion, and the arts.

Due to its long and rich history of religious and cultural diversity, Sarajevo is sometimes called the “Jerusalem of Europe” or “Jerusalem of the Balkans“.

It is one of only a few major European cities which have a mosque, Catholic church, Orthodox church and synagogue in the same neighborhood.

A regional center in education, the city is home to the Balkans first institution of tertiary education in the form of an Islamic polytechnic called the Saraybosna Osmanlı Medrese, today part of the University of Sarajevo.

Although settlement in the area stretches back to prehistoric times, the modern city arose as an Ottoman stronghold in the 15th century.

Sarajevo has attracted international attention several times throughout its history.

In 1885, Sarajevo was the first city in Europe and the second city in the world to have a full-time electric tram network running through the city, following San Francisco….)

 

 

At the time, the city was overflowing with civil servants from all parts of Austria-Hungary, and thus many languages could be heard in its restaurants, cafés and on its streets.

Culturally, the city boasted a strong Germanic element, and the curriculum in educational institutions was designed to reflect this.

From a total of 83 teachers that worked at Andrić’s school over a twenty-year period, only three were natives of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“The teaching program,” biographer Celia Hawkesworth notes, “was devoted to producing dedicated supporters of the Habsburg Monarchy.”

Andrić disapproved.

“All that came at secondary school and university,” he wrote, “was rough, crude, automatic, without concern, faith, humanity, warmth or love.“

 

Andrić experienced difficulty in his studies, finding mathematics particularly challenging, and had to repeat the sixth grade.

For a time, he lost his scholarship due to poor grades.

Hawkesworth attributes Andrić’s initial lack of academic success at least partly to his alienation from most of his teachers.

Nonetheless, he excelled in languages, particularly Latin, Greek and German.

Although he initially showed substantial interest in natural sciences, he later began focusing on literature, likely under the influence of his two Croat instructors, writer and politician Đuro Šurmin and poet Tugomir Alaupović.

Of all his teachers in Sarajevo, Andrić liked Alaupović best and the two became lifelong friends.

 

Above: Tugomir Alaupovic (1870 – 1958)

 

Andrić felt he was destined to become a writer.

He began writing in secondary school, but received little encouragement from his mother.

He recalled that when he showed her one of his first works, she replied:

“Did you write this? What did you do that for?”

Andrić published his first poem “U sumrak” (At dusk)  in 1911 in a journal called Bosanska vila (Bosnian Fairy), which promoted Serbo-Croat unity.

At the time, he was still a secondary school student.

His poems, essays, reviews, and translations appeared in journals such as Vihor (Whirlwind), Savremenik (The Contemporary), Hrvatski pokret (The Croatian Movement), and Književne novine (Literary News).

One of Andrić’s favorite literary forms was lyrical reflective prose, and many of his essays and shorter pieces are prose poems.

The historian Wayne S. Vucinich describes Andrić’s poetry from this period as “subjective and mostly melancholic“.

Andrić’s translations of August Strindberg’s novel Black Flag, Walt Whitman, and a number of Slovene authors also appeared around this time.

 

Above: Swedish writer August Strindberg (1849 – 1912)

 

In 1908, Austria-Hungary officially annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, to the chagrin of South Slav nationalists like Andrić.

In late 1911, Andrić was elected the first president of the Serbo-Croat Progressive Movement (Serbo-Croatian: Srpsko-Hrvatska Napredna Organizacija; SHNO), a Sarajevo-based secret society that promoted unity and friendship between Serb and Croat youth and opposed the Austro-Hungarian occupation.

Its members were vehemently criticized by both Serb and Croat nationalists, who dismissed them as “traitors to their nations“.

Unfazed, Andrić continued agitating against the Austro-Hungarians.

On 28 February 1912, he spoke before a crowd of 100 student protesters at Sarajevo’s railway station, urging them to continue their demonstrations.

The Austro-Hungarian police later began harassing and prosecuting SHNO members.

Ten were expelled from their schools or penalized in some other way, though Andrić himself escaped punishment.

Andrić also joined the South Slav student movement known as Young Bosnia, becoming one of its most prominent members.

 

 

In 1912, Andrić registered at the University of Zagreb, having received a scholarship from an educational foundation in Sarajevo.

He enrolled in the department of mathematics and natural sciences because these were the only fields for which scholarships were offered, but was able to take some courses in Croatian literature.

 

 

(Today Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of Croatia.

It is located in the northwest of the country, along the Sava River, at the southern slopes of Mount Medvednica.

 

 

The climate of Zagreb is classified as an oceanic climate, but with significant continental influences and very closely bordering on a humid Continental climate as well as a humid subtropical climate.

Zagreb has four separate seasons.

Summers are warm, at the end of May the temperatures start rising and it is often pleasant with occasional thunderstorms.

Heatwaves can occur but are short-lived.

Temperatures rise above 30 °C (86 °F) on an average 14.6 days each summer.

Rainfall is abundant in the summertime and it continues to be in autumn as well.

Zagreb is Europe’s 9th wettest capital, behind Luxembourg and ahead of Brussels, Belgium.

Autumn in its early stages is mild with an increase of rainy days and precipitation as well as a steady temperature fall towards its end.

Morning fog is common from mid-October to January with northern city districts at the foothills of the Medvednica mountain as well as those along the Sava river being more prone to all-day fog accumulation.

Winters are cold with a precipitation decrease pattern.

Even though there is no discernible dry season, February is the driest month with 39 mm of precipitation.

On average there are 29 days with snowfall with first snow falling in early November.

Springs are generally mild and pleasant with frequent weather changes and are windier than other seasons.

Sometimes cold spells can occur, mostly in its early stages.

The average daily mean temperature in the winter is around 1 °C (34 °F) (from December to February) and the average temperature in the summer is 22.0 °C (71.6 °F).

 

 

Zagreb is a city with a rich history dating from the Roman times to the present day.

The oldest settlement located in the vicinity of the city was the Roman Andautonia, in today’s Ščitarjevo.

The name “Zagreb” is recorded in 1134, in reference to the foundation of the settlement at Kaptol in 1094.

Zagreb became a free royal town in 1242.

In 1851 Zagreb had its first mayor, Janko Kamauf.

After the 1880 Zagreb earthquake, up to the 1914 outbreak of World War I, development flourished and the town received the characteristic layout which it has today.

 

 

Zagreb still occasionally experiences earthquakes, due to the proximity of Žumberak-Medvednica fault zone.

It’s classified as an area of high seismic activity.

The area around Medvednica was the epicentre of the 1880 Zagreb earthquake (magnitude 6.3), and the area is known for occasional landslide threatening houses in the area.

The proximity of strong seismic sources presents a real danger of strong earthquakes.

Croatian Chief of Office of Emergency Management Pavle Kalinić stated Zagreb experiences around 400 earthquakes a year, most of them being imperceptible.

However, in case of a strong earthquake, it’s expected that 3,000 people would die and up to 15,000 would be wounded.

 

Above: Damage done to Zagreb Cathedral, 9 November 1880

 

The first horse-drawn tram was used in 1891.

The construction of the railway lines enabled the old suburbs to merge gradually into Donji Grad, characterised by a regular block pattern that prevails in Central European cities.

This bustling core hosts many imposing buildings, monuments, and parks as well as a multitude of museums, theatres and cinemas.

An electric power plant was built in 1907.

 

Since 1 January 1877, the Grič cannon is fired daily from the Lotrščak Tower on Grič to mark midday.

 

 

The first half of the 20th century saw a considerable expansion of Zagreb.

Before World War I, the city expanded and neighbourhoods like Stara Peščenica in the east and Črnomerec in the west were created.

The transport connections, concentration of industry, scientific, and research institutions and industrial tradition underlie its leading economic position in Croatia.

Zagreb is the seat of the central government, administrative bodies, and almost all government ministries.

Almost all of the largest Croatian companies, media, and scientific institutions have their headquarters in the city.

Zagreb is the most important transport hub in Croatia where Central Europe, the Mediterranean and Southeast Europe meet, making the Zagreb area the centre of the road, rail and air networks of Croatia.

It is a city known for its diverse economy, high quality of living, museums, sporting and entertainment events.

Its main branches of economy are high-tech industries and the service sector.

 

 

Zagreb is an important tourist centre, not only in terms of passengers travelling from the rest of Europe to the Adriatic Sea, but also as a travel destination itself.

It attracts close to a million visitors annually, mainly from Austria, Germany and Italy, and in recent years many tourists from the Far East (South Korea, Japan, China and India).

It has become an important tourist destination, not only in Croatia, but considering the whole region of southeastern Europe.

There are many interesting sights and happenings for tourists to attend in Zagreb, for example, the two statues of Saint George, one at the Republic of Croatia Square, the other at Kamenita vrata, where the image of Virgin Mary is said to be only thing that hasn’t burned in the 17th-century fire.

Also, there is an art installation starting in Bogovićeva street, called Nine Views.

Most people don’t know what the statue “Prizemljeno Sunce” (The Grounded Sun) is for, and just scrawl graffiti or signatures on it, but it’s actually the Sun scaled down, with many planets situated all over Zagreb in scale with the Sun.

There are also many festivals and events throughout the year, making Zagreb a year-round tourist destination.

The historical part of the city to the north of Ban Jelačić Square is composed of the Gornji Grad and Kaptol, a medieval urban complex of churches, palaces, museums, galleries and government buildings that are popular with tourists on sightseeing tours.

The historic district can be reached on foot, starting from Jelačić Square, the centre of Zagreb, or by a funicular on nearby Tomićeva Street.

Each Saturday, (April – September), on St. Mark’s Square in the Upper town, tourists can meet members of the Order of The Silver Dragon (Red Srebrnog Zmaja), who reenact famous historical conflicts between Gradec and Kaptol.

It’s a great opportunity for all visitors to take photographs of authentic and fully functional historical replicas of medieval armour.

 

 

Numerous shops, boutiques, store houses and shopping centres offer a variety of quality clothing.

There are about fourteen big shopping centres in Zagreb.

Zagreb’s offerings include crystal, china and ceramics, wicker or straw baskets, and top-quality Croatian wines and gastronomic products.

Notable Zagreb souvenirs are the tie or cravat, an accessory named after Croats who wore characteristic scarves around their necks in the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century and the ball-point pen, a tool developed from the inventions by Slavoljub Eduard Penkala, an inventor and a citizen of Zagreb.

Many Zagreb restaurants offer various specialties of national and international cuisine.

Domestic products which deserve to be tasted include turkey, duck or goose with mlinci (a kind of pasta), štrukli (cottage cheese strudel), sir i vrhnje (cottage cheese with cream), kremšnite (custard slices in flaky pastry) and orehnjača (traditional walnut roll). )

 

 

Andrić was well received by South Slav nationalists in Zagreb and regularly participated in on-campus demonstrations.

This led to his being reprimanded by the university.

In 1913, after completing two semesters in Zagreb, Andrić transferred to the University of Vienna, where he resumed his studies.

 

 

(Vienna is the federal capital, largest city and one of nine states of Austria.

Vienna is Austria’s principal city, with a population of about 1.9 million (2.6 million within the metropolitan area, nearly one third of the country’s population), and its cultural, economic and political centre.

It is the 7th-largest city by population within city limits in the European Union.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was the largest German-speaking city in the world, and before the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, the city had 2 million inhabitants.

Today, it has the second largest number of German speakers after Berlin.

Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC.

The city is located in the eastern part of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.

These regions work together in a European Centrope border region.

Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants.

In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In July 2017 it was moved to the list of World Heritage in Danger.

Apart from being regarded as the City of Music because of its musical legacy, Vienna is also said to be “The City of Dreams” because it was home to the world’s first psychoanalyst – Sigmund Freud.

The city’s roots lie in early Celtic and Roman settlements that transformed into a Medieval and Baroque city, and then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It is well known for having played an essential role as a leading European music centre, from the great age of Viennese Classicism through the early part of the 20th century.

The historic centre of Vienna is rich in architectural ensembles, including Baroque castles and gardens, and the late-19th-century Ringstraße lined with grand buildings, monuments and parks.

Vienna is known for its high quality of life.

In a 2005 study of 127 world cities, the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked the city first (in a tie with Vancouver and San Francisco) for the world’s most liveable cities.

Between 2011 and 2015, Vienna was ranked second, behind Melbourne.

In 2018, it replaced Melbourne as the number one spot.

For ten consecutive years (2009–2019), the human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Vienna first in its annual “Quality of Living” survey of hundreds of cities around the world.

Monocle’s 2015 “Quality of Life Survey” ranked Vienna second on a list of the top 25 cities in the world “to make a base within.”

The UN-Habitat classified Vienna as the most prosperous city in the world in 2012/2013.

