Читать книгу Travel Adventures 1950 - 2018 - Herbert Herzmann - Страница 11
ОглавлениеChapter 3: Yugoslavia 1966 – 2007
3.1 A vanished country
All through my childhood Yugoslavia to me was first and foremost the country by the Adriatic Sea. My parents and grandparents on my father’s and mother’s side had lived there before I was born. My father’s father was a surgeon in Bosanski Novi (today Novi Grad) near Sarajevo, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy till the end of the First World War. My father, my mother and Aunt Hanna were born in Bosnia. After 1918 the different countries and regions of the Southern Slavs united and formed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The new state consisted of what today are Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia. Up until 1918 Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia and a part of Serbia were part of Austria-Hungary.
After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy my grandparents and my parents stayed in the new country and became Yugoslavs. They belonged to the German-speaking minority of the Yugoslavian kingdom and their identity was somewhat confused. Although they felt close to the culture of the German speaking countries, they had a strong sense of loyalty to the Serbian royal house. They all spoke German and Serbo-Croat with equal fluency. My sister was born in Belgrade. When the Nazis bombed the city in April 1941, my parents moved to Vienna where they felt safer. I was born there two years later. After my mother’s death my father settled in Vienna. He became an Austrian citizen but never a good Austrian. For the rest of his life, he was homesick for Yugoslavia and the Dalmatian coast. On Sundays he sometimes attended the services in the Serbian Orthodox Church in Vienna’s 3RD district, where he mingled with the Serb expats and conversed with them in their language.
After the Second World War the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was no more. It had been replaced by Tito’s Communist regime. Nevertheless, as an ideal and as a physical entity Yugoslavia still was the home of all Southern Slavs and Albanians as well as of Catholic and Orthodox Christians and of Muslims. It could be said that Yugoslavia was the true successor of the multi-national and multiethnic Habsburg Empire and that like the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy it was doomed to fail once nationalism became rampant. While the Habsburg Empire had held together for hundreds of years and managed to withstand the nationalist onslaught of the 19th century until 1918, communist Yugoslavia fell victim to a wave of a vicious new nationalism only a few years after Tito’s death.
I was lucky to visit Tito’s Yugoslavia a few times when it still appeared to be a credible alternative to the Soviet Communist model and an example of the viability of a multi-national, multiethnic and multi-cultural state. Unlike my parents, my mother’s sister Aunt Gerda and her Serb husband Vojeslav (Vojo) had not fled from Belgrade when the Nazis bombed it. They had two children: a daughter, Dušanka and a son, Dejan.
In 1960, when still in high school, Ilse and I were invited to spend a few weeks of the summer holidays in Belgrade. Aunt Gerda and Uncle Vojo spoke perfect German, our cousins Dejan and Dušanka , however, did not. After the war, so I was told, it had not been advisable to be heard speaking German anywhere in Belgrade, therefore my aunt and uncle decided not to teach their children the language of the hated enemy in order to avoid hostilities and possible discrimination. Our cousins and Ilse had French, and I spoke some English. But we all learned Latin in school. So, we communicated through this ancient lingua franca. Initially, it was not easy but it certainly was fun. We got better with practice and after a few days we even managed to tell jokes!
I then knew very little about the history and the political situation of Yugoslavia. Belgrade to me was a somewhat exotic city, but not that exotic that I did not feel at home after a few days. I liked the buzz of the place, the restaurants by the riverside, the spicy food and the open-air markets. It was a bit run down, but Vienna, and most European cities at that time were no different. In spite of the grey and shabby facades of the houses, Belgrade gave the impression of being a vibrant place.
Uncle Vojo was a staunch anti-communist and made no secret of it. One day a friend of his offered to take us for a drive to the surroundings of the city. Uncle Vojo warned me that his friend was a supporter of Tito and that I should refrain from making any derogatory remarks about the regime. In spite of their political differences my uncle and his communist friend got on very well. However, when he found it necessary, Uncle Vojo could stand up fearlessly to the authorities of Tito’s state. One day we were walking in a park and observed a policeman, showing a boy how to use a Flobert gun to shoot birds. My uncle was outraged. He told off the policeman most severely for teaching a boy to kill innocent birds and by doing so endangering passers-by. My uncle’s angry tirades made the policeman shrink by a size or two and in the end the poor guardian of the peace ended up apologizing profusely.
