Halfway down the Danube

The Road to Istanbul

When we lived in Belgrade, we had a little house just off the old Istanbul road.

It wasn't called that, of course. These days it's Bulevar Kralja Aleksandar, King Alexander Boulevard. I think for a while under the Communists it was Bulevar Revolutsija, but they changed the name back. Anyhow, it's the big street that runs from the center of the city to the east, roughly parallel to the Danube.

(In those days we lived on Golsvortieva Street. Golsvortieva is the Serbian version of Galsworthy. John Galsworthy was a British novelist of the '20s and '30s who wrote a lot of "social fiction". Real Communists considered him kind of a wuss, but Titoist Yugoslavia -- the kinder, gentler Communism! -- found him very agreeable, and so named a street after him.)

Belgrade was under the control of the Ottoman Turks from 1423 until 1867. During that whole time, the big road going east from the city was called Drum Stamboul: the Istanbul Road. -- The word drum, incidentally, got left behind all over the region. Here in Romania, you often say drum bun for "goodbye". It literally means "good road", or "have a nice trip".

Anyway, the Drum Stamboul used to run into the center of old Belgrade, which under the Turks was a town of maybe 20,000 people. The Turks called Belgrade "the Portal of Wars"; I won't bore you with the history, except to say that the name was entirely appropriate. But Belgrade was a walled city in those days, and where the road hit the wall, there was a gate: Stamboul Kapija, the Istanbul gate.

Now Stamboul Kapija wasn't just a gate. No, it was a miniature fortress projecting from the greater wall. It was four stories tall, and flanked by two towers filled with soldiers. The road, passing through the gate, became a tunnel, with doors at one end and a portcullis at the other.

In front of the gate was an empty space. It was kept clear for reasons of military security, except that it was occasionally used for public punishments and executions. This was the scene of one of the most gruesome episodes in modern Serbian history: in 1814, in response to riots in the city, the Turks impaled nearly two hundred Serbs on stakes. (There's a bloody backstory there too, involving the First and Second Serbian Uprisings, but maybe some other time.)

There's a story that three of the executed Serbs were Orthodox priests or deacons. The story further goes that the youngest of them, a fellow named Avakum who was just 20 years old, was offered the chance to live if he would convert to Islam. He refused, was impaled, and died horribly. Thereafter he was proclaimed a holy martyr by the Serbian Orthodox Church. No problem there... but in recent years, he's also become a symbol for Serb nationalists. There's a whole "transcendent holiness of the Serb victim" thing going on there. More on this anon.

Meanwhile: the Second Serbian Uprising was a success, sort of, and Serbia won autonomy from the Turks in 1819. But the Turks kept nominal sovereignty. They showed this by keeping control of the Kalamegdan, the citadel-fortress in the center of Belgrade, and also of the Istanbul Gate. So, while Serbia was an "autonomous principality", all traffic in and out of Belgrade's main gate passed under the eyes of the Turkish garrison.

This odd and rather humiliating arrangement lasted nearly 50 years. Finally, in 1867, autonomy became full independence and the Turks were expelled. This, BTW, is part of the reason many Serbs still hate the idea of "autonomy" for Kosovo and other regions of Serbia. While the term has a neutral or slightly positive connotation to most modern Europeans, Serbs have learned from their history that it really means "way station on the road to independence".

And as soon as the Turks left, the Serbs tore the Istanbul Gate down. It was a symbol of hated alien rule and national humiliation, obviously. And they needed the building material. Belgrade, the capital of newly independent Serbia, was bursting out of its old walls.

So the Serbs took the stones of the great Gate and used them for new construction in the city that was, finally, theirs and theirs alone. The site of the Gate became the great central square of the new city, flanked by the National Theater -- built in part with the Gate's own stones -- and the National Museum. An equestrian statue of the Prince who drove out the Turks was placed in the center of the square.

And a wall of new buildings was placed across the old empty space where the Drum Stamboul had approached the city. I'm not sure why they did this, but I suspect it was symbolic. The Istanbul Road no longer ran directly to the heart of the city. And this is why, even today, if you want to exit central Belgrade to the east, you have to do a strange little workaround; it's curiously difficult to get from "Freedom Square" to Bulevar Kralja Aleksandar by car, even though it's just three or four blocks' distance walking.

-- This was a post I originally wanted to write two years ago, when we still lived in Belgrade. I finally got around to it now, because the story of the Mogosoaia pavement reminded me of it. Constantin Brancoveanu's oak beams under Callea Victoriei; the stones of the old Stamboul Kapija deep in the foundations of Belgrade.

One difference, though. A few months ago, on December 30, 2004, a cross suddenly and mysteriously appeared in Freedom Square in central Belgrade. It was a large cross with a cement base, no casual thing. It popped up as suddenly and unexpectedly as a mushroom. And it was dedicated to "Holy Martyr Deacon Avakum".

Nobody knows who put it there, and nobody has claimed responsibility. But in the context of modern Serbia, it's not too hard to guess.

Sometimes the past gets buried and forgotten. And sometimes it just gets buried.

Posted by douglas at May 17, 2005 12:08 AM