The city was ranked 1st globally for its culture of innovation in 2007 and 2008, and sixth globally (out of 256 cities) in the 2014 Innovation Cities Index, which analyzed 162 indicators in covering three areas: culture, infrastructure, and markets.

Vienna regularly hosts urban planning conferences and is often used as a case study by urban planners.

Between 2005 and 2010, Vienna was the world’s number-one destination for international congresses and conventions.

It attracts over 6.8 million tourists a year.)

 

Above: Images of Vienna (Wien)

 

While in Vienna, Andric joined South Slav students in promoting the cause of Yugoslav unity and worked closely with two Yugoslav student societies, the Serbian cultural society Zora (Dawn) and the Croatian student club Zvonimir, which shared his views on “integral Yugoslavism” (the eventual assimilation of all South Slav cultures into one).

Andric became acquainted with Soren Kierkegaard’s book Either / Or, which would have a lasting influence on him.

 

Above: Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

 

Despite finding like-minded students in Vienna, the city’s climate took a toll on Andrić’s health.

He contracted tuberculosis and became seriously ill, then asked to leave Vienna on medical grounds and continue his studies elsewhere, though Hawkesworth believes he may actually have been taking part in a protest of South Slav students that were boycotting German-speaking universities and transferring to Slavic ones.

 

For a time, Andrić had considered transferring to a school in Russia but ultimately decided to complete his fourth semester at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

 

Above: Logo of Jagiellonian University

 

(Kraków is the second largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland.

Situated on the Vistula River, the city dates back to the 7th century.

Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 and has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Polish academic, economic, cultural and artistic life.

Cited as one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, its Old Town was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The city has grown from a Stone Age settlement to Poland’s second most important city.

It began as a hamlet on Wawel Hill and was already being reported as a busy trading centre of Central Europe in 965.

With the establishment of new universities and cultural venues at the emergence of the Second Polish Republic in 1918 and throughout the 20th century, Kraków reaffirmed its role as a major national academic and artistic centre.

The city has a population of about 770,000, with approximately 8 million additional people living within a 100 km (62 mi) radius of its main square.

 

 

After the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany at the start of World War II, the newly defined Distrikt Krakau (Kraków District) became the capital of Germany’s General Government.

The Jewish population of the city was forced into a walled zone known as the Kraków Ghetto, from which they were sent to German extermination camps such as the nearby Auschwitz never to return, and the Nazi concentration camps like Płaszów.

 

 

In 1978, Karol Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elevated to the papacy as Pope John Paul II—the first Slavic pope ever and the first non-Italian pope in 455 years.

 

Above: Pope John Paul II (1920 – 2005)

 

Also that year, UNESCO approved the first ever sites for its new World Heritage List, including the entire Old Town in inscribing Kraków’s Historic Centre.

Kraków is classified as a global city with the ranking of high sufficiency by GaWC.

Its extensive cultural heritage across the epochs of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture includes the Wawel Cathedral and the Royal Castle on the banks of the Vistula, the St. Mary’s Basilica, Saints Peter and Paul Church and the largest medieval market square in Europe, the Rynek Główny.

Kraków is home to Jagiellonian University, one of the oldest universities in the world and traditionally Poland’s most reputable institution of higher learning.

In 2000, Kraków was named European Capital of Culture.

In 2013 Kraków was officially approved as a UNESCO City of Literature.

The city hosted the World Youth Day in July 2016.)

 

 

Throughout his life Andric would feel that he owed much to the Polish excursion.

Andric met and mingled with painters Jovan Bijelic, Roman Petrovic and Peter Tijesic.

He transferred in early 1914 and continued to publish translations, poems and reviews.

Six poems written by Andric were included in the anthology Hrvatska Mlada Linka (Young Christian Lyricists).

In the words of literary critics:

“As unhappy as any artist.  Ambitious.  Sensitive.  Briefly speaking, he has a future.”

 

Above: Flag of Poland

 

(This perspective has always made me wonder….

Must a man suffer before he can call himself an artist?)

 

 

Certainly, Andric lost his father and was separated from his mother in his childhood and the domination of his homeland by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire clearly bothered him, nonetheless Andric had had the distinct privilege of living and studying in four of the most beautiful and cultural cities that Eastern Europe offers.

Certainly, Andric would be plagued with ill health often during the course of his lifetime, but it would not be until the outbreak of war in 1914 that his, and Europe’s, suffering would truly begin….

(To be continued….)

Sources: Wikipedia / Google / Lonely Planet Eastern Europe / Belgrade City Museum, Memorial Museum of Ivo Andric Guide / Komshe Travel Guides, Serbia in Your Hands / Top Travel Guides, Belgrade / Bradt Guides, Serbia / Aleksandar Diklic, Belgrade: The Eternal City / Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina / Ivo Andric, Signs by the Roadside

Canada Slim and the Current War

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 17 October 2018

(Continued from Canada Slim and the Visionary)

What has gone before….

I visited Serbia this past April and spent a few wonderful days exploring the Serbian capital of Belgrade.

Of the many wonders to explore and of the many things Belgrade and Serbia have to offer, one particular attraction that stands out is the Nikola Tesla Museum.

Nikola Tesla was a great Serb physicist and inventor who almost, but not quite, became an international household name.

Above: Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)

Many say that if it were not for occasional stubbornness and a poor sense of financial management, Tesla might have ended up as famous as Edison or Einstein.

Despite a lack of international recognition, Tesla remains a Serbian national hero.

It is his face that currently decorates the 100 dinar note.

In the first part of three (this is the second) I briefly spoke of Hugo Gernsback that made Tesla as famous as he did become and I spoke of his life before he left for the United States.

Above: Hugo Gernsback (1884 – 1967)

 

What follows is the sad story of a prisoner execution, a deadly blizzard and a very ugly battle between two business magnates with Tesla smack dab in the middle of it all….

 

But first….

Let there be light.

 

The first type of widely used electric light was the arc lamp.

These lamps had been around for most of the 19th century but by the late 1870s were beginning to be installed in cities in large scale systems powered by central generating plants.

Arc lighting systems were extremely brilliant and capable of lighting whole streets, factory yards, or the interior of large buildings.

They needed high voltages (above 3,000 volts) and some ran better on alternating current.

Alternating current had been under development for a while in Europe with contributions being made to the field by Guillaume Duchenne (1850s), the dynamo work of Zénobe Gramme, Ganz Works (1870s), Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti (1880s), Lucien Gaulard, and Galileo Ferraris.

The high voltages allowed a central generating station to supply a large area, up to 7-mile (11 km) long circuits since the capacity of a wire is proportional to the square of the current traveling on it, each doubling of the voltage allowed the same size cable to transmit the same amount of power four times the distance.

1880 saw the installation of large-scale arc lighting systems in several US cities including a central station set up by the Brush Electric Company in December 1880 to supply a 2-mile (3.2 km) length of Broadway in New York City with a 3,500–volt demonstration arc lighting system.

The disadvantages of arc lighting were:

It was maintenance intensive, buzzed, flickered, constituted a fire hazard, was really only suitable for outdoor lighting, and, at the high voltages used, was dangerous to work with.

 

In 1878 inventor Thomas Edison saw a market for a system that could bring electric lighting directly into a customer’s business or home, a niche not served by arc lighting systems.

Above: Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931)

 

By 1882 the investor-owned utility Edison Illuminating Company was established in New York City.

Edison designed his “utility” to compete with the then established gas lighting utilities, basing it on a relatively low 110 volt direct current supply to power a high resistance incandescent lamp he had invented for the system.

Edison direct current systems would be sold to cities throughout the United States, making it a standard with Edison controlling all technical development and holding all the key patents.

 

Direct current worked well with incandescent lamps, which were the principal load of the day.

Direct-current systems could be directly used with storage batteries, providing valuable load-leveling and backup power during interruptions of generator operation.

Direct-current generators could be easily paralleled, allowing economical operation by using smaller machines during periods of light load and improving reliability.

Edison had invented a meter to allow customers to be billed for energy proportional to consumption, but this meter worked only with direct current.

Direct current also worked well with electric motors, an advantage DC held throughout the 1880s.

The primary drawback with the Edison direct current system was that it ran at 110 volts from generation to its final destination giving it a relatively short useful transmission range:

To keep the size of the expensive copper conductors down generating plants had to be situated in the middle of population centers and could only supply customers less than a mile from the plant.

 

Starting in the 1880s, alternating current gained its key advantage over direct current with the development of functional transformers that allowed the voltage to be “stepped up” to much higher transmission voltages and then dropped down to a lower end user voltage for business and residential use.

Using induction coils to transfer power between electrical circuits had been around for 40 years with Pavel Yablochkov using them in his lighting system in 1876 and Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs using the principle to create a “step down” transformer in 1882, but the design was not very efficient.

A prototype of the high efficiency, closed core shunt connection transformer was made by the Hungarian “Z.B.D.” team (composed of Károly Zipernowsky, Ottó Bláthy and Miksa Déri) at Ganz Works in 1884.

Above: (left to right) Károly Zipernowsky, Otto Bláthy, Miksa Déri

The new Z.B.D. transformers were 3.4 times more efficient than the open core bipolar devices of Gaulard and Gibbs.

Transformers in use today are designed based on principles discovered by the three engineers.

Their patents included another major related innovation:

The use of parallel connected (as opposed to series connected) power distribution.

Ottó Bláthy also invented the first AC electricity meter.

The reliability of this type of AC technology received impetus after the Ganz Works electrified Rome, a large metropolis, in 1886.

 

In North America the inventor and entrepreneur George Westinghouse entered the electric lighting business in 1884 when he started to develop a DC system and hired William Stanley, Jr. to work on it.

Above: George Westinghouse (1846 – 1914)

Westinghouse became aware of the new European transformer based AC systems in 1885 when he read about them in the UK technical journal Engineering.

He grasped that AC combined with transformers meant greater economies of scale could be achieved with large centralized power plants transmitting stepped up voltage very long distances to be used in arc lighting as well lower voltage home and commercial incandescent lighting supplied via a “step down” transformer at the other end.

Westinghouse saw a way to build a truly competitive system instead of simply building another barely competitive DC lighting system using patents just different enough to get around the Edison patents.

The Edison DC system of centralized DC plants with their short transmission range also meant there was a patchwork of un-supplied customers between Edison’s plants that Westinghouse could easily supply with AC power.

Westinghouse purchased the US patents rights to the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer and imported several of those as well as Siemens AC generators to begin experimenting with an AC-based lighting system in Pittsburgh.

 

William Stanley used the Gaulard-Gibbs design and designs from the ZBD transformer to develop the first practical transformer.

The Westinghouse Electric Company was formed at the beginning of 1886.

In March 1886 Stanley, with Westinghouse’s backing, installed the first multiple-voltage AC power system, a demonstration incandescent lighting system, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Expanded to the point where it could light 23 businesses along main street with very little power loss over 4000 feet, the system used transformers to step 500 AC volts at the street down to 100 volts to power incandescent lamps at each location.

By fall of 1886 Westinghouse, Stanley, and Oliver B. Shallenberger had built the first commercial AC power system in the US in Buffalo, New York.

By the end of 1887 Westinghouse had 68 alternating current power stations to Edison’s 121 DC-based stations.

Above: William Stanley (1858 – 1916)

 

To make matters worse for Edison, the Thomson-Houston Electric Company of Lynn, Massachusetts (another competitor offering AC- and DC-based systems) had built 22 power stations.

Thomson-Houston was expanding their business while trying to avoid patent conflicts with Westinghouse, arranging deals such as coming to agreements over lighting company territory, paying a royalty to use the Stanley AC transformer patent, and allowing Westinghouse to use their Sawyer-Man incandescent bulb patent.

 

Besides Thomson-Houston and Brush there were other competitors at the time included the United States Illuminating Company and the Waterhouse Electric Light Company.

 

All of the companies had their own electric power systems, arc lighting systems, and even incandescent lamp designs for domestic lighting, leading to constant lawsuits and patent battles between themselves and with Edison.

 

Elihu Thomson of Thomson-Houston was concerned about AC safety and put a great deal of effort into developing a lightning arrestor for high-tension power lines as well as a magnetic blowout switch that could shut the system down in a power surge, a safety feature the Westinghouse system did not have.

Thomson also worried what would happen with the equipment after they sold it, assuming customers would follow a risky practice of installing as many lights and generators as they could get away with.

He also thought the idea of using AC lighting in residential homes was too dangerous and had the company hold back on that type of installations until a safer transformer could be developed.

 

Due to the hazards presented by high voltage electrical lines most European cities and the city of Chicago in the US required them to be buried underground.