During my first visit to Yugoslavia I did not see the Adriatic sea. I had to wait another six years. The opportunity arose in the summer of 1966 when I met Ann. She was a great admirer of Byzantine Art and knew a lot about it. Together we visited the medieval Serbian Orthodox monasteries that were famous for their frescoes. Whereas the Byzantine monasteries and churches in Italy and Greece (Palermo, Monreale, Ravenna, Thessaloniki and others) are known for their mosaics, the Serbian kings after winning independence from the Byzantine Empire employed painters to decorate their churches. They left Serbia with a unique heritage.
One finds rudiments of medieval Byzantine frescoes in other parts of the world, for example in Pürgg and in Lambach, both in Austria. What makes the Serbian monasteries so special is that the frescoes of their churches cover all the walls and ceilings and amount to a carefully planned iconographic programme. In the apse one normally finds the twelve apostles, above them is Mary, the four corners of the cupola depict the symbols of the four evangelists, bull, eagle, man and lion. In the cupola is Christ the Redeemer. The walls of the naves are covered with juxtaposed scenes of the Old and New Testaments. For example, on the wall opposite the resurrection of Christ, we may see Jonah in the belly of the whale. Jonah spent three days inside the whale and then returned to life outside. This story from the Old Testament was understood to anticipate Christ’s three days in the tomb and his following resurrection. Sometimes there is room for scenes depicting the lives of Saints and even of Serbian kings and queens. A fresco showing the death of a Serbian queen may closely follow the iconography of the Death of Mary on the opposite wall. Obviously, that was not considered blasphemous.
The best known of these monastic gems are Mileševa near Prijepolje, Dećani near Peć, two churches in Peć, Gračanica near Priština, Sopoćani near Novi Pazar and Studenica a bit further north of Novi Pazar. While Mileševa, Sopoćani and Studenica are today still in Serbia, Dećani and the churches in Peć as well as Gračanica, are now in the newly established state of Kosovo. This is particularly hurtful to the Serbs as these monasteries are an essential part of Serbian history and cultural heritage. Peć used to be the seat of the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church. It is as if Lower Austria had lost the monasteries of Klosterneuburg, Göttweig, Dürnstein and Melk to a new hostile state, or England had been forced to hand over the regions that locate the Cathedrals of Canterbury, Ely, Wells or Winchester to an enemy.
As I had not yet learned to drive, Ann took it upon herself to drive all the way. It was an epic journey lasting about four weeks. She planned the route in such a way that we would take in as many Byzantine sights as possible. In 1966 Yugoslavia still existed. Kosovo was part of it, so were Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. We moved through Slovenia to Rijeka, drove alongside the coast to Zadar and Dubrovnik, then to Mostar and Sarajevo and then turning east to Kraljevo. After that we turned south again to Novi Pazar, taking in the monasteries of Studenica and Milešiva, and continued further south to Peć, Dećani and Prizren. We drove as far as Skopje and from there to Lake Ochrid near the Albanian border. Turning north again we visited Gračanica and Priština and finally arrived in Belgrade. We visited Uncle Vojo and my cousins who still lived in the same apartment where I had stayed six years previously. Aunt Gerda had died a few years earlier. From Belgrade we drove on the autoput (a kind of motorway without a barrier separating the oncoming traffic) direction West to Zagreb and back to Austria.
When travelling in Yugoslavia, we encountered no borders. In each region we met people with different religions, different customs, music and folklore, but everybody was Yugoslav. How different this is today! There are borders everywhere. Slovenia and Croatia are now members of the EU, the other successor states of Yugoslavia are still on the waiting list and may remain there for a long time. Apart from the Slovenes everybody spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian. True, the Croatians as Catholics use Latin letters, the Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins write in Cyrillic letters. But it was considered to be one language and people understood each other perfectly. Now the Serbs speak Serbian, the Bosnians Bosnian, the Macedonians Macedonian, the Montenegrins Montenegrin and the Croats Croatian. Should the Serbs and the Bosnians and Montenegrins join the EU, they and the Croats will probably insist that all documents are translated into their now different languages. The Croats will pretend that they do not understand Serbian and vice versa, the Bosnians will claim that they are unable to read documents in Serbian or Montenegrin and so on. It is like if the Chileans insisted on translations of Spanish into Chilean, the Peruvians asking for translations of anything written in Ecuadorian, or if the Austrians asked for translations of texts written by their German neighbours. The Bible tells us that Babel caused a great confusion, because all of a sudden everybody spoke a different language. The successor states of Yugoslavia are trying hard to recreate Babel.
