So, this was our last morning in Belgrade. By 11 am we had to leave, so we packed up in anticipation, but still left time for a bit of breakfast. Alexandar, our host, led us out of the apartment and down to the garage. John was in the driving seat for this initial leg of the journey. A shaft of light filled the dark and cool basement, and soon we were out and onto the cobbled street above.
John retraced our entry into the city, but this time amongst noticeably more traffic as we passed the Parliament building and descended down towards the motorway. The one advantage the traffic provided was the time to scrutinise some of the old buildings along this governmental boulevard, and guessing their function.
With an unfamiliar road layout, and a version of the Birmingham ‘Spaghetti Junction’ coming up, together we exited the boulevard and veered right onto the downward slip road onto the main east-west motorway, seamlessly merging in. We glided over the Sava River, past the brutalist New Belgrade community, and were waved off by the Western City Gate, or Genex Tower as its also known. However, nerves began to bubble, as I knew that soon I would have to take over the driving.
Soon enough, we pulled into a service station to fill the tank and grab some road snacks. I was now in control of ‘Sandra the Suzuki’. I got my seat right, and mirrors sorted, and then set off back onto the somewhat quieter road. It took some getting used to, but on a straight and easy road I did not find it too challenging. However, the first stop on the way to Zagreb was going to take us off the ‘beaten track’ and north-east towards a quieter border point and beyond, to the town of Vukovar.
I turned off at the sign for Sid, and we now found ourselves travelling along a busy country road passing through small and narrow villages. Having gone north, as we arrived in Sid we turned left and towards the border about 1-mile further west. As we approached the small border post, a grave yard appeared to our right. Despite it being an ominous symbol of the reason why I wanted to visit Vukovar, I found it odd that a graveyard would sit on the border where no village appeared close by.
The Serbian side of the border was swift. When it was our turn to be checked by the border guard on the Croat side, a rather terse woman asked for papers, which I handed over. She barked ‘papers’ once more because, unbeknownst to us, we needed to give her the documents for the car. John shuffled in the glove box and pulled out a green booklet, which I handed over. A flick through aforementioned documents led to their return, and a barrier being raised. The road ahead was ours.
I recalled that I had passed through this area before, and have the stamps to prove it, as I had crossed the border here some years ago when I travelled by train from Belgrade to Sarajevo. It’s always nice to have a new perspective on a journey when you are retracing your steps. Certainly, going through the border was quicker by car than by train!
The countryside had more contours now, with winding roads dipping up and down agricultural fields and low hills. We came close to the Danube again, swerving away from it once more until we would see it fully again at Vukovar. We were greeted on our arrival by the destroyed water tower in the east of the town. Meandering through some road works, we then found ourselves on a sort of bypass that went around the main high street, both of which were parallel to the river. We located a car park on the opposite side of the bypass to the market, through which we would have to walk to reach the river. We paid our fee and traipsed over.
The odd person was spotted, doing their shopping or sat out staffing their stalls. It was a humid day, so perhaps people came out later in the day. We reached a sort of quay where a small river cut through the town to reach the Danube. We walked over the modern bridge which had helpful information on. The west part of the town was in geographical Slavonia - a name and place which has existed for many centuries. The east of the town was in the Srem/Srijem. This area stretches all the way to New Belgrade, bordered to the north by the Danube and to the south by the Sava. We crossed over into Srem/Srijem.
Situated here were older buildings, more turn of the century and rather more ornate. But also, the evidence was there that they were also recently refurbished. It’s difficult to imagine the horrors that took place here, little over two decades ago. One of the familiar clips of video, in my mind, is of a bus, window wipers miserably oscillating, driving through this very high street after forces on the Serbian side had ‘taken’ Vukovar. Rubble was strewn everywhere, and no people could be seen. It really captured the overwhelming destruction that took place at the start of the war, on a town that had only recently become a frontier town, as former internal borders overnight became international ones.
We walked briefly up and down the high street, during which John attempted to exchange denars at a shop (unsuccessfully I may add). The buildings were Austro-Hungarian in style, plastered and whitewashed, or pastel coloured, with minimal ornamentation gracing them, such as dark wooden beams. A notable feature were the arched colonnades you walked through in lieu of pavements, which provided much needed shade. We returned to Slavonia and sat in a café, near a fan with water misters, and had a coffee. We then returned to the boiling hot car, to continue our journey.
We needed to re-join the main highway, and did so in a south-westerly direction. The terrain was very much the same, but the roads passed by more villages than through them. The slower journey on these countryside roads allowed us to take in our surroundings. We circumnavigated the ring road around the only urban centre we would see until Zagreb. This was Vinkovci. Similar to any experience you have of circling a town - a junction, an industrial park, a retail park, some houses adjacent to the road, and topped off by my first roundabout!
At one point, we found ourselves descending into the Sava floodplain, but its backdrop, to the south and ahead of us, were the peaks of mountains in northern Bosnia, beyond the river. Their allure reminded me of our time there the previous year, and a hint of sadness crept in with the knowledge that we would not be there again on this trip. As we continued to the motorway, joining it after paying our toll, we were in the lull of the floodplain and our horizons were now fields or forests, the latter acting as barriers to settlements beyond.