The City of New York did not require burying and had little in the way of regulation so by the end of 1887 the mishmash of overhead wires for telephone, telegraph, fire and burglar alarm systems in Manhattan were now mixed with haphazardly strung AC lighting system wires carrying up to 6000 volts.

Insulation on power lines was rudimentary, with one electrician referring to it as having as much value “as a molasses covered rag“, and exposure to the elements was eroding it over time.

A third of the wires were simply abandoned by defunct companies and slowly deteriorating, causing damage to, and shorting out the other lines.

In June 1884, Tesla emigrated to the United States from Paris.

He arrived in America with four cents in his pocket (he had been robbed aboard ship), a book of poetry and a letter of recommendation.

“I wish that I could put into words my first impressions of this country.

In the Arabian Tales I read how genii transported people into a land of dreams to live through delightful adventures.

My case was just the reverse.

What I had left was beautiful, artistic and fascinating in every way.

What I saw here was machined, rough and unattractive.

A burly policeman was twirling his stick which looked to me as big as a log.

I approached him politely with the request to direct me.

“Six blocks down, then to the left.“, he said, with murder in his eyes.

“Is this America?“, I asked myself in painful surprise.

“It is a century behind Europe in civilization.”

When I went abroad in 1889 – five years having elapsed since my arrival here – I became convinced that it was more than one hundred years AHEAD of Europe and nothing has happened to this day to change my opinion.”

“The meeting with Edison was a memorable event in my life.

I was amazed at this wonderful man who, without early advantages and scientific training, had accomplished so much.

I had studied a dozen languages, delved in literature and art, and had spent my best years in libraries reading all sorts of stuff that fell into my Hands, from Newton’s Principia to the novels of Paul de Kock, and felt that most of my life had been squandered.

Above: Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727)

But it did not take long before I recognized that it was the best thing I could have done.

Within a few weeks I had won Edison’s confidence and it came about this way:

The SS Oregon, the fastest passenger steamship at the time, had both of its lighting machines disabled and its sailing delayed.

As the superstructure had been built after their installation it was impossible to remove them from the hold.

The predicament was a serious one and Edison was much annoyed.

In the evening I took the necessary instruments with me and went aboard the vessel where I stayed for the night.

The dynamos were in bad condition, having several short circuits and breaks, but with the assistance of the crew I succeeded in putting them in good shape.

At five o’clock in the morning, when passing along 5th Avenue on my way to the shop, I met Edison with Batchelor and a few others as they were returning home to retire.

Above: Charles Batchelor (1845 – 1910)

“Here is our Parisian running around at night.“, he said.

When I told him that I was coming from the Oregon and had repaired both machines, he looked at me in silence and walked away without another word.

But when he had gone some distance I heard him remark:

“Batchelor, this is a damn good man.”

 

From that time on I had full freedom in directing the work.

 

For nearly a year my regular hours were from 10:30 am to 5 o’clock the next morning without a day’s exception.

 

Edison said to me:

“I have had many hard-working assistants but you take the cake.”

 

During this period I designed 24 different types of standard machines with short cores and of uniform pattern which replaced the old ones.”

(A few notes for those of an unscientific background:

Imagine a blanket that covers everything and stretches into infinity.

Imagine that this blanket consists of two types of energy: that which remains stationary (magnetic) and that which is constantly in motion (electrical).

Further imagine that within all matter there is, on the subatomic level, particles of a positive nature (protons) and a negative nature (electrons) and that they create fields that either attract or repel other particles towards or away from them.

This force’s presence and motions between these particles is manifested in current (how this flow varies over time) by either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC).

Direct current means that there is a one-way flow from positive magnetic spot to negative magnetic spot.

Alternating current means that the current flow can reverse direction repeatedly.

Direct current means direct contact with a conductor, for example, a copper wire, but much energy is lost as heat due to wire resistance.

Alternating current means that the waves of electromagnetic radiation (manifested in the form of heat) rather than travelling through a wire will instead ride upon the surface of the wire.

Direct current motors sparked, needed constant replacements and servicing, and offered limited range.

But until Tesla no one had found an effective method to create an AC motor.)

 

Meanwhile, Hugo Gernsback (né Gernsbacher)(1884 – 1967) was born in Luxembourg Ville to Moritz Gernsbacher, a Jewish winemaker, and his wife Berta (née Dürlacher).

Above: Flag of Luxembourg

 

Tesla began working almost immediately at the Machine Works on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in an overcrowded shop with a workforce of several hundred machinists, labourers, managing staff and 20 field engineers struggling with the task of building the largest electric utility in New York City.

As in Paris, Tesla was working on troubleshooting installations and improving generators.

Tesla met Thomas Alva Edison only a couple of times.

Edison called Tesla “the Poet of Science“, for both men had very different approaches.

Where Edison was a practical, mercantile, trial and error man, Nikola Tesla was a theoretical, well-educated business-naive visionary who never fully understood the American tendency to disbelief in science unless it was cloaked in the “show me” sensibility.

Tesla had been working at the Machine Works for a total of six months when he quit.

Tesla had made considerable improvements on DC dynamos, but when he approached Edison for the money he had been promised he was told:

“Tesla, you don’t understand American humour.”

Above: Nikola Tesla

 

This caused Tesla to resign and to form his own company, Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing, but this came to nought as his investors pulled out over his plan for an alternating current motor.

Soon after leaving the Edison company, Tesla was working on patenting an arc lighting system.

Tesla worked for the rest of the year obtaining the patents that included an improved AC generator, but investors showed little interest in his ideas for new types of alternating current motors and electrical transmission equipment.

By 1886 the inventor was left penniless so he had to work at various electrical repair jobs and as a ditch digger.

 

In late 1886, Tesla met Alfred S. Brown, a Western Union superintendent, and New York attorney Charles F. Peck.

The two men were experienced in setting up companies and promoting inventions and patents for financial gain.

Based on Tesla’s new ideas for electrical equipment, including a thermo-magnetic motor idea, they agreed to back the inventor financially and handle his patents.

Together they formed the Tesla Electric Company in April 1887, with an agreement that profits from generated patents would go 1/3 to Tesla, 1/3 to Peck and Brown, and 1/3 to fund development.

They set up a laboratory for Tesla at 89 Liberty Street in Manhattan, where he worked on improving and developing new types of electric motors, generators, and other devices.

 

In 1887, Tesla developed an induction motor that ran on AC, a power system format that was rapidly expanding in Europe and the United States because of the advantages in long-distance, high-voltage transmission.

The motor used polyphase current, which generated a rotating magnetic field to turn the motor.

This innovative electric motor had a simple self-starting design that avoided sparking and the high maintenance of constantly servicing and replacing mechanical brushes.

Along with getting Tesla’s motor patented, Peck and Brown arranged to get the motor publicized, starting with independent testing to verify that it was a functional improvement, followed by press releases sent to technical publications for articles to run concurrent with the issue of the patent.

Physicist William Arnold Anthony (who tested the motor) and Electrical World magazine editor Thomas Commerford Martin arranged for Tesla to demonstrate his AC motor on 16 May 1888 at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Engineers working for the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company reported to George Westinghouse that Tesla had a viable AC motor and related power system – something Westinghouse needed for the alternating current system he was already marketing.

Westinghouse decided that Tesla’s patent would probably control the market.

In July 1888, Brown and Peck negotiated a licensing deal with George Westinghouse for Tesla’s polyphase induction motor and transformer designs for $60,000 in cash and stock and a royalty of $2.50 per AC horsepower produced by each motor.

Westinghouse also hired Tesla for one year for the large fee of $2,000 ($54,500 in today’s dollars) per month to be a consultant at the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company’s Pittsburgh labs.

During that year, Tesla worked in Pittsburgh, helping to create an alternating current system to power the city’s streetcars.

He found it a frustrating period because of conflicts with the other Westinghouse engineers over how best to implement AC power.

Between them, they settled on a 60-cycle AC system that Tesla proposed (to match the working frequency of Tesla’s motor), but they soon found that it would not work for streetcars, since Tesla’s induction motor could run only at a constant speed.

They ended up using a DC traction motor instead.

 

Tesla’s demonstration of his induction motor and Westinghouse’s subsequent licensing of the patent, both in 1888, came at the time of extreme competition between electric companies.

The three big firms, Westinghouse, Edison, and Thompson-Houston, were trying to grow in a capital-intensive business while financially undercutting each other.

There was even a propaganda campaign going on with Edison Electric trying to claim their direct current system was better and safer than the Westinghouse alternating current system.

Competing in this market meant Westinghouse would not have the cash or engineering resources to develop Tesla’s motor and the related polyphase system right away.

The Great Blizzard of 1888 (11 – 14 March 1888) was one of the most severe recorded blizzards in the history of the United States of America.

The storm, referred to as the Great White Hurricane, paralyzed the East Coast from Chesapeake Bay to Maine, as well as the Atlantic provinces of Canada.

Snowfalls of 10 to 58 inches (25 to 147 cm) fell in parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, and sustained winds of more than 45 miles per hour (72 km/h) produced snowdrifts in excess of 50 feet (15 m).

Railroads were shut down, and people were confined to their houses for up to a week.

Railway and telegraph lines were disabled, and this provided the impetus to move these pieces of infrastructure underground.

Emergency services were also affected.

 

The Great Blizzard of 1888 tore down a large number of the lines, cutting off utilities in the city.

This spurred on the idea of having these lines moved underground but it was stopped by a court injunction obtained by Western Union.

Legislation to give all the utilities 90 days to move their lines into underground conduits supplied by the city was slowly making its way through the government but that was also being fought in court by the United States Illuminating Company, who claimed their AC lines were perfectly safe.

As AC systems continued to spread into territories covered by DC systems, with the companies seeming to impinge on Edison patents including incandescent lighting, things got worse for the company.

The price of copper was rising, adding to the expense of Edison’s low voltage DC system, which required much heavier copper wires than higher voltage AC systems.

Thomas Edison’s own colleagues and engineers were trying to get him to consider AC.

Edison’s sales force was continually losing bids in municipalities that opted for cheaper AC Systems and Edison Electric Illuminating Company president Edward Hibberd Johnson pointed out that if the company stuck with an all DC system it would not be able to do business in small towns and even mid-sized cities.

Edison Electric had a patent option on the ZBD transformer, and a confidential in-house report recommended that the company go AC, but Thomas Edison was against the idea.

 

After Westinghouse installed his first large scale system Edison wrote in a November 1886 private letter to Edward Johnson:

“Just as certain as death Westinghouse will kill a customer within six months after he puts in a system of any size.

He has got a new thing and it will require a great deal of experimenting to get it working practically.”

 

Edison seemed to hold a view that the very high voltage used in AC systems was too dangerous and that it would take many years to develop a safe and workable system.

Safety and avoiding the bad press of killing a customer had been one of the goals in designing his DC system and he worried that a death caused by a mis-installed AC system could hold back the use of electricity in general, Edison’s understanding of how AC systems worked seemed to be extensive.

He noted what he saw as inefficiencies and that, combined with the capital costs in trying to finance very large generating plants, led him to believe there would be very little cost savings in an AC venture.

Edison was also of the opinion that DC was a superior system (a fact that he was sure the public would come to recognize) and inferior AC technology was being used by other companies as a way to get around his DC patents.

 

In February 1888 Edison Electric president Edward Johnson published an 84-page pamphlet titled “A Warning from the Edison Electric Light Company” and sent it to newspapers and to companies that had purchased or were planning to purchase electrical equipment from Edison competitors, including Westinghouse and Thomson Houston, stating that the competitors were infringing on Edison’s incandescent light and other electrical patents.

It warned that purchasers could find themselves on the losing side of a court case if those patents were upheld.

The pamphlet also emphasized the safety and efficiency of direct current, with the claim DC had not caused a single death, and included newspaper stories of accidental electrocutions caused by alternating current.

As arc lighting systems spread so did stories of how the high voltages involved were killing people, usually unwary linemen, a strange new phenomenon that seemed to instantaneously strike a victim dead.

One such story in 1881 of a drunken dock worker dying after he grabbed a large electric dynamo led Buffalo, New York, dentist Alfred P. Southwick to seek some application for the curious phenomenon.

He worked with local physician George E. Fell and the Buffalo ASPCA, electrocuting hundreds of stray dogs, to come up with a method to euthanize animals via electricity.

Southwick’s 1882 and 1883 articles on how electrocution could be a replacement for hanging, using a restraint similar to a dental chair (an electric chair) caught the attention of New York State politicians who, following a series of botched hangings, were desperately seeking an alternative.

An 1886 commission appointed by New York governor David B. Hill, which including Southwick, recommended in 1888 that executions be carried out by electricity using the electric chair.