3.2 Novi Pazar and the Adriatic coast
We arrived in Novi Pazar on the evening of 9th September 1966. En route from Kraljevo we had visited the stunning monasteries of Žiča and Studenica. On the following day we planned to see Sopoćani and Mileševa and then continue our journey to Peć. Impressive as all these sacred sites with their byzantine frescoes were, Novi Pazar as it was then presented itself to us in a wonderfully exotic light. It is located in what under Turkish rule was called the Sandžak region, and when we arrived there, we felt we had left Europe, gone back in time and entered the Ottoman Empire. There were old Turkish houses and mosques and Orthodox churches. The streets were crowded with people and there were almost no cars. In the centre of the town we spotted a brand-new hotel on the main square. It was the only Western style building to be seen. Assuming that this was where we had to stay, Ann parked the car and I got out and walked to the hotel with the intention of asking for a room for one night. It was closed. There was no notice indicating when, or if, it would open.
When I walked back, the car was surrounded by a hundred or more people who stared in awe at the black Volkswagen with a foreign registration and at the driver inside who did not know where to look in order to conceal her embarrassment. When I approached, the crowd stood back very politely and opened a passage for me. We then discovered an old Turkish style building on the other side of the square that appeared to be a hotel of a more traditional kind. We had no problem getting a room there. The accommodation was basic. As it was very hot, we had to leave the window facing the square open. There was shouting and music all night and we did not sleep a wink.
After checking in, we strolled around the town looking for a place where we could eat. The news that strangers had come to town had spread like wildfire. Many people approached us, chatting us up, asking us questions about ourselves or offering help. We ended in the company of a few young men who turned out to be very kind guides. They were happy to practice a bit of English and German, so communication was all right. One of the men had been a Serb lightweight boxing champion who had given up the sport after he was defeated and injured. We ate some ćevapčići with delicious freshly baked white bread and our hosts insisted on buying us beer and šljvovica. They did not expect anything in return. What they offered was pure unselfish hospitality, for which the Slavs, especially the Serbs, are well known.
I returned to Novi Pazar many years later when I revisited Yugoslavia with Ursula in 1990. We drove to Belgrade and stayed with Uncle Vojo and my cousin Dušanka, who had married Danilo, a man from Montenegto. They had two children, Jelena and Blagoje. We then drove south, as I wanted to show Ursula the Serbian monasteries. Dušanka, Jelena and Blagoe accompanied us. We drove in two cars as Dušanka and her children had to go back to Belgrade while Ursula and I planned to drive on to Buljarica on the Adriatic Coast and from there, via the Dalmatian coast back to Ljubljana and then on to Dublin.
Dušanka had booked us into a B&B in Novi Pazar. We were to go to the hotel in the centre and phone the owner of the B&B from there. He would meet us there and bring us to his house. The hotel was oversized, empty of guests and its interior was kind of reminiscent of the Alhambra in Granada. I think it was the same hotel where Ann and I had unsuccessfully tried to get a room twenty-four years earlier. The reception was on the first floor. Above it was a big NO SMOKING sign. The two attractive and heavily made up women behind the desk were smoking. They rang our host. After waiting a few minutes, we heard the lift coming up to our floor. It stopped and somebody tried to get out. Apparently, the door was jammed and the person inside the lift started banging with his fist and then pushing against it. After a few heavy pushes the door suddenly opened and a heavily built man burst into the reception room and almost fell to the ground. He was our host, Rešad.
We did not take the hotel lift to get to the ground floor. Rešad brought us to his house in a lane called Osmana đikića. We spent two days there. It was a comfortable place and Muradija, Rešad’s wife, did everything to make us feel at home. Her breakfasts were wonderful. One of her delights were uštipci, a kind of donut similar to the churros I remembered from my visits to Granada. The best way of eating them is to dip them into hot chocolate. The Spanish probably got the recipe from the Moors and the Serbs took it from the Turks.
