BELGRADE Read Free

pick out the private dwellings from the buildings that are or have been invested with some municipal function. I quickly begin to feel a historical background and establish a relationship with my surroundings based on the general cultural encyclopaedia that I carry around all the time.
    Yet in a place further afield, such points, like points of a compass, are absent. It becomes more difficult to discover a basic orientation, to know in which direction to look in order to find north and other points of the compass. In those further fields, where the stories are not mine, I need more in order to appreciate the importance of a house, building, monument, to see how it fits into the larger scheme of that urban pattern, and then to understand the city as a sequence of sentences which have their own internal logic, their own grammar.
S OMEONE E LSE’S M EMORY
     
    The purpose of this book is to facilitate communication with Belgrade, to achieve a fuller understanding of the connections between its different parts and its architectural and urban sights. The journey is akin to entering someone else’s memory where there exists a different set of stories underpinning the unity of the city. Chapters contain a description of the buildings and design of a certain area of central Belgrade with other sections that give historical background associated with the district and references to depictions of it in art and literature.
    The book opens at the apex of Belgrade, the fortress of Kalemegdan, which overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. In the first chapter I focus on the early history of Belgrade until the nineteenth century when its strategic importance brought many different armies to this place. It was finally taken by the Ottoman Empire in 1521 when Kalemegdan became the seat of a Turkish pasha. In the eighteenth century it fell into Austrian hands only to be returned later to Islamic rule. The Serbian presence in the city was hardly felt during these centuries and change only came with local rebellions against Ottoman government.
    The story of the Serbian uprisings and the changes which followed in Belgrade during the nineteenth century are told in the next two chapters. Particular attention is given to the effects of the rapid social modernization that shaped the city during this period. Modernization was synonymous with Europeanization as Belgrade cast off its oriental look, the legacy of Ottoman rule, and replaced it with western styles and fashions. The arts developed and Belgrade became a cultural centre with writers, artists and critics rubbing shoulders with one another. In these chapters I also present portrayals of life in the city and important political events of the nineteenth century as described in fiction.
    In Chapters Four and Five I describe significant episodes from Belgrade in the twentieth century, first as the capital of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia then of the communist state after the Second World War with the cultural changes reflecting these political transformations. The urban landscape shifted from the ornate style of architecture practised at the beginning of the new era to the more austere principles characteristic of socialist planning after 1945. Novels and films show the experiences of the people who lived under different regimes in the city.
    Chapter Six contains an examination of the period at the end of the twentieth century, after the death of President Tito. Yugoslavia began to unravel leading to a bloody civil war that was seen briefly in Slovenia in the summer of 1991 before moving to Croatia and then, finally, to Bosnia 1992–95. Many people had relatives in other parts of Yugoslavia caught up in the conflicts who were forced to flee and turned up in the city as refugees. Some went off to fight as “weekend” soldiers, leaving for short periods as members of paramilitary units to use the opportunity for brutal looting of villages and towns in Bosnia and parts of Croatia.