Above: William Kemmler (1860 – 1890), the world’s first person to be executed by electric chair (6 August 1890)

 

There were early indications that this new form of execution would become mixed up with the war of currents.

As part of their fact-finding, the commission sent out surveys to hundreds of experts on law and medicine, seeking their opinions, as well as contacting electrical experts, including Elihu Thomson and Thomas Edison.

Above: Elihu Thomson (1853 – 1937)

 

In late 1887, when death penalty commission member Southwick contacted Edison, the inventor stated he was against capital punishment and wanted nothing to do with the matter.

After further prompting, Edison hit out at his chief electric power competitor, George Westinghouse, in what may have been the opening salvo in the war of currents, stating in a December 1887 letter to Southwick that it would be best to use current generated by “‘alternating machines,’ manufactured principally in this country by George Westinghouse“.

 

Soon after the execution by electricity bill passed in June 1888, Edison was asked by a New York government official what means would be the best way to implement the state’s new form of execution.

“Hire out your criminals as linemen to the New York electric lighting companies” was Edison’s tongue in cheek answer.

 

As the number of deaths attributed to high voltage lighting around the country continued to mount, a cluster of deaths in New York City in the spring of 1888 related to AC arc lighting set off a media frenzy against the “deadly arc-lighting current“and the seemingly callous lighting companies that used it.

These deaths included a 15-year-old boy killed on 15 April by a broken telegraph line that had energized with alternating current from a United States Illuminating Company line, a clerk killed two weeks later by an AC line, and a Brush Electric Company lineman killed in May by the AC line he was cutting.

The press in New York seemed to switch overnight from stories about electric lights vs gas lighting to “death by wire” incidents, with each new report seeming to fan public resentment against high voltage AC and the dangerously tangled overhead electrical wires in the city.

 

Tesla became a US citizen in 1889.

In 1889, Tesla moved out of the Liberty Street shop Peck and Brown had rented and for the next dozen years would work out of a series of workshop/laboratory spaces in Manhattan.

These included a lab at 175 Grand Street (1889–1892), the fourth floor of 33–35 South Fifth Avenue (1892–1895), and sixth and seventh floors of 46 & 48 East Houston Street (1895–1902).

Above: Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) at Tesla’s 5th Avenue laboratory

 

Tesla and his hired staff would conduct some of his most significant work in these workshops.

 

In the summer of 1889, Tesla traveled to the Exposition Universelle in Paris and learned of Heinrich Hertz’s 1886–88 experiments that proved the existence of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves.

Tesla found this new discovery “refreshing” and decided to explore it more fully.

In repeating, and then expanding on, these experiments, Tesla tried powering a Ruhmkorff coil with a high speed alternator he had been developing as part of an improved arc lighting system but found that the high frequency current overheated the iron core and melted the insulation between the primary and secondary windings in the coil.

To fix this problem Tesla came up with his Tesla coil with an air gap instead of insulating material between the primary and secondary windings and an iron core that could be moved to different positions in or out of the coil.

Two years after signing the Tesla contract, Westinghouse Electric was in trouble.

The near collapse of Barings Bank in London triggered the financial panic of 1890, causing investors to call in their loans to Westinghouse Electric.

The sudden cash shortage forced the company to refinance its debts.

The new lenders demanded that Westinghouse cut back on what looked like excessive spending on acquisition of other companies, research, and patents, including the per motor royalty in the Tesla contract.

At that point, the Tesla induction motor had been unsuccessful and was stuck in development.

Westinghouse was paying a $15,000-a-year guaranteed royalty even though operating examples of the motor were rare and polyphase power systems needed to run it were even rarer.

 

After 1890, Tesla experimented with transmitting power by inductive and capacitive coupling using high AC voltages generated with his Tesla coil.

He attempted to develop a wireless lighting system based on near-field inductive and capacitive coupling and conducted a series of public demonstrations where he lit Geissler tubes and even incandescent light bulbs from across a stage.

He would spend most of the decade working on variations of this new form of lighting with the help of various investors but none of the ventures succeeded in making a commercial product out of his findings.

 

In 1891 Tesla established his own laboratory in Houston Street, where he lit up vacuum tubes as evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.

 

In early 1891, George Westinghouse explained his financial difficulties to Tesla in stark terms, saying that, if he did not meet the demands of his lenders, he would no longer be in control of Westinghouse Electric and Tesla would have to “deal with the bankers” to try to collect future royalties.

The advantages of having Westinghouse continue to champion the motor probably seemed obvious to Tesla and he agreed to release the company from the royalty payment clause in the contract.

 

At the beginning of 1893, Westinghouse engineer Benjamin Lamme had made great progress developing an efficient version of Tesla’s induction motor and Westinghouse Electric started branding their complete polyphase AC system as the “Tesla Polyphase System“.

Westinghouse Electric asked Tesla to participate in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago where the company had a large space in a building devoted to electrical exhibits.

Westinghouse Electric won the bid to light the Exposition with alternating current and it was a key event in the history of AC power, as the company demonstrated to the American public the safety, reliability, and efficiency of a fully integrated alternating current system.

 

Tesla showed a series of electrical effects related to alternating current as well as his wireless lighting system, using a demonstration he had previously performed throughout America and Europe.

These included using high-voltage, high-frequency alternating current to light a wireless gas-discharge lamp.

An observer noted:

“Within the room were suspended two hard-rubber plates covered with tin foil.

These were about fifteen feet apart and served as terminals of the wires leading from the transformers.

When the current was turned on, the lamps or tubes, which had no wires connected to them, but lay on a table between the suspended plates, or which might be held in the hand in almost any part of the room, were made luminous.

These were the same experiments and the same apparatus shown by Tesla in London about two years previous, where they produced so much wonder and astonishment.”

 

Tesla also explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field in an induction motor by demonstrating how to make a copper egg stand on end, using a device that he constructed known as the Egg of Columbus and introduced his new steam powered oscillator AC generator.

 

At St. Louis’s Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the National Electric Light Association, Tesla told his audience that he was sure a system like his could eventually conduct “intelligible signals or perhaps even power to any distance without the use of wires” by conducting it through the Earth.

 

Edward Dean Adams, who headed up the Niagara Falls Cataract Construction Company, sought Tesla’s opinion on what system would be best to transmit power generated at the falls.

Over several years, there had been a series of proposals and open competitions on how best to use power generated by the falls.

Among the systems proposed by several US and European companies were two-phase and three-phase AC, high-voltage DC and compressed air.

Adams pumped Tesla for information about the current state of all the competing systems.

Tesla advised Adams that a two-phased system would be the most reliable, and that there was a Westinghouse system to light incandescent bulbs using two-phase alternating current.

The company awarded a contract to Westinghouse Electric for building a two-phase AC generating system at the Niagara Falls, based on Tesla’s advice and Westinghouse’s demonstration at the Columbian Exposition that they could build a complete AC system.

At the same time, a further contract was awarded to General Electric to build the AC distribution system.

In 1897 Westinghouse purchased Tesla’s patent for a lump sum payment of $216,000 as part of a patent-sharing agreement signed with General Electric (a company created from the 1892 merger of Edison and Thompson-Houston).

The money Tesla made from licensing his AC patents made him independently wealthy and gave him the time and funds to pursue his own interests.

And it would be this pursuit of his own interests that would take a highly-respected engineer and, through Hugo Gernsback, make him into a legend….

Sources:  Wikipedia / Nikola Tesla, My Inventions

Canada Slim and the Holy Field of Sparrows

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 20 July 2018

I have three books in my possession that offer three different ways to consider the Serbian capital city of Belgrade….

I can choose to be as Chris Farmer and be Grumpy in Belgrade, I can choose to be as Momo Kapor and feel The Magic of Belgrade, or I can follow Aleksandar Diklic´s advice and take a sentimental journey through history of Belgrade: The Eternal City.

What is certain is that I experienced these emotions and more when I was in Belgrade this past April.

I spent six glorious days in Serbia as a guest of my Starbucks St. Gallen colleague Nesha, and there is much I learned that I wish to share with you, my gentle readers, in the hopes that you too will discover the unsung delights that are the fascinating cities of Belgrade and Nis.

Perhaps my stories will encourage you to visit….

Above: The City of Belgrade

Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday 5 April 2018

The day, my first full one, began with a regret, my first full one.

During the evening as a result of excessive eating and drinking – first with Nesha and his mama Strawberry, and then later with Nesha and the godparents of Nesha´s daughter – in Belgrade, which, like New York City, never sleeps – I found that my night clothing had paid the penalty for my pastimes.

It had been a difficult time – my leg itched, I couldn´t get comfortable on my air mattress bed, and the gigantic teddy bears that shared the room seemed to be watching me.

I dreamt of Amadeus Mozart gambling – his name spelled Mozzart like the chain of Serbian betting offices seen everywhere.

Above: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791)

 

As the ladies of the harbour offered me comfort for the night, raccoon-eyed, hard-working, hard-living Nesha kept telling me:

“Listen to me, Adami.  I´ll sleep when I´m dead.”

Above: Nesha Obranovic, the man, the legend

The begging boys by the Danube reminded me that no concentration camps are open on the Orthodox Easter weekend.

I take my night clothing into the shower, attempting to multi-task my morning cleanliness with a wee bit of laundry.

Not knowing how Nesha´s shower worked, I turn the bathroom floor into a swimming pool.

Yet Nesha is in good spirits, despite his lungs are tobacco leaf folders.

His kitchen is not ideally set up for elaborate cooking so after discussion about this and that we have latté and Turkish coffee at the Café Alphonse de Lamartine.

Named after French writer/poet/politician Alphonse de Lamartine (1790 – 1869) the Café stands across from Park Lamartine.

Above: Alphonse de Lamartine

Lamartine is memorialized by this park and café as well as a monument in Karadordev Park.

Lamartine was born in Macon, France, on 21 October 1790.

His family were members of the French provincial nobility and Lamartine spent his youth at the family estate.

Lamartine made his entrance into the field of poetry by a masterpiece, Les Méditations Poétiques (1820) and awoke to find himself famous.

He was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1825.

He worked for the French embassy in Italy from 1825 to 1828.

In 1829, he was elected a member of the Académie française.

He was elected a deputy in 1833.

Above: Flag of modern France

In 1835 he published the Voyage en Orient, a brilliant and bold account of the journey he had just made, in royal luxury, to the countries of the Orient.

Alphonse de Lamartine was an Orientalist with a particular interest in Lebanon and the Middle East.

He travelled to Lebanon, Syria and the Holy Land via Serbia in 1832–33.

During that trip, while he was in Beirut, on 7 December 1832, he lost his only remaining child, Julia.

During his trip to Lebanon he had met Prince Bashir Shihab II and Prince Simon Karam, who were enthusiasts of poetry.

A valley in Lebanon is still called the Valley of Lamartine as a commemoration of that visit and the Lebanon cedar forest still harbors the Lamartine Cedar, which is said to be the cedar under which Lamartine had sat 200 years ago.

“Highlanders with innate manners, shepherds who live for freedom and women as beautiful as ladies from Swiss cantons…”

This is how Lamartine saw the people of Serbia during his visit in 1833.

Was Alphonse de Lamartine actually the one who has established French-Serbian friendship, and not World War I, as it was considered for a long time?

Lamartine was the first man whose opinion mattered and who spread the word across Europe about sufferings of peoples in the Balkans under  Ottoman rule and the great courage of Serbs fighting for freedom.

Till than France was on good terms with the Ottoman Empire, but it all changed after what Lamartine had to say.

He visited Serbia, met the villagers that hosted him in their modest peasant houses, talked to princes and warriors.

Finally Lamartine came to a conclusion that “among them there is very little material inequality and the only grandeur they have are their weapons” used to defend their freedom.

He liked the Serbian language and considered it “harmonious, musical, and rhythmic”.

There was something in the country of this small nation from the Balkans that deeply touched the heart of this romantic poet.

Lamartine was so influenced by his trip that he staged his 1838 epic poem La Chute d’un ange (The Fall of an Angel).

From then on he confined himself to prose.

 

He was briefly in charge of the French government during the turbulence of 1848.

He was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 24 February 1848 to 11 May 1848.

Due to his great age, Jacques-Charles Dupont de l’Eure, Chairman of the Provisional Government, effectively delegated many of his duties to Lamartine.

He was then a member of the Executive Commission, the political body which served as France’s joint Head of State.

Lamartine was instrumental in the founding of the Second Republic of France, having met with Republican Deputies and journalists in the Hôtel de Ville to agree on the makeup of its provisional government.

Lamartine himself was chosen to declare the Republic in traditional form in the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville and ensured the continuation of the Tricolore as the flag of the nation.

During his term as a politician in the Second Republic, he led efforts that culminated in the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, as well as the enshrinement of the right to work and the short-lived national workshop programs.