Rešad did nothing. Whenever we passed through the living room going out in the morning and returning in the evening, he was lying on the sofa. To us he embodied what we imagined to be a pasha. He was very interested in our wellbeing. He had a little knowledge of German and kept asking how we were: Gut schlafen? Gut essen? Gut einkaufen?
Although the house we were staying in lived up to my expectations, I could not help being disappointed with Novi Pazar. Many of the old Turkish houses had been replaced by boring apartment blocks, few women wore the traditional clothes, most of the younger ones preferred to wear jeans. The calls for prayer sounding from the mosques were recordings. It was difficult to find a traditional bakery, where we could buy the delicious white bread I remembered. Gone was the feeling of being in the world of the Arabian Nights that I had enjoyed so much a quarter of a century earlier. Time had moved on. Novi Pazar was trying her best to become like any other place in the globalised world. Confronting the dreams of the past with the reality of the present more often than not leads to disappointment.
Yet, underneath these rather desperate attempts to catch up with globalisation, some things had not really changed. Behind the façade of modernity old attitudes persisted. We went to the post office in Novi Pazar to buy stamps. The door was closed. A handwritten sign said PAUSE. We waited for ten minutes or so and nothing happened. Finally, we gave up. We came across such PAUSE signs many times. Whenever it suited them, the employees of banks, post offices or shops would take a break, as long as they wished. Another time we went to a bank to change money. In front of us was a family or a clan of six or more people who at the same time wanted to change German marks into dinar and put money into their saving accounts. They occupied the only two counters available. There was a lot of gesticulating and shouting and the clerks were overwhelmed. It was chaos, pure and simple. I cannot remember if we had the patience to wait until they had solved their problems.
The Serbian monasteries were as glorious as ever. I had brought a good camera and a tripod and took plenty of photographs of the frescoes. This is not always allowed. In Mileševa the frescoes were in the process of being restored under the guidance of a woman art conservator-restorer from Belgrade. She kindly allowed me to set up my tripod and take pictures. In Studenica I defied the notices saying that no pictures must be taken. There was nobody around and I worked away quite happily until an orthodox monk appeared. He looked at me and I looked at him a bit sheepish. He asked if I was Frances. I thought it best to pretend to be French and nodded. He seemed to be pleased and gave me a friendly slap on my shoulder and walked away. In Dečani we met a monk by name of Boreslav who told us a little about the history of the monastery. His historic reminiscences consisted mostly of the cruelties the Turks had committed in the past. If he is still alive, Boreslav will not be happy about the fact that Dečani, like the churches in Peć, as well as the monastery of Gračanica, now belong to the new nation state of Kosovo whose inhabitant are mostly Muslims.
1990 was the last year of Yugoslavia’s existence. In the following year the war broke out and destroyed the country. The tensions could already be felt everywhere. We were the only tourists. Dušanka was worried about the safety of herself and her children as her car had a Belgrade (i.e. Serbian) registration. She felt safe enough in Novi Pazar because it was part of Serbia. Kosovo, however, was different. The post office in Peć was burned down. There were endless queues outside every telephone box. The rubbish had not been collected for weeks and was piling up in the streets. Serbian tanks and soldiers patrolled the streets. Nowhere did we see women driving. In the restaurants and cafes they were conspicuous by their absence. The pedestrians paid no attention to traffic lights and cars. They crossed the streets whenever it suited them. Neither did the drivers care about pedestrians. One had the sense that law and order was breaking down and that the region was in social and psychological reverse gear. Women did not seem to count. Dušanka in her Yugo Fiat was the only female driver to be seen, or shall I say: to be ignored. While she was waiting in line at a petrol station a male driver brutally forced his lorry in front her. I wonder what the situation of women now is in this new independent state of Kosovo.