Two hours out of Vukovar, and very much in the western part of Slavonia, we departed the motorway once more for a pre-planned stop. Having studied south-east Europe, and continuing to read an array of books on the region, the place we were going to visit had a sinister past, the traces of which were now long gone, and a memorial built in another era to commemorate that past.
It was a quiet country road that led to the outskirts of the village of Jasenovac, with the Sava, and Bosnia & Herzegovina, only a stone’s throw away. The name, notorious amongst a number of communities in the former Yugoslavia, represents the concentration camp that existed here during the time of the Nazi-puppet regime of the Ustasha. That regime took the destructive intent of the Nazis - murdering Jews, Gypsies and Roma, and political opponents - and added to those the local Serb population, who lived in the newly created, and expanded, Croatian state known as the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). The regimes’ intent was to ‘cleanse’ the territory of Serbs to make an ethnically pure Croatia. The Serbs comprised the largest group of detainees and victims.
The place was still as we arrived. Only a couple of cars were parked up, and the collective hum of crickets were the only background noise. We parked in front of a single storey building, a disconnected ‘L’ shape, the void of which had marble slabs with information on the site and the architecture of the nearby point of interest. The small museum was of interest, but only took 20 minutes to pass through. The photos of the camp were the only way for you to comprehend the space in which the horrors took place, in the vicinity of where we stood.
We returned to the heat and proceeded to walk up a short embankment, which turned out to be a former railway line branch. An old steam train with animal wagons stood idly on the side, as a reminder of the disturbing role it played in the atrocities. The other reason why I wanted to visit here was to see my first, of what I hope to be many, Tito-era ‘Spomenik’.
The embankment kept the river at bay, but created an almost boggy island between it and the road on which we arrived. The only thing dominating this space was the quadruple winged ‘Flower Monument’. Wooden railway line sleepers formed the causeway to it, with two landscaped pools as sites for reflection, and small circle mounds symbolising where the former camp structures lay.
We had the space to ourselves, and it was peaceful to be here. The concrete structure, despite its beauty, encapsulated the brutal nature of the regime that did its evil work here. Bogdan Bogdanovic was the architect, and he went on to create a vast number of these monuments. One commentator noted that the abstract and non-explicit designs avoided explicit references to death, and instead moved into the sphere of how a monument can create feelings in the observer, feelings of the past, present, and future. Here, I think he captured that sentiment perfectly.
We returned to the car once more and made our way back to the motorway. Within 60 minutes we were at the city limits of Zagreb, and the urban sprawl began to suck us in. Despite my reluctance to drive in cities, I had ensured that the route to get to our accommodation was as simple as possible. It was a right fork off the motorway, now named ‘Slavonska Avenija’ and a left towards the Railway station. As we pulled off into a quiet set of low-rise central European style apartment blocks, hidden behind the Lisinski Concert Hall, I recalled the area as this was where I stayed in 2011. We were met by our host and shown around, given the house rules and what we needed to do before departure, then off they went. We gave ourselves some time to recharge our batteries and shower.
It was dark when we left the apartment, and the area behind the railway station was, as I recalled, a quiet and mildly threatening space you didn’t want to spend any time in. So, we aimed straight for the underpass, stopping for a quick snack from a newsagent, and then appeared out on King Tomislav Square. The series of three squares we were about to walk north through formed part of the late 1800s planned reconstruction of the city, and were the right line of a squared letter ‘U’ of green spaces arching through the city, and were surrounded by grand buildings with ornate facades popular at the time. At the third square, a classical music festival was taking place. We savoured it as we slowly passed, but hunger was very much controlling our movements.
We passed through the brightly lit Ban Jelacic Square, and wound around behind it up a bustling lane of cafes and restaurants, and then down a long and narrow street that had single level wooden framed shops, similar to those in the Bascarsija in Sarajevo. There was a lively atmosphere here, with people singing solo or in a duet every so often. John spotted a nice restaurant, where we could sit out and savour the music and warm evening.
Laterna na Dolcu was the name of the restaurant, and we examined the tasteful few options on the menu. We decided to get a bottle of wine too, after all our driving, and so asked the waiter to recommend one for the food we had chosen. He suggested a specific Croatian red, and we obliged. Only after he left did I see the price, and had a mild panic. It was going to be more than the food! John put me at ease, let’s say, and thankfully the wine was both nice and an had the effect of helping me forget its cost. The steak I had with a potato and spinach side was very nice, and we even had pudding. We left satisfied and meandered a little more about the centre of the city.
A friend of mine from Zagreb recommended going to a small gay club that was near the central square, so John and I headed for there. A glazed door that looked more like the entrance to an office or travel agent was our discreet entrance into this club. We showed our ID and descended to the basement in the now familiar fog of cigarette smoke. It was quiet as we walked in, a couple of patrons on one side and a table of six around a low-level table and sofa. We had some beers and found a spot to perch. We chatted about the day, and often turned towards the door when someone new came in, as that’s how quiet it was. But all of a sudden it had become busy.
Although we didn’t dance, nor stay too long after it had reached a party atmosphere, someone had spoken to us and, as we got chatting, mentioned that a lot Bosnian’s come here, given that it was the closest friendly city for them with a gay scene. I now noticed an ID card of someone who was getting served at the bar when I was, and this confirmed his observation. Soon after, we called it a night and returned via the green squares, and back to our apartment.
No comments:
Post a Comment