A political idealist who supported democracy and pacifism, his moderate stance on most issues caused many of his followers to desert him.

He was an unsuccessful candidate in the presidential election of 10 December 1848, receiving fewer than 19,000 votes.

He subsequently retired from politics and dedicated himself to literature.

He published volumes on the most varied subjects (history, criticism, personal confidences, literary conversations) especially during the Empire, when, having retired to private life and having become the prey of his creditors, he condemned himself to what he calls “literary hard-labor in order to exist and pay his debts“.

Lamartine ended his life in poverty, publishing monthly installments of the Cours familier de littérature to support himself.

He died in Paris in 1869.

Above: The tomb of Alphonse de Lamartine, Paris

 

The square where Nesha´s apartment stands is named after this poet.

Nesha and I say little at breakfast, as he is determined that I am “set up electronically for Serbia” and magically manipulates my mobile so that I am not plagued by roaming phone charges.

Then we part company as he has business to conduct in distant Tara National Park.

I am left the use of Nesha´s Belgrade apartment and I am to remain solo until late Saturday night.

 

With the exception of a few Serbian words my bought-in-Switzerland guidebook provides, I am rendered mostly mute as a Canadian stranger in a strange land – a feeling that is simultaneously terrifying and exhilirating.

 

I continue down the street upon which the Café Lamartine stands and have breakfast at Restaurant Voulez-Vous: another latté and a serving of posinana jaja Benedict with home fries.

I am told by the waiters, resplendent in azure blue long-sleeved shirts with grey collars, that I must eat outside on the café terrace as “only the insane eat indoors on a sunny day.”

 

Armed with guidebook and maps obtained from yesterday´s arrival at the airport, I am a man with a plan:

Try to see as much as I can, as leisurely as possible, allowing myself to occasionally get lost.

My steps are as unsteady as the aim of an amateur archer.

I am pointed towards a target but there is no guarantee that I will reach the target.

 

I make my way to the closest tourist attraction to Lamartine: the St. Sava Cathedral.

The small rise upon which the Cathedral sits was once called Savinac, then later Vrapcije Polje (field of sparrows).

Over time and through the language variation that time creates, the name evolved into Vracarsko Polje and was eventually shortened to Vracar.

To appreciate Serbia fully, one must come to understand the importance of this Cathedral in the history of the country.

And much like Serbia itself, like Belgrade itself, the Cathedral has always been in a state of construction and renovation.

 

“There is a belief that the history of mankind is actually a history of waging war.

The voyage through history of our civilization´s soul leads us to Belgrade, one of the oldest and most often destroyed cities of the world.

When Le Corbusier, the famous architect, said that “Belgrade was the ugliest city at the most beautiful place“, he certainly had in mind the image of the results caused by the continual destruction of the city over many centuries as well as its inadequate renewal and reconstruction.

Above:  Charles-Édouard Le Corbuisier (1887 – 1965)

It is for certain that the most beautiful Belgrade has disappeared without a trace, vanished, impossible to touch.

History cherishes many stories about this city that are hard to be reconstructed exactly due to its continuous destruction, shifts and intertwining of a large number of cultures and prominent people whose life paths have passed through Belgrade, the eternal city….”

(Aleksander Diklac)

 

Before 1236, no individual among the Serbs had been woven into the consciousness and being of the people as St. Sava.

Though certainly there were those who tried.

 

As Greek legend has it, the Argonauts, a team of mythical sailors under Jason´s command, stole the Golden Fleece and sailed into the river Danube.

It is believed that when Apollonius of Rhodes wrote his Argonautica (300 BC) he was copying a legend much older than himself, known from a time predating the Trojan War.

In the magnificent legend about the Argonauts, Apollonius tells us about the hospitality of the Sindi people who lived at a place where the waters part, a locality already heavily inhabited.

Above: The Argo, Konstantinos Volanakis (1837 – 1907)

According to other legends, the Danube River is one of the four rivers originating in Paradise.

Above: The course of the Danube, flowing east from west

 

Singidun, Belgrade´s first name to be entered into the annals of history, is ascribed to the fearless Celtic tribe of Scordisci who, soon after Alexander the Great’s death in 323 BC, invaded and conquered the area of Serbia.

However generations later, as it happens in history, no alliances, no singularities of culture, no dexterous manufacture and handling of weapons could repel the advancing Roman army, whose military order and war tactics made it a revolutionary apparatus for killing, subordination and enslavement.

The arrival of the Romans into Singidun hastened the complete assimiliation of the Scordisci and Romanized the name into Singidunum, but the region was not stabilized until the era of the formidable Octavian / Caesar Augustus.

Singidunum gained fortifications, magnificent edifices and villas, a precious water pipeline, roads and even artist´s workshops, which made life in the city quite pleasant.

Roman Singidunum became a strategic area and an important base connecting the fortifications and settlements along the Danube border.

An epitaph from Roman Belgrade, blazing like a flash of light across the centuries and with a disregard for time, comes to us with a pain that quivers.

The powerfully engraved text is the cry of a soldier, a father filled with sorrow over his prematurely departed son:

“To the gods of the underground world!

Traveller, ye who walks the roads, whoever ye be, please, hear.

When, in his 15th year of age, the fuzz of his first beard sprouted over the cheeks of the young man´s face, he was taken by the boat on which the dead are transported to the other world and deprived his unlucky father of his only consolation.

He is lying here now.

Taken from his father´s embrace, as the plough cuts the flower from the soil.

Still, the small flower shall blossom again in pleasant meadows.

But ye dead I can no longer revive.”

We feel the pain inherent, although 17 centuries have passed since the tragic event.

 

Signidunum was a city with developed civilized manners, wealthy people, active soldiers, and veterans.

Life was facilitated by an abundance of food: grains, vegetables, fish and excellent fruit of the vine.

Fishermen and shepherds were free men, while construction and farm labour was performed by slaves.

The ancient city saw numerous imperial processions as many Roman emperors (17) passed through Belgrade or stayed in it.

Christians first appeared in the 3rd century when the priest Montanus and his wife Maxima died, accompanied by around 40 fathful Christians.

They were killed in 315 when Emperor Licinius ruled the eastern part of the Roman Empire while Constantine the Great ruled in the west.

Together the Christians suffered brutal torture and were jointly sentenced to death, shut into a chest and cast into the Danube River alive.

Ten years later, Licinius made a bid for power, unleashing carnage in a series of rebellions and battles.

Constantine ordered him killed together with his young son, Licinius II.

Harmony did not reign among the first Christians, either.

 

Long ago, in 441, the legendary conqueror Attila the Hun (406 – 453) besieged and captured Singidunum.

He destroyed and killed everything that moves and single-handedly brought an end to the ancient past of the city of Belgrade.

Rivers of human bones and the odor of death testified to Attila´s barbaric cruel campaigns.

Attila died on the first night of his marriage.

After destroying Singidunum and forever extinguishing the Roman lamp within it, Attila died in the arms of a woman called Ildiko.

The wedding day progressed with the customary feasting, singing, inebriation and gluttony.

When night finally fell, the drunk and lecherous groom naturally led the bride to intimate quarters.

He was found the next morning, long dead, while beside him was his terrified bride, who had trembled the whole night.

As to the possible cause of death of the 47-year-old leader?

An enormous quantity of alcohol, vast quantities of food, poison?

According to one narrative, Attila was buried somewhere in the waters of Singidunum, as per Khazar custom.

After Attila, Belgrade was subsequently razed by the Sarmats, then the East Goths, and then the Gepids, before the city of Singidunum was restored by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (482 – 563).

Justinian with significant funds and even greater visions reached the Sava and Danube around 535 and rebuilt Singidunum.

Justinian was an important man for the history of Europe, especially Christianity, but it is clear that the true power of this ruler originated from the other half of his wedding bed.

The Emperor was a slow and indecisive man, practically a pawn in comparison with Empress Theodora, a charismatic courtesan with a brilliant mind.

Justinian gave orders for the construction of both Singidunum´s new fortifications as well as Constantinople´s Hagia Sophia, possibly the most beautiful place of worship in the world.

Ten thousand people over many years built the temple that marked a new era in the history of Christian architecture.

The best marble, as well as gold, silver and ivory were transported from the most distant regions of the empire.

Even with these divine components, the architects demanded that there be no lack of taste.

Thus, Hagia Sophia is a composition of the most refined artistic sensitivity towards space and materials, a rhapsody of diversity that successfully demonstrates the greatness of God imitated on Earth.

Hagia Sophia was consecrated in 537.

Belgrade’s monumental Temple of St. Sava, with its skyscraping cross at 82 metres above ground, is one of the tallest and largest temples in the Christian world.

It was intended to resemble the magnificent Hagia Sophia.

These days the Temple is consecrated to St. Sava, but what of the saint himself?

Patience, my gentle readers, we are getting there.

 

Many people and many conquerors to the banks of the Sava and the Danube came, for Singidunum was for most of its history the end point of a large number of organized states, and thus was a frequent target of attack and destruction.

None of the conquerors could boast of their humanity towards the population they found.

Though the flow of the rivers brought changes and new tyrants, the appeal of the location as a place of life endures to this day.

So fierce and frequent were the attacks from all sides that Singidunum, as a fortified and significant military fortification, could not and did not manage to repel them, regardless of the height of the defensive walls or the skill of the defenders.

By the end of the 6th century, ancient Singidunum was ultimately destroyed though never abandoned, as the Slavs appeared.

 

The first mention of the Slavic name Belgrade appears on 16 April 878, when the city’s name appears on a letter from Pope John VIII sent to the Bulgarian Prince (Knyaz) Boris Mihail, referring to the dismissal of the Belgrade Bishop Sergios.

Pope John VIII is remembered by history as a great advocate for the use of the Slavic languages in the liturgy.

However it should be mentioned that this Pope may have been a female in disguise.

John was poisoned by the wife of the spouse she fell in love with, then she was finished off by blows of a hammer to the head by the accomplices of the jealous wife, dying on 15 December 882.

 

Some decades after her letter to the Knyaz, once again armies and conquerors came a-callin’.

 

Charlemagne (Charles the Great)(742 – 814) during his reign conquered Italy and was crowned by Pope Leo III Roman Emperor in order to restore the hopes and dreams of a wealthy and holy Roman Empire.

Along the course of Charlemagne´s campaigns, he demolished Belgrade.

The severity of his campaigns was such that tribes begged for Peace and agreed to be baptized and embrace Christianity.

Rulers die and empires fall.

The Frankish rule over Belgrade was superseded by the Bulgarians and theirs by the Hungarians.

 

At the end of the 10th century, Samuilo (997 – 1014) created a large empire of southern Slavs taking over the region that is today´s Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Romanian Dobruja, northern Bulgaria and northern Greece, adopting for himself the title of Emperor of Bulgaria.

After several victories and defeats, the final showdown between Samuilo and Byzantium took place on Belasica Mountain in 1014.

The Bulgars were massacred.

Around 14,000 Bulgar captives were blinded by order of the Byzantine Emperor, with every 100th man left with one eye so as to be able to guide the others home.

As a consequence of such cruelty, Byzantine Emperor Basil II was given the epithet “Bulgar slayer“.

It is reported that Samuilo, at the sight of his chained and blinded army, died on the spot from a heart attack.

Above: Forensic reconstruction of Samuilo

 

Belgrade again became a significant border fortress to the Byzantine Empire.

During the 11th and 12th centuries the rival powers of Bulgaria, Byzantium and Hungary contended for Belgrade.

Enter, St. Sava (1169 – 1236)

Rastko Nemanjic was born in 1169 in Gradina (modern Podgorica, Montenegro) as the youngest son of Grand Prince Stefan Nemanjic and his wife Ana, alongside his brothers Vukan and Stefan.

The brothers received a good education in the Byzantine tradition, which exercised great political, cultural and religious influence in Serbia.

Rastko grew up in a time of great foreign relations activities in Serbia.

He showed himself serious and ascetic when he was made Prince of Hum at an early age in 1190.

(Hum was a province between Neretva and Dubrovnik.)

Having his own court with magnates (velmoze), senior officials and selected local nobility, governance in Hum was not only an honorary title but constituted a practical school of state administration.

Rastko, as a ruler, was said to be “mild and gentle, kind to everyone, loving the poor as few others and very respecting of the monastic life.”

He showed no interest in fame, wealth or the throne.

 

Meanwhile….

Frederick Barbarossa (1122 – 1190), following his reconciliation with the Pope and wearing the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, embarked on the Third Crusade to liberate from Muslim control the holy sites of Christendom, especially Christ’s empty tomb in Jerusalem.

His European counterparts, the French under Philip II Augustus and the English under Richard the Lionheart, joined the Crusade.