After Dušanka, Jelena and Blagoe had left in order to return to Belgrade, Ursula and I travelled south to the coast. Now it was Ursula’s first time to see the wonderful Aaadria! Near Dubrovnik in a small town called Plat we found a very attractive B&B. The house was situated about twenty metres above a strand. We took our breakfast on the terrace with a view of the sea, and one day the landlady brought us homemade apple cake to our room. From the house a few steps led down to the beach. There were safe places to swim and there was a restaurant that served freshly fried fish, squid and salads as well as rice and pasta dishes. The owner had a little terrier whose job it was to chase away feral cats. In the evenings we sat outside having our simple and delicious meals and drinking Dalmatian wine. There were very few guests. One evening the only other customers were an Irish garda (policeman) and his girlfriend. They had come all the way from Ireland on their motorbike. The air was balmy, and the moon poured her silver rays on the calm sea. It was the perfect scene for the cover of a glossy travel brochure.
3.3 Mostar 1966, 1990 and 2001
After enjoying this idyllic life for a few days, it was time to start the journey home. Our route was from Dubrovnik to Neum, Mostar, Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Zagreb to Ljubljana where we put the car on a train to Oostende. From there it was not too far back to Ireland: only two car-ferries and a 600 km drive from the east coast of England to the west coast.
At Neum we turned inland. After leaving Počitelj, where we had visited the Turkish fortress, a bus overtook us on a dangerous bend. We stopped for a picnic and then continued driving towards Mostar. Suddenly we came across a horrific scene. The bus that had overtaken us earlier had collided head on with a lorry. Bodies and pieces of luggage were scattered all over the place, police, ambulances and fire brigades were there. With great difficulty we got past the accident scene and continued our journey in a shaken state.
When I visited Mostar for the first time in 1966 with Ann, I instantly liked this old Bosnian town in the mountains, some 140 km south of Sarajevo. The fact that our hotel was very near the railway station and that we were kept awake by the constant noise and, worse, by the emissions of the steam locomotives, did not take away from the good memories I have. After Novi Pazar Mostar seemed to me to be the most “Turkish” of all places in Yugoslavia, even more so than Sarajevo.
The best-known feature of the town was the old bridge over the Neretva River. This spectacular single span stone arch bridge was almost twenty-nine metres long and twenty metres high. Mimar Hayruddin, a student of the great Ottoman architect Sinan built it in 1566. The Sultan threatened to execute Hayruddin if the bridge collapsed after the removal of the wooden supports. Legend has it that Hayruddin dug his own grave just in case. However, the bridge survived more than four hundred years. Local male youths used to show off by diving from the bridge into the river. In 1993 the bridge collapsed after Croat artillery had shelled it. When the war ended, a provisional bridge was built that connected the eastern and western parts of the town. Later Mimar Hayruddin's bridge was reconstructed with international help, and using the original plans that have been kept in an archive in Istanbul.
The visit in 1990 to Mostar was my second one. For Ursula it was the first. We arrived there later than we had planned and were short of time because we wanted to get to Banja Luka before dark. I was eager to show Ursula the famous bridge and stopped the car at a point from where we had a good view. A man approached us and offered to give us a tour of the town. He told us that he was a historian, and from what we could gather he appeared to be genuinely knowledgeable. When we explained to him that we did not have much time he promised to make the tour a short one. After some hesitation we decided that we could not delay any further as we did not wish to continue our drive on the mountainous road to Banja Luka in the dark. He was deeply offended when we left him standing there. For a long time, we felt guilty and often thought about him wondering if and how he survived the years after our brief encounter. We also wondered how our pasha in Novi Pazar and his wife had been coping with the bloody war. We will never know.
Driving towards Banja Luka we noticed that many place names were blackened out and had SDS written over them. SDS stands for Srpska Demokratska Stranka (Serb Democratic Party), which was founded by Jovan Rašković on 17th February 1990. Its aim was to defend Serbian national interests against the rising Croatian nationalism. In the ensuing war the SDS became the driving force behind the establishment of a Serb nationalist movement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and it was later held responsible for many war crimes, notably for the massacre in Srebrenica. One of the most notorious leaders of that party was Radovan Karadžić. The breakup of Yugoslavia was already anticipated and the different parties were getting ready to secure as many of the spoils of the future war as possible. The aim of the SDS was to unite the Bosnian Serbs with the Serb motherland, something that was not achieved in the end. Today Banja Luka is the de facto capital of the Republica Srpska, which is now an autonomous region within the independent state of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Our hotel in Banja Luka had two beds. One was unusable because it was like a slide. Apart from the beds there was nothing in the room. A door led to a balcony without railings. Its main function was that of an ashtray. In the bar below us people kept us awake by singing in perfect harmony until one o’clock in the morning.
