BELGRADE Read Online Free

outstanding figure in twentieth-century Serbian letters, was a poet, novelist and essayist whose work has greatly influenced the literary styles and tastes of modern Belgrade writers. One of his lesser-known books is a travel guide to the city, originally published in French in 1936. He writes about its geographic position in the following terms: “Belgrade sits on a rock rising high over a broad plain. The view encompasses the majestic panorama of the old Serbian provinces of Bačka and Banat, which were also the last to be liberated.”
    Today we can stand on that rocky outcrop and look out at the view Crnjanski describes from Belgrade’s old Turkish fortress of Kalemegdan, now a public park containing many reminders of the city’s history. It is here that the story of Belgrade begins in all its incarnations: a city ruled by many different regimes and the capital city of various countries—Serbia, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, communist Yugoslavia, and most recently of Serbia again.
    Kalemegdan crowns the central district of Belgrade’s old town. A towering statue of a naked man with a sword grasped in his right hand and a hawk perched on his left stands on the furthest point of this promontory. The monument, fashioned by the famous Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962), was placed here in 1928 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Serbia’s victory in the First World War on the side of the Allies. It is appropriately named the Victor (Pobednik) and is often the first port of call for visitors to Belgrade.
    The confluence of the rivers Sava and Danube lies immediately below, with the flat expanse of Vojvodina, the lands of Bačka and Banat, stretching northward toward the borders with Croatia, Hungary and Romania. In the distance, overlooking the Danube, the conurbation of Zemun is identifiable by its tall “millennium tower” of 1896 visible on a hilltop. In a different direction, bridges span the Sava to join the old town with the serried rows of tower blocks and wide avenues of New Belgrade, built only after the Second World War. An island occupies the central part of the watery junction giving a staging post from one bank to another. The island was often used by armies laying siege to the town, hence its ominous name of Great War Island (Veliko ratno ostrvo).
    All the natural advantages of the city’s position are to be seen from the platform around the Victor’s base. The fortress walls offer clear lines of sight over comparatively large distances, and the rivers on two sides provide both defensive potential and navigation routes in three directions. Yet such a naturally advantageous location has not saved Belgrade from attack and it has frequently been occupied, then lost and fought over again. Each time a new town has sprung up in place of the old one. Slobodan Glumac offers a telling comment testifying to the city’s stormy past in his book
Belgrade
:
The history books say that Belgrade was razed and put to the torch forty times. This, then, would mean that it was rebuilt forty-one times. Yet different each time, different from the preceding community, almost as if to deny its very existence.
     
    These words from 1989 bear an almost prophetic tone, coinciding with the time when Belgrade was on the verge of another major transformation, as the country of which it was then capital was about to dissolve in the Wars of Yugoslav Succession.
    The flat land of Vojvodina to the north was in some very far and distant past covered by a vast tract of water, the Pannonian Sea, which is still yielding occasional examples of prehistoric fossils. Archaeologists have also found plenty of evidence of life from more recent prehistory in the vicinity of Kalemegdan, which reveals that it has been a base for human activity for some eight thousand years. There are two large archaeological sites from the Neolithic period fairly close by. The closer one is to be found at Vinča, about ten miles from the centre of