Richard and Philip approached Jerusalem by sea, while the German Emperor Barbarossa preferred land, over which he marched through Hungary and Serbia.

Under Barbarossa’s leadership, 190,000 warriors marched into Belgrade and left it in ruins, razed to the ground.

He then stopped in Nis where they were politely welcomed by Rastko who personally tended to the ailing Barbarossa, who continued on his journey.

Frederick Barbarossa, though successful at traversing Belgrade’s rivers, drowned on 10 June 1190 when crossing the small river of Saleph in Cilicia.

Thrown by a horse, the shock of the cold water induced a heart attack in the German king, who at the time of his unexpected death was 68.

 

After two years as ruler, in the autumn of 1192, Rastko left Hum for Mount Athos.

Upon arriving at Athos, Rastko entered the Russian St. Panteleimon Monastery where he received the monastic name of Sava (Sabbas).

He later entered the Greek Vatopedi Monastery, where he would stay for the next seven years, becoming acquainted with Greek theological and church administrational literature.

Sava´s father tried to persuade him to return to Serbia, but Sava was determined and replied:

“You have accomplished all that a Christian sovereign should do.

Come now and join me in the true Christian life.”

Stefan Nemanja took his son’s advice and abdicated on 25 March 1196, giving the throne to his middle son Stefan.

The next day Stefan and Ana took monastic vows.

Stefan took the monastic name Simeon and stayed in Studenica until leaving for Mt. Athos in the autumn of 1197.

Simeon’s arrival was greatly pleasing to Sava and the Athonite community as Stefan as a ruler had donated much to the community.

The two, with the consent of monastic head (hegumen) Theostyriktos of Vatopedi, went on a tour of Athos in late autumn 1197 in order for Simeon to familiarize with all of its churches and sacred places.

When Sava guested the Byzantine Emperor Alexios III Angelos at Constantinople, he mentioned the neglected and abandoned Hilandar, and asked him that he and his father be given the permit to restore the monastery and grant it to Vatopedi.

The Emperor approved and sent a special letter and much gold to his friend Stefan Nemanja (monk Simeon).

Sava then addressed the Protos of Athos, asking them to support the effort that the monastery of Hilandar becomes the haven of the Serb monks.

All Athonite monasteries, except Vatopedi, accepted the proposal, and in July 1198 Emperor Alexios III authored a charter which revoked the earlier decision, and instead not only granted Hilandar, but also the other abandoned monasteries in Mileis, to Simeon and Sava, to be a haven and shelter for Serb monks in Athos.

The restoration of Hilandar quickly began and Grand Prince Stefan sent money and other necessities, and issued the founding charter for Hilandar in 1199.

Sava wrote a typikon (liturgical office order) for Hilandar, modeled on the typikon of the monastery of The Mother of God Euergetes in Constantinople.

Besides Hilandar, Sava was the ktetor (founder) of the hermitage at Karyes (seat of Athos) for the monks who devoted themselves to solitude and prayer.

In 1199, he authored the typikon of Karyes.

Along with the hermitage, he built the chapel dedicated to Sabbas the Sanctified, whose name he received upon monastic vows.

His father died on 13 February 1199.

 

On 13 April 1204, Sava received the rank of archimandrite.

That same year, with the establishment of the Latin Empire, Rome increased its power over Serbia.

As Nemanja had earlier decided to give the rule to Stefan, and not the eldest, Vukan, in the meantime, back home, the latter began plotting against Stefan.

He found an ally in Hungarian king Emeric with whom he banished Stefan to Bulgaria and Vukan usurped the Serbian throne.

Stefan returned to Serbia with an army in 1204 and pushed Vukan to Zeta, his hereditary land.

After problems at Athos with Latin bishops and Boniface of Montferrat following the Fourth Crusade, Sava returned to Serbia in the winter of 1206, with the remains of his father which he relocated to his father’s endowment, the Studenica Monastery, and then reconciled his quarreling brothers.

Sava saved the country from further political crisis by ending the dynastic fight.

Simeon was canonized in 1206.

 

Having spent 14 years in Mount Athos, Sava had extensive theological knowledge and spiritual power, so he was asked to teach the court and the people of Serbia Christian laws and traditions and “in that way enwisen and educate.”

Since his return in 1206, Sava had become the hegumen of Studenica.

He used the general chaos in which the Byzantine Empire found itself after the Crusader siege of Constantinople (1204) and the strained relations between the Despotate of Epirus (to which the Serbian Church was subject to) and the Ecumenical Patriarchiate of Nicaea to his advantage.

He declared that “Here, therefore, no one is have authority, neither Bishop nor anyone else.” over Studenica.

In 1217, Sava´s brother King Stefan made a switch in politics, marrying a noblewoman of Venice, and asked the Pope for a crown and moral support.

Stefan was crowned in Zica, now equal to other kings, and was called by Rome “the first crowned King of all Serb lands“.

Stefan´s allegiance to Rome over Constantinople in matters of religion did not sit well with the Serbian people.

Serbia embraced and Sava represented the Orthodox Church, Stefan the Catholic Church.

The elevation of Serbia into a kingdom did not fully mark the independence of the country, according to that time´s understanding, unless the same was achieved with its church.

On 15 August 1219, Sava was consecrated as the first Archbishop of the independent Serbian church, which was vitally important as the church was the supporter and an important factor in state sovereignty as well as political and national identity.

That same year, Sava published Zakonopravilo (Sava´s Nomocanon), the first constitution of Serbia, uniting both politics and religion.

In 1229, after the son of Stefan, Radoslav was crowned King of Serbia, Sava left for a trip to Palestine.

After another throne change in 1234, when Radoslav was replaced by his brother Vladislav, Sava began a second trip to the Holy Land.

Sava, after much work and years of travelling, arrived at the Bulgarian then-capital of Trnovo a tired and sick man.

He died on 14 January 1235.

Above: Where Sava died, Trnovo, Bulgaria

 

Sava became known as the protector of the Serbian people – of their churches, families, schools and artisans.

He is regarded as the father of Serbian education and literature.

Many songs, tales and legends were created about his life, work, merit, goodness, fairness and wisdom.

His relics became a topic of nationalism, a political cult, a focus of liberation, a danger to foreign rule.

Belgrade is not only the capital of the Serbian state but as well Serbia´s most important economic, cultural and religious centre.

So it comes as no surprise that Serbia´s most important cathedral, dedicated to Sava, should be in Belgrade.

 

In 1319, Belgrade was seized, and again destroyed, by the Hungarians.

The ruined and deserted city became a border base.

The continued existence of the Serbian state and the reconstruction of Belgrade was necessary for the Hungarians as Serbia served as a desirable military buffer against greater barbarians and conquerors.

 

As such, Belgrade welcomed the 15th century when the Turks, a new large conquering force, entered the historical arena of Europe.

Belgrade would soon gain the rank of Antemurale Christianitatis, the Bulwark of Christianity.

For an entire century, Belgrade resisted Turkish incursions.

The Turks, under the leadership of Sultan Suleiman I (“the Magnificent“), would finally conquer Belgrade, on their third attempt, on 28 August 1521, and the key of defense to western Europe.

The reign of Suleiman I has been described as the Golden Age of the Ottoman Empire.

Above: Suleiman I (1494 – 1566)

 

At the end of his reign, however, constant wars had taken their toll, damaging the economy.

The faulty politics that followed shook the economy and the foundations of Ottoman society: state officials became poor, their pay worthless, corruption and briberies common.

Mutiny struck throughout the Ottoman Empire.

 

Over the next few centuries there were many Serbian uprisings against Turkish rule.

In 1594, during the Austrian-Turkish War (1593 – 1606), a Serbian insurrection was staged in the Banat region north of the Danube River.

The Turkish Sultan responded by skinning alive and hanging the Serbian Patriarch, Teodor, before bringing the relics of St. Sava to Vracar to be burned and his ashes scattered on 27 April 1594, because the figure of St. Sava had adorned the flags of the Serbian rebels.

There was great violence carried out against the Serbian clergy and devastation of their monasteries.

The Ottomans sought to symbolically and in reality to set fire to the Serb determination of freedom.

But this desecration was considered to be an unimaginably sacrilegious act by all Serbs.

Rather than discouraging dissent, St. Sava’s desecration fomented and cemented rebellion.

One day the Serbians would rally around the idea of St. Sava and expel the Ottoman Turks from their land.

 

The Church of St. Sava was built near the place where his relics were burned.

Construction began on 10 May 1935, 340 years after the burning of Sava’s relics, and was “completed” in 2004, but the Church much like the Serbia it serves is never complete.

Construction was halted when the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia in 1941.

The occupying German army used the unfinished church as a parking lot.

Later in 1944 Russia’s Red Army and later the Yugoslav People’s Army would do the same.

For a while after, the Church was used for storage by various companies.

Construction resumed on 12 August 1985.

After the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, construction was halted again.

Serbian Patriarch Pavle thought that the expense of building a massive Cathedral was inappropriate when people are beaten and impoverished.

After becoming Prime Minister, Zoran Dindic spoke with the Patriarch and convinced him to have construction resumed.

By 2017, the exterior of the church was complete.

Work continues on the interior.

The church is centrally planned, having the form of a Greek cross.

It has a large central dome supported on four pendentives and buttressed on each side by a lower semi-dome over an apse.

Beneath each semi-dome is a gallery supported on an arcade.

The dome is 70 m (230 ft) high, while the main gold plated cross is another 12 m (39 ft) high, which gives a total of 82 m (269 ft) to the height of the Church of Saint Sava.

The peak is 134 m (440 ft) above the sea level (64 m (210 ft) above the Sava river).

Therefore the church holds a dominant position in Belgrade’s cityscape and is visible from all approaches to the city.

Above: The Church of St. Sava and the National Library of Serbia

The church is 91 m (299 ft) long from east to west and 81 m (266 ft) from north to south.

It is 70 m (230 ft) tall, with the main gold-plated cross extending for 12 m (39 ft) more.

Its domes have 18 more gold-plated crosses of various sizes, while the bell towers have 49 bells of the Austrian bell foundry Grassmayr.

It has a surface area of 3,500 m² (37,674 sq ft) on the ground floor, with three galleries of 1,500 m² (16,146 sq ft) on the first level and a 120 m² (1,292 sq ft) gallery on the second level.

The Church can receive 10,000 faithful at any one time.

The choir gallery seats 800 singers.

The basement contains a crypt, the treasury of Saint Sava, and the grave church of Saint Lazar the Hieromartyr, with a total surface of 1,800 m² (19,375 sq ft) .

Above: The crypt of the Church of St. Sava

The central dome mosaic depicts the Ascension of Jesus and represents Resurrected Christ, sitting on a rainbow and right hand raised in blessing, surrounded by four angels, Apostles and Theotokos.

This composition is inspired by mosaic in main dome of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.

The lower sections are influenced by the Gospel of Luke and the first narratives of the Acts of the Apostles.

The texts held by the angels are written in the Church Slavonic language, while the names of the depicted persons are written in Greek.

The first points to the pan-Slavic sentiment while the latter connects it to the Byzantine traditions.

The total painted area of the dome is 1,230 m² (13,200 sq ft).

It is one of the largest curved area decorated with the mosaic technique and when the work is completely finished, Saint Sava will be the largest church ornamented this way.

Magnificient is the legacy that is St. Sava’s Church.

 

It is my feeling that Serbia and Serbians will remain incomprehensible to the foreigner who has never visited St. Sava Church or has never read why this church remains integral to the Serbian identity, for Religion has Always played a defining role in the history of the Serbs.

The main religion of Serbia remains that of Sava: Serbian Orthodox Christianity, which is practiced by 84% of the population.

The Serbian Orthodox Church is an independent Church, ranking 6th in order of seniority of the Orthodox Churches after Constantinople (Istanbul), Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Russia.

Above: Flag of the Serbian Orthodox Church

Serbian Orthodoxy is also practiced by 74% of the population of Montenegro, 36% in Bosnia and Herzegovina and 4.4% in Croatia.

Religion plays an important role in Serbian daily life.

The religious calendar is filled with a profusion of saints’ days, celebrated by families in the traditional way – usually involving a visit to church, prayers and the lighting of candles.

 

As a barbaric heathen I cannot claim to understand the Serbian need to kiss icons as passionately and as frequently as they do, but it makes them happy so who am I to argue?

All I know is a visit to St. Sava, especially if one researches the history behind it, is as awe-inspiring as a visit to the Sistine Chapel in Rome or the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, but unlike the Vatican City or Turkish temples of worship St. Sava has a feeling of warmth and personability that the others lack.