Eleven years later, in June 2001, Ursula and I returned to what had once been Yugoslavia. The war had ended only a short time before. Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia were now independent countries. We took a Croatian Airlines charter flight from Dublin to Split and Dubrovnik. Most passengers on the plane were pilgrims, who flew to Split from where they were transferred to Medjugorje. Only a few passengers continued on to Dubrovnik. Leaving the bus that had brought us from Dubrovnik to nearby Plat we got a shock. There were rows of buildings that had suffered badly from artillery fire. Some houses had been reduced to rubble. Others were still standing with broken windows and damaged facades.
Our hotel, however, was in perfect condition. Once we learned to ignore the sad immediate surroundings, we had a good time there. Very near the hotel was the B&B where we had stayed in 1991. The little restaurant by the beach, of which we had such romantic memories, was also still there. The little terrier, however, that used to chase away the feral cats was missing. The owner told us that the dog had been shot dead by the Serbs.
After a few days lying by the hotel pool and occasionally diving into the sea we rented a car and drove to Mostar. We were keen to see how that town was coping with the new situation. Arriving there we got another shock to see so many houses damaged or destroyed. The Neretva River divides the city. The Catholic Croats live east of the river, the Muslim quarters are on the east side. We got the definite impression that the Croats were unhappy to live in a state and in a town they had to share with the (Muslim) Bosnians. All over the Croatian side we saw Croatian flags and Christian crosses. All the shops and restaurants accepted the Croatian kuna.
We crossed the provisional bridge that was erected after Mimar Hayruddin's masterpiece had been destroyed by the Croats and sat down in a café. When it came to paying the waitress refused to accept Croatian money. Bosnia had the Bosnian Mark and this was the only currency with which one could pay in this part of the town. The waitress told us off in good German: “if you visit a foreign country you pay in the currency of the country”, full stop. We tried to explain to her that we were, of course, aware of that but that we had been told before coming here that the kuna was accepted anywhere in Bosnia. What we not had been told was how intensive the hostility between Croats and Bosnians (or Catholics and Muslims) still was. We should have known better.
3.4 Slavonic hospitality
The hospitality that we experienced in Novi Pazar in 1966 is not unusual in Serbia. Serbian hospitality is a serious matter. How serious it was I learned in 2007 when Ursula and I visited my Serb relations in Belgrade. Dušanka’s and Danilo’s children, Blagoje and Jelena, had grown into young adults. Also present was my cousin Dejan who had married a Dutchwomen, Maret. They lived in Amsterdam but spent a lot of their time in Belgrade. One day Dejan rented a bus and drove us into the surroundings of the Serb capital. Somewhere in a remote place we stopped at a restaurant where a suckling pig was roasting on a spit. Sitting in the open air, we ate the meat, salads and white bread. It was delicious. We knew that Danilo and Dejan would foot the bill, but Ursula thought that it might be a good idea if we paid as we had availed of the hospitality of my Serb cousins for a few days. So, I sneaked off and settled the bill behind the backs of Dejan and Danilo. When they found out they were deeply offended. I had disregarded Serbian hospitality! I don’t think they ever forgave me.
Twenty years earlier, in 1967, I had experienced another feast of Slavonic hospitality, that time not in Serbia, but in Bulgaria. One year after our visit to the Serbian monasteries, Ann decided to undertake another epic journey to Bulgaria and Greece in search of further Byzantine treasures. Once again, I accompanied her. 1967 was the first year when Bulgaria had abolished many of the restrictions Western tourists had to face when visiting that country. Now one could easily get a visa at the border. It was valid for one month and travel by car was completely unrestricted. B&Bs were readily available everywhere. When driving into a town or city there was normally a tourist office where you could book private accommodation.