As much as it is splendid to feel the almighty grandeur of a glorious God in an edifice meant to impress and intimidate, I feel that religion, being the personal and private set of values and beliefs unique to each individual, should whisper into the ears and seductively warm the hearts of salvation’s seekers rather than frighten and cow people into a submissive state little related to the promise of eternal blessing from a loving deity.

Certainly St. Sava is not lacking in pomp and circumstance as a church should shine above the standards of the common Household, but one cannot have a personal relationship with God if one does not feel to have anything in common to that person inside God’s house.

And somehow St. Sava captures that nuance.

I left the church to explore more of the city, knowing one certainty upon which I stake my experience upon.

There is little danger (or hope) that I shall ever become a Serbian Orthodox Christian but to deny the feeling that there is a need to believe in something or someone beyond one’s self is a primal passion that St. Sava church quietly shares.

It is waiting to share this passion with you.

My explorations of Belgrade (and later Nis) would continue, but in the beginning God….

Sources:  Aleksander Diklic, Belgrade the Eternal City / Culture Smart Serbia / Momo Kapor, A Guide to the Serbian Mentality / Wikipedia / Facebook

 

 

 

Canada Slim and the Land of Long Life

Landschlacht, Switzerland, 15 April 2018

So much has gone on and is going on in my life that it is difficult for my writing to keep up the pace.

New events and new ideas crop up before I have completed writing about already started descriptions of older material.

I am much like a man walking down the street with an old girlfriend, finding himself attracted to a new girl that has suddenly crossed their path.

 

Followers of this blog may have noticed two phenomena happening:

First, I have devoted much time to my other blog Building Everest to the neglect of this one since the start of 2018.

Second, this all-purpose, general-opinion blog has evolved into becoming a travel blog whose themes have followed the sequence of writing about Italy, London and Switzerland.

Today I add to the sequence, inserted in alphabetical order, Serbia, where I recently spent an interesting week (4 – 9 April 2018) as a guest of my Starbucks co-worker Nesha of Belgrade.

Six days and five nights isn´t much time to see a city, let alone an entire country.

To further complicate my explorations I was in Serbia during Orthodox Easter Week, meaning that normal visiting days Friday and Sunday found many attractions closed for Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Nonetheless I spent four days and three nights in the Serbian capital of Belgrade and two days and one evening in the southen city of Nis in a most delightful and entertaining fashion.

What I discovered about Nesha´s amazing homeland has planted within me a desire to return to Serbia and a motivation to share with others the magic I discovered in the hopes that they can share this pleasure with me.

Landschlacht, Switzerland to Belgrade, Serbia, 4 April 2018

Since moving to Landschlacht eight years ago mostly every single solo journey I have taken has started at the Landschlacht Train Station, though “Train Station” might be too generous a description for the single track, small glass shelter, stop-only-on-request, train halt labelled “Landschlacht“.

Ideally I would have preferred to walk to Serbia, but neither time nor finances permitted such a project.

I also would have preferred taking a train or bus between Switzerland and Serbia.

But the aforementioned time issue plus the economical advantage of flying on a budget airline as compared to the costs of international train or bus travel found me this day following an itinerary of a train ride to Appenzell Ausserrhoden´s cantonal capital Herisau, riding with Nesha by car through Austria to the Munich West airport of Memmingen (Germany) and flying with Wizz Air (an English-owned, Hungarian registered budget airline) to Belgrade.

The day began as all days on the cusp of a great adventure should begin: with spring sunshine and clear views of the distant Alps.

The Thurbo (the SBB´s Thurgau branch) journey to Herisau was neither pleasant nor unpleasant in its unremarkableness.

Caramel macchiato at the Herisau café Panetarium was quickly consumed as Nesha arrived at the station as punctually as he had promised.

We drove from Herisau to the town of Rheineck where Nesha filled the car with fuel and bought a windshield sticker needed to travel Austrian roads.

Above: Flag of Austria

Bought but for some unfathomable reason not affixed to the windshield as it should have been we drove through a tiny section of Austria before following an Autobahn through the Allgäu Region to Memmingen Airport.

 

On the drive to the airport Nesha takes his role as my self-appointed guide to his homeland seriously.

He speaks of the past, desperate to salvage Serbia´s reputation from the bad press the media has given his country since the breakup of former Yugoslavia.

Above: Map of Yugoslavia (1946 – 1990)

Nesha wants me to see his homeland as more than just conflict and turmoil.

He reminds me of world-famous music festivals and top-class athletes, of rich cuisine and unusual landscapes, of friendly people and stunning scenery, of numerous nightclubs and a multitude of monasteries.

Nesha is proud and passionate about his country of ancient sites and architectural riches.

He is as independent as his fellow Serbians, who are proud to have survived and thrived as a landlocked country positioned at the crossroads of central and southeastern Europe, a major link between East and West, between capitalism and communism, between Christianity and Islam.

Above: The flag of Serbia

Serbia has always had to fight for its survival and they have seen the rise and fall of empires around them: Rome, the Ottoman Turks, the Hapsburg Empire, the Third Reich and the Soviets.

Serbia was the dominant power in the former Yugoslavia and under Tito´s rule Yugoslavia steered an independent course, separate from both Western capitalism and Soviet communism.

Above: Josip Broz Tito (1892 – 1980)

After Tito´s death in 1980 the multinational state disintegrated amid bitter conflict.

The last of these conflicts – the war over the secession of Kosovo – saw Serbia bombed by NATO forces for two and a half months.

Above: The flag of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

This devastation, combined with international isolation, caused the Serbs to rise up against their leaders in the 5 October 2000 Bulldozer Revolution – a campaign of civil resistance that brought about democratic government in Serbia.

Above: Newspaper headlines of 6 October 2000

 

Nesha is proud of his surname Obrenovic, for his is a heritage of proud royal resistance.

The Obrenovic dynasty (1815 – 1903) ruled over Serbia first as princes and later kings.

They came to power through Milos Obrenovic (1780 – 1860) in the Second Serbian Uprising (1815 – 1817) against the ruling Ottoman Empire.

Above: Prince Milos Obrenovic (1780 – 1860)

This Uprising would lead to the formation of the Principality of Serbia (1815 – 1882) and later the Kingdom of Serbia (1882 – 1918).

The Obrenovics were traditionally allied with the Austro-Hungarian Empire versus the Russian-supported Karadordevic dynasty (1804 – 1813 / 1842 – 1858 / 1903 – 1945) which would supplant and eliminate them.

The Obrenovic dynasty ended in the May Coup (10 – 11 June 1903) when the military faction known as the Black Hand stormed the Royal Palace and murdered King Alexander I (1876 – 1903) who died without an heir.

Above: King Alexander I of Serbia (1876 – 1903)

The National Assembly of Serbia chose Petar Karadordevic (1844 – 1921) as Alexander´s successor.

Above: King Peter I of Serbia (1844 – 1921)

Of the five Obrenovics (four, officially) who ruled Serbia, Nesha most admires Mihailo Obrenovic (1823 – 1868) who is considered to be the most enlightened ruler of modern Serbia (1839 – 1842 / 1860 – 1868) and one of the first advocates of a Balkan federation to combat the Ottoman Empire.

Above: Prince Mihailo Obrenovic (1823 – 1868)

The ironic coincidence of Mihailo (44) dying on 10 June 1868, Alexander (26) dying on 10 June 1903 and Nesha turning 45 on 10 June 2018 is not lost on my Serbian host.

When speaking about Serbian history and heritage Nesha sighs and tells me that the only permanence Serbia has ever had is beauty.

Above: Tara National Park, western Serbia

His surname and love of country made Nesha the ideal person to lecture me on the history of Serbia throughout the drive to Allgäu Airport and to reassure me on that which worried me about our journey.

 

“Listen to me, Adami!

(Adami is his term of affection for me)

Don´t worry so much!

Anything is possible in Serbia!”

 

Memmingen/Allgäu Airport (identified as FMM on my luggage tags) is an international airport outside the village of Memmingerberg near the town of Memmingen in the Swabia region of the German State of Bavaria.

Above: Memmingen/Allgäu Airport

It is the smallest of the three commercial airports in Bavaria and has the highest altitude (633 metres / 2,077 feet) of any commercial airport in Germany.

Allgäu Airport, a former USAF training base, is located 3.8 km / 2.4 miles from the centre of Memmingen and 110 km / 68 miles from the city centre of Munich (München).

(Which begs the question how this airport so distant from Munich is also known as München West.)

It has been in operation for civilian air traffic since 2008.

We travelled to this airport rather than using the international airport in Zürich because it is a hub for low-cost airlines like Ryanair and Wizz Air.

It mostly features flights to European leisure and metropolitan destinations and handled over one million passengers in 2017.

 

Due to our booking our flights to and from Belgrade at different times Nesha and I don´t fly together and happily my seat over the wing of the planes gives me isolation from dealing with strangers at my elbow.

I follow a Gothic-clad teenager with luggage labelled “Irina” and sporting a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Weird/Common” from the terminal to the plane.

I am disturbed only once by a lady passenger who, in trying to win a debate with her partner over whether Americans can pronounce her surname correctly, asks me how I would say “Cirovic´“.

(Somehow she fails to see me sporting a bright red Roots sweater with the word “Canada” splashed across my chest in brilliant white lettering.)

Apparently Canadians are no different than Americans in this regard.

I failed miserably in echoing the correct Serbian pronunciation.

 

Belgrade´s Nikola Tesla Airport (Aerodom Nikola Tesla) (BEG on my luggage tags) serves over 5 million passengers per year and 36 airlines at two terminals.

Located near the town of Surcin (15 km / 9 miles from Belgrade city centre), Nicola Tesla is the 5th airport to serve Belgrade since air travel began.

At both Memmingen Allgäu Airport and Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport customs and luggage handling are painless.

With rare exception I find most airports to be unremarkably similar.

An airport is an airport is an airport.

We are happy that departure from one and arrival at the other passed quickly.

 

We are met by Nesha´s mother Jagoda (“strawberry” in Serbian) who is clearly a woman with very set ideas and opinions.

In discussing where to have lunch (normally at 3 pm in Serbia) my glutenfree diet gets mentioned.

In broken English, Jagoda informs me that all Americans have gluten allergies, including her American son-in-law Mitch.

She drives us to Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) across the Suva River from the Serbian capital.

I am given a tour of Nesha´s childhood home.

 

Listen to me, Adami.

Here is where I slept as a child.

Here are pictures of my family.

This is my sister (She is a lawyer.) and her husband Mitch in San Diego.

Here is where Papa died last year.

God rest his soul.

 

We drink glasses of sljivovica, a rakija plum brandy, and toast one another with Ziveli! (Cheers! / Long life!) and declare life to be dobar dobar (good good).

Nothing of any real importance in Serbia is done without rakija.

Birth is celebrated with rakija.

Without rakija one does not go to war, join the army, enter a church, visit friends or hit the road.

Rakija is the drink of kings and peasants, doctors and policemen, judges and lumberjacks, politicians and priests.

Rakija cures everything.

For example, a sore throat can be cured by putting a cloth soaked in rakija on your neck, and, as always, take a shot, take two, of rajika for good measure and additional insurance.

Death itself is not without rakija.

Leave a bottle of rakija on the grave of the deceased, for even the dead drink.

Sprinkle rakija around during the funeral and the wake, not only for the delight of the dead but for the solace of the living.

 

All foreigners visiting Serbia are obliged to be registered with the police within 24 hours.

This registration is normally done automatically by hotels on checking in, but I am not staying at a hotel in Belgrade but with Nesha in his apartment.

So Jagoda drives us to the nearest police station.

Within an hour of landing in Serbia I already have a police record.

I am taken by Nesha and Mama Strawberry to a restaurant whose name translates as “Our House of Meat“.

There was pljeskavica (meat patties of pork, beef and lamb sprinkled with spices and served with onions), raznjici (shish kebabs of pork and veal), cevapcici (spiced minced meat kebabs), leskovacki cevapcici (kebabs with peppers), mesano meso (mixed grill) and many more selections too numerous to list here.

Serbs enjoy eating meat in as many ways as there are to cook meat.

This is not a country for the vegetarian or the health conscious.

Serbian food, while tasty and wholesome, is also heavy and greasy.

 

Listen to me, Adami.

You know that surely this cannot be found elsewhere.

 

Nesha and his mama sincerely believe that there is no place except Serbia that serves such sumptious food.

Thank the gods that you, poor stranger, found Serbia in time and have just barely escaped hunger.

But now you´ll see the originality of Serbian cuisine.

 

So the informed foreigner says nothing, for at first glance it seems there isn´t in fact such a thing as Serbian cuisine.

 

The grill comes from Arab countries.

Cevapcici, the Serbian cylindrical-shaped piece of grilled meat, comes from Turkey via Persia.

Njeguska smoked ham is a close relative of Parma ham, but in Serbia it is never eaten with melons.

Lamb is roasted on a spit, but it might be better in Greece.

Barbecued young pork meat is not a Serbian speciality.

That honour belongs to Spain and Italy.

Beans came to Serbia from Peru.

 

But wait, oh, ye cynic!

 

There is kajmak, an amazing food stuff that I have never tasted anywhere else.

Kajmak, a salty cream cheese, is skimmed from freshly boiled milk and bears absolutely no resemblance to young cheeses, despite its appearance, such as mozzarella or sour cream.

No one knows why Serbs invented it nor why only the Serbs invented it.

It is a secret.

 

According to Belgrade writer Momo Kapor (1937 – 2010), there is an international kajmak smuggling ring conducted by Serbs who risk everything to bring this delicious dairy product to their countrymen around the world.

Above: Momo Kapor (1937 – 2010)

The irresistible longing for kajmak is so intense that friends and relatives are beseeched to bring it to the most distant cities of the world, whether it is to the remote regions of Georgia, the Caucasus, Tibet or New York City.

I cannot in mere words describe the exquisite taste of kajmak except to say that the delightful shock that the tongue experiences when tasting kajmak for the first time has the soul hoping that Heaven has kajmak waiting for it.

Kajmak is as close to mystique and magic as any mere mortal will ever enjoy.

Ask any Serbian.

 

There is an old Serbian legend about how it was customary in medieval times for Serbians to eat with golden forks, while Western nobles of that period ate meat with their bare hands.

Until the 17th century it was deemed a transgression of relgious regulation to pierce meat with a fork.

The papal injunction against the fork was explained by the view that only fingers should be used on God´s creatures, and never forks.

The use of a fork could bring years of punishment in a dungeon or even a horrendous death.

In the 11th century Ostia Cardinal Bishop Peter Damian recited terrifying sermons against the fork in Venice, threatening Hell to those who dared use it.

Above: Bust of Peter Damian (1007 – 1073)

When a Byzantine princess who had married into the French court was found using her small fork, she was burnt at the stake as a witch.

The Serbs, who were at the time under the political sphere of Byzantium, refused to acknowledge the papal prohibition and very much enjoyed their cutlery.

 

Serbians, if the mighty Momo can be trusted, believe milk is fundamentally incompatible with tea.

Serbs drink milk only when they are being breast-fed and tea only when they are ill.

Such perverts the English are!

 

Regarding the chicken, there are only two circumstances when it is to be eaten: either when the chicken is sick or when you are.

 

In Belgrade one can find almost anything you would find in Barcelona, Beijing or Boston.

Above: Aerial view of Belgrade

One may find all kinds of coffeehouses, cafés and restaurants in Belgrade that serve whisky, vodka, tequila and cognac.

In contrast to the Islamic world, Serbian religion allows husbands to drink as much as they wish.

Sadly their wives won´t allow for such foolishness, so perhaps Serbian husbands might as well be Muslim.

 

And no meal is complete without the cancerous contribution of a cigarette, for here not only do most Serbians smoke but smoking signs here actively encourage and proudly proclaim “Smoke here, please.”

Serbia is the #1 country in the world for per capita cigarette consumption.

My friend Nesha has been smoking since he was a teenager and many of his friends do.

Perhaps Jagoda is now convinced that as all Americans have gluten allergies so are all Canadians non-smokers.

 

I can´t help wonder what kind of a toll this combination of rich, greasy cuisine and continuous cigarette consumption must have on the Serbian health system or on Serbian longevity.

As Serbians celebrate life with libations of liquor, cartons of cigarettes and feasts of meat, while kissing one another (as well as every icon that can be found in every religious establishment) reminders of death can be seen everywhere.

Walk down any street and read the obituaries, for notices of death, certificates of demise, are posted around every town.

Paper proofs of death (umrlica) are posted on walls, doors, poles and trees.

The wise Serbian knows that it is not the fat nor the grease nor cigarettes that kill.

There are three things that guarantee death in Serbia:

• Wet hair, even minor dampness, is life-threatening, if you foolishly set foot outside.
• Draft (promaja) from cracked doors and windows – beware!
• No socks – don´t even think about it!

 

Perhaps it is no wonder that Serbians say Ziveli! so often.

With war visiting Serbia, or so it seems, once in every generation….

With feasts of fat and gobs of grease eaten from mountains of meat….

With cancer consumed more copiously than oxygen….

With the helplessly hopeless walking the streets with wet hair….

With demented foreigners leaving drafty windows open everywhere….

With barefoot barbarians bounding across Belgrade….

The formality of wishing one another long life is not only polite.

It is necessary.

Sources: The Brandt Guide to Serbia / Emma Fick, Snippets of Serbia / Culture Smart Serbia / Momo Kapor, A Guide to the Serbian Mentality

 

 

 

 

 

A union in name only?

“Every person who comes is a human being and has the right to be treated as such.” Angela Merkel, German Chancellor

“As throngs of Africans and Arabs turn Italian and Greek islands and eastern European railway stations into refugee camps, the Chancellor has taken a brave stand.

She has denounced xenophobes, signaled Germany’s readiness to take more Syrian refugees and set out a European solution to a politically explosive problem.

On 31 August Mrs Merkel issued a dramatic call to arms, warning that today’s refugee misery will have graver consequences for the future of the EU than the euro mess.

“If Europe fails on the question of refugees it won’t be the Europe we wished for.”, she said.

The EU was born, after a devastating war, on a promise of solidarity with the persecuted and the downtrodden.

The biggest displacement of people since 1945 is a test of European values and of the ability of member states to work together.

The refugees from civil wars in Syria and Iraq clearly need help.

European countries can provide it only if they share the task.

That means a collective response.

Unfortunately, whereas external border control is, for most EU members, a common problem, migration and asylum policies remain national.

Refugees are supposed to seek asylum in the European country in which they first set foot, usually Italy or Greece, but these countries are overwhelmed.

Most refugees want to head north to Germany, Britain or Scandanavia.

That is not difficult thanks to the dismantling of passport controls at the EU’s internal borders (the Schengen agreement).

Once a symbol of hope, the EU fails to inspire…as the migrant crisis reveals much about European citizens.

The xenophobic reaction of many to the refugees spilling into the countries…and antagonism towards foreigners is a reason for pessimism about Europe.

The fence erected by Hungary’s government along its border with Serbia is an unhappy reminder of Cold War Communism.”
The Economist, 5 – 11 September 2015

“What happens at Europe’s borders often telegraphs momentous change.

The reimposition of border controls to staunch the flow of refugees and migrants is the harbinger of dramatic erosion and possible demise of the Schengen free-travel area, one of the EU’s most striking achievements.

At a meeting of interior ministers on 14 September eastern European countries blocked plans for 120,000 refugees to be resettled across the EU under a system of quotas.

The idea that EU leaders can act in common interest has suffered yet another blow.

If people can no longer travel freely, then what exactly is the point of the EU?

Hungary has sealed its border with Serbia with barbed wire fences and has begun arresting those trying to cross.

Police fire tear gas at them.

Growing numbers of refugees are now trapped in Serbia and started evading the barrier by marching into Romania and Croatia.

Hungary says it will extend the fence to its Romanian border.

Poland and the Czech Republic have joined Hungary in refusing to accommodate migrants, even though they are often young and educated.

Eastern Europe may not like refugees but needs them more than other EU countries.

Labour shortages are common in eastern Europe.

Consruction, manufacturing and technology firms are struggling to find enough workers.

Shortages are likely to get worse as populations age rapidly.

Birth rates are declining and many of the young have left.

2 out of 5 firms in Poland struggle to fill vacancies.

Poland needs 50,000 more IT workers than it can find.

Poland has large shortages of manual workers in agriculture and construction.

In Hungary almost half can not get the staff they need.

Hungary has a large demand for carpenters, shop assistants, gardeners and bakers.

Labour shortfalls decrease the abiltity to produce and sell goods and services and increase pension deficits and leave holes in public finances.

In Hungary 40% of doctors are over 60.

More than 200 medical practices have no doctor at all.

Poland has 5 nurses per 1,000 inhabitants, of which 30% are due to retire in the next seven years.

Syrians are relatively well-educated.

Immigration critics are right that integrating outsiders into countries with difficult languages and fragile public services is hard, but the rewards are obvious.”
The Economist, 19 – 25 September 2015

Xenophobic hatred doesn’t only destroy the lives of those being hated, but it also destroys the future of those doing the hating.

Oops! Did we do that?

At least seven people were killed on Monday when a warplane mistakenly dropped a bomb on a residential area in Baghdad.

The Iraqi plane dropped the bomb on Ne’iriyah district in southeastern Baghdad, destroying six houses and damaging several nearby buildings and civilian cars.

(Deccan Herald, 6 July 2015)

The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

On the night of 17 April 2002, near Kandahar, Afghanistan, an American F-16 fighter pilot dropped a laser-guided 500-pound (230 kg) bomb on the 3rd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group, who were conducting a night firing exercise at Tarnak Farms.

Four Canadian soldiers were killed.

Eight others were injured.

The Americans claimed they bombed their ally mistakenly and had acted in self-defence, though a reasonable pilot never would have believed that the fire on the ground was a threat to flight.

The pilot was fined, reprimanded but allowed to retire honorably.

The deaths were the first of Canada’s war in Afghanistan and the first Canadian deaths in a combat zone since the Korean War (1950-1953).

…and these were allied countries fighting together.

On 7 May 1999, during the NATO bombing of Belgrade, five US JDAM guided bombs hit the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese reporters and outraging the Chinese public.

President Bill Clinton apologized for the bombing saying it was accidental, as the CIA had identified the wrong coordinates for a Serbian military target on the same street.

Ah, those misjudged folks at the CIA…

Switzerland was a neutral country during World War II, but was completely surrounded by Axis or Axis-conquered countries.

On several occasions, Allied bombing raids hit targets in Switzerland, resulting in fatalities and property damage.

In subsequent diplomatic exchanges, Allied forces explained the causes of violations as navigational errors, equipment failure, weather conditions and pilot error, while the Swiss expressed fear that these violations were intended to exert pressure on the country to end its economic cooperation with Nazi Germany.

The daylight bombing of Schaffhausen at 10:50 am on 1 April 1944 by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF) was the most serious of all incidents.

Approximately fifty B-24 Liberators of a larger force misidentified Schaffhausen as their target Ludwigshafen am Rhein near Mannheim (235 km north of Schaffhausen) and dropped 500 fire and high-explosive bombs on the city centre and triggered off almost 50 fires.

Forty people lost their lives, 270 were injured and many many buildings were destroyed, including some priceless, irreplaceable cultural heritage.

At the insistence of the Swiss government for an explanation, Allied investigations into the incident found that bad weather broke up the American formation over France and that high winds that nearly doubled the speed of the bombers confused the navigators.

As Schaffhausen is situated on the north side of the Rhine River, it was assumed to be a German city.

In the middle of the forest above Schaffhausen lies a large quiet sprawling cemetery called Waldfriedhof.

Search diligently enough and you will come across a semi-circle of gravestones, in front of a long wall and an angel statue nearby.

A plaque on the wall reads:

“Am Vormittag des 1. April 1944 in 5.ten Jahr des 2.ten Weltkriegs wurde die Stadt Schaffhausen irrtumlich von Amerikanischen Fliegen bombardiert die Brand und Sprengbomben forderten 40 Todesopfer. Ihrem Andenken ist diese Grabstatte geweiht.”

(On the morning of 1 April 1944, in the 5th year of the 2nd World War, the city of Schaffhausen was mistakenly bombed with fire and high explosive bombs by American warplanes, resulting in 40 victims killed. Their memory is preserved in this place.”)(Rough translation)

The Americans paid $193 million to the Swiss government.

None of the pilots were ever found guilty.

The Americans send a wreath every 1 April.

War has distressing consequences for civilian populations.

Even if civilians are not directly killed or maimed as a result of military action, they may suffer longterm injury as a result of radiation, post-conflict contact with unexploded munitions or pollution caused by the spillage of toxic materials.

Populations become displaced and many people suffer deep psychological traumas.

As I type these words, more than a third of the world’s population are involved in conflict, many of them civil wars.

US President Dwight Eisenhower once remarked:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

Money spent on arms is money not being spent on development.

Just half the amount spent on arms could put every child on the planet into school.

And perhaps an educated populace might learn how to wage war responsibly.

Or perhaps learn how to live intelligently without waging war.

“Imagine there’s no countries.
It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace.

Imagine no possessions.
I wonder if you can.
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world”

(John Lennon, “Imagine”)

Just imagine…