Driving through Bulgaria was sheer pleasure. Traffic was sparse, most roads, even the main roads, were paved with cobblestones. The countryside looked very well cared for. The crops were automatically irrigated and there were many people working in the fields, most of them women. They waved at us as we drove by. It felt like being in a kitschy Heimatfilm. If someone had painted the scene (strong and healthy-looking women working in beautiful fields and happily waving at cars driving by), the result would have been a perfect example of Soviet social-realist art, propagating the benefits of the communist system.
The Bulgarians not only waved at us as we drove by them. Whenever we stopped in a village our car was immediately surrounded by a crowd, we were invited into houses, offered coffee and shown places they thought might be of interest to us. It was sometimes difficult to stick to our travel timetable as the hospitable locals refused to let us go. Even if a lot of this hospitality may have been motivated by curiosity about Westerners it was still remarkable. When a few weeks later we crossed the Turkish border and arrived in Edirne, the contrast to Bulgaria could not be greater. Some street urchins approached us and tried to sell us postcards. We declined politely. As we walked on, they pelted us with stones.
Ann had brought a book with her, by David Rice, on Byzantine Art that listed the churches with the frescoes she wanted to see. We often asked passers-by how to get to this or that church. As we spoke no Bulgarian, we used sign language and when that failed Ann took out her sketchbook and made a little drawing. If, for example, we were looking for the church of the Archangel Gabriel, Ann drew the outlines of a byzantine church (layout like a Greek cross, cupola in the middle), beside it a figure of an archangel, (a creature with two very long wings), and wrote “Gabriel” beside it. The interesting thing was that the men we asked never knew what we meant while the women understood immediately.
David Rice’s book mentioned frescoes in a church high in the mountains, near a remote little town whose name and location I have forgotten. Ann was determined to find the church and the frescoes. We arrived in the town in the late morning and went into the post office hoping that somebody there could tell us how to get there. The two ladies behind the counter spoke a little French and German and they knew where the church was, but told us that it would be difficult for us to find it. They offered to be our guides. Before closing the post office, they rang a doctor in the hospital and asked him if he would join us. The good doctor had to decline as he was scheduled to perform an operation.
So, the four of us set off. We entered a thick forest and started scrambling up steep ground. There was no path. The ladies walked in front of us in their bare feet. Each carried a stick with which they kept hitting the ground. When we asked them why they did that the answer was because of poisonous snakes! After an hour or so of strenuous walking we arrived at the church. It was in ruins and over-grown by trees and shrubs. There were no frescoes. A plaque informed us that they had been removed to a museum in Sofia.
So back down we went, the two barefooted ladies once again ahead of us beating the shrubs with sticks to chase away nasty snakes. Back in the town the ladies insisted on inviting us for lunch. They brought us to a little restaurant at the bank of a river. As we could not understand the menu, we were led into the kitchen to look at the various dishes. We pointed at what we thought we would like to eat. We sat around a rickety wooden table. The owner appeared with a tablecloth. She spread it across the table with a grand gesture, as if it had been made of silk and gold, fit for a royal party. And, indeed, we were treated like royalty. I have never been back to Bulgaria, but the friendliness and hospitality of the people we met has secured a special place in my heart for that country.
3.5 A Journey into history
The history of Yugoslavia and her successor states is closely linked to the history of my own country, Austria. The historic connections are particularly poignant in my mother’s birthplace, Sarajevo. When I was there for the first time in 1966, I stood on the same spot, (it was marked), as Gavrilo Princip who on 28th June 1914 assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife, Countess Sophie Chotek. Nearby was a museum dedicated to this fatal event. I did not learn a lot from visiting it because the explanations were in Serbo-Croat, a language I learned later in life. Some 500 km to the West in Vienna is the marvellous Heeresgeschichtliches Museum (Military Museum). There the visitor can see the car in which the Austrian archduke and his wife were travelling when they were killed. Also, on display is the blood-drenched uniform the archduke was wearing. It is eerie to see these relics of an event that took place over a hundred years ago and triggered one of the greatest European catastrophes that changed the world forever.
Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek were buried in the crypt of Schloss Artstetten, their private castle situated in the idyllic landscape north of the Danube in Lower Austria. Today the castle is the family home of the duchess Anita von Hohenberg and her husband. For reasons too complicated to explain here, the family of the assassinated archduke took the name Hohenberg. Anita von Hohenberg is a great granddaughter of Franz Ferdinand and of Sophie Chotek. On 17th May 2019 Ursula and I visited Schloss Artstetten with its excellent museum. When we arrived there a funeral was taking place. The crypt was closed to visitors but the museum was open. About a hundred and fifty guests were there, “all family” as one of the employees informed us. When the coffin was carried out of the chapel to be moved into the crypt a traditional brass band played a funeral march. We asked who had died and were told that we were witnessing the funeral of the Duke of Hohenberg. He had been in his late eighties and was a grandson of the assassinated archduke. After visiting the museum, we strolled around in the park. We observed the funeral party congregating in a fenced-off space behind the castle for drinks. Later we saw them move into the private rooms in the first floor for a meal.
Bosnia had been part of the Ottoman Empire for centuries before Austria-Hungary annexed it in 1908. About 250 km from Sarajevo my grandfather worked in the hospital of Bosanksi Novi (today Novi Grad). In 1910 he was made an honorary citizen of that town. After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, he stayed in Yugoslavia and retired in Banja Luka, which now like Novi Grad is in the Republica Srpska of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Sarajevo was hit very hard in the war that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia. Bosnia was a battleground between Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs and Muslims. This was not the first time Sarajevo became the victim of a war between Christians and Muslims. At the end of the 17th century the Austrian field marshal Prince Eugen of Savoy pushed the Turks out of Hungary and further east making sure that they would never again threaten Vienna. The Ottomans had unsuccessfully besieged the Imperial city twice, in 1529 and in 1683. After the battle of Zenta where he had routed the Turks, the Prince marched on Sarajevo. When the city refused to surrender on 23rd October 1697, he ordered his troops to ransack it for three days. Poor Sarajevo was burned down and completely destroyed.
In 1717 Eugen conquered the heavily fortified city of Belgrade. The fortress is called Kalemegdan and today is surrounded by a lovely park on an elevated spot from where one has great views over the river Sava. Whenever I visit my relations in Belgrade, we go for a stroll on Kalemegdan. There is a cemetery with the graves of Ottoman generals who defended the fortress and conquered faraway territories. The military commander of Belgrade in 1717 was Vezir Mükkerem Rumeli Valesi Bayeseli Taya-Sade Ibrahim Bassa. After peace was made between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans he served as ambassador in Vienna from 1719 to 1720. Prince Eugen of Savoy died in 1736. Three years later, in 1739, the Turks retook Belgrade.
Fifty more years went by till the Austrians once again besieged Belgrade and conquered it. The general commanding the Austrian forces was seventy-two year old Gideon Laudon, an experienced soldier and veteran of the Seven Years’ War. The Habsburgs did not keep Belgrade very long. In the ensuing peace treaty, it was handed back to the Turks in 1791.
Laudon took Mükkerem Rumeli’s marble sarcophagus to Vienna as a trophy. He also took with him two epitaphs and a beautiful Tughra, a calligraphic monogram of the sultan, all in marble. The epitaphs and the Tughra had been placed at Belgrade’s Konstantinopel Gate after the Turks had retaken Kalemegdan and the city in 1739. The text of the epitaphs praises in grandiloquent language the victory Allah had granted the Ottomans over the infidel Austrians.
Gideon Laudon built himself a charming castle in Hadersdorf near Vienna. He died a year after his Belgrade military adventure and was buried in the Vienna Woods. Walking from Hadersdorf on the path leading further into the hills the hiker inevitably passes by Laudon’s monumental grave. Not far from it, on the other side of the path, are the coffin of the Turkish commander of Belgrade, the two marble epitaphs and the Tughra.
In Sarajevo I stood on the spot from where Princip fired the fatal shots at the car in which Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were travelling. I saw that car and the blood-drenched uniform of the archduke in the Military Museum in Vienna and I accidentally witnessed the funeral of his grandson in Artstetten. I walked on Kalemegdan where Mükkerem Rumelis sarcophagus had stood before Laudon took it together with the epitaphs and the Tughra to Vienna and I look at these trophies in the Vienna Woods whenever I walk by them.
Travelling makes history come alive. It can open vistas into the past and make us aware of historic connections between places and persons and thus enrich our present.
Wounds of war in Mostar
