The Danube

by Nick Thorpe

  The question of possible literacy is the hardest of the many Vinča nuts to crack. ‘However fragile the documentary bridge may seem today between the decay of writing in the Danube civilization and the earliest documentation of Linear A signs in Minoan Crete around 2500 BC, the time gap is not so dramatic as to exclude a historical relationship by means of cultural memory between these two traditions of script use,’ wrote Harald Haarmann, of the Institute of Archaeo-mythology in California.12

  Andrej himself is not completely convinced. ‘I'm pretty sure that the Vinča system of signs was a kind of very structured and strict written communication. But whether we can call it an actual “script” or not is less important.’ If one accepts that these are written signs, what might they have been meant to communicate, and to whom? ‘My research as an archaeologist shows clearly that almost 90 per cent of the objects with signs found so far came from the context of everyday domestic life, from the interior of houses. From garbage pits, and not from graves, or from sanctuaries, or from ritual places. That is not so easy to explain.’ Why the great Danubian civilisations of the Copper Age died out is as big and as enigmatic a question as how they arose, and from whence. Once again, modern research is turning some of the old theories on their heads. ‘The way our teachers explained the end of Vinča was the following. Vinča as the capital started to decline, so all the other settlements inevitably followed. We now believe that the Vinča settlement near Tuzla, and the salt mines that were so central to their ability to export meat, were destroyed first.’ The loss of salt may have been the killer blow for the Vinča people. ‘The attackers came from the north, from the Hungarian plain. For the first time in my research on Vinča, I saw real evidence of battle, of destruction in war. A lot of arrow heads, burnt houses, even a skeleton, left where the body fell. Then, nearby, evidence of a settlement of a completely different people – the victors.’

  Skadarska Street intersects with Francuska Street in Belgrade, home to the Serbian Writers's Union and a restaurant with traditional Serbian food. The nineteenth-century villa is a well-established nest of nationalists and communists. You reach the entrance down the side of the building. In March 1999 I came here one evening with some fellow reporters. Entering the hallway, a staircase spirals down into a murky restaurant in which the brightest objects are the perfectly starched, almost fluorescent white shirts of the waiters, floating between the tables like fireflies. The gloom allows those who have been sitting here for hours a chance to survey each new arrival at their leisure, before they are identified themselves. As we reached the bottom of the steps, an elderly woman shrieked across the room: ‘Simpson is here, war is . . inevitable.’ The tall man at my side, the easily recognisable figure of the BBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent John Simpson, froze in mid-step as if he had been hit by a sniper's bullet.

  ‘Who is that woman?’ John asked me.

  In the ebbing darkness, I recognised the fragile figure of Dessa Trevisan, the doyenne of the foreign press corps in Belgrade and a long-serving correspondent for the London Times.13 I whispered her name.

  ‘Oh, Dessa, how are you?’ he asked, and went and sat on the arm of her chair. The broken fabric of the hubbub rapidly healed. Plates of fiery red paprika baked in olive oil and stuffed with sheep's cheese bounced from the tables, hurled down by waiters who identified us as the enemy, but who were determined to maintain the tradition of Serbian hospitality to the bitter end. During the war in Bosnia, if you failed to drink enough plum brandy with the gun-toting thugs on the roadblocks, you could be killed on the spot for that reason alone. Serbia is a nation of Boy Scouts. If there's no fire, no alcohol, no meat roasting on the spit, the men get bored very easily.

  Dessa Trevisan was right. A few evenings later we watched NATO missiles rain down on Batajnica, the base of the Yugoslav Air Force just outside Belgrade, and on the bridges over the Danube. The waiters of the Writers' Union, like many of their compatriots, spat fire and fury that their Second World War allies had turned against them so cruelly, so incomprehensibly. And we were holed up in the luxury of the Hyatt Hotel, just across the Sava river in New Belgrade, being bombed by our own airforce.

  The strategic importance of Belgrade, at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, is best appreciated from Kalemegdan, the fortress on the headland overlooking both rivers. In November 1990 I came to Belgrade for the first time, hoping for an interview with President Slobodan Milošević. Vladimir Stambuk, one of his minions in the Socialist Party of Serbia, met me instead. We drank freshly squeezed orange juice in the socialist headquarters in the same drab skyscraper across the river which would later be the target of NATO airstrikes. Milošević was in no way responsible for the impending collapse of Yugoslavia, the suave Stambuk explained – the leaders of the other republics, of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Macedonia, were to blame.

  Josip Broz Tito, the partisan leader who had defeated German forces in numerous skirmishes in the Second World War and became president of the new Yugoslavia in 1945, died of old age in 1980. He kept this disparate empire of feuding nationalities and interest groups together for so long by skilfully playing each off against the others. Without Tito there to pull the strings, every nationality set off in its own direction. Milošević offered to restore to the Serbs, as the largest nation in Yugoslavia, what many felt – especially members of the nationalistically minded Writers' Union – was their rightful position as ‘first nation’. This kindled the desire of other peoples, reluctant to live under Serbian domination, to leave the federation. First Slovenia and Croatia in 1991, then Macedonia and Bosnia in 1992, Montenegro in 2005 and Kosovo in 2008 jumped ship with varying degrees of bloodshed.14

  In 1915, another foreign correspondent, John Reed of the New York Times, found himself crawling over Kalemegdan, to get a better view of Austrian positions. ‘From the edge there was a magnificent view of the muddy Danube in flood, inundated islands sticking tufts of tree tops above the water, and the wide plains of Hungary drowned in a yellow sea to the horizon. Two miles away, across the Sava, the Austrian town of Semlin (Zemun) slept in radiant sunlight. On that low height to the west and south were planted the invisible threatening cannon. And beyond, following southwest the winding Sava as far as the eye could see, the blue mountains of Bosnia piled up against the pale sky. Almost immediately below us lay the broken steel spans of the international rail bridge which used to link Constantinople to western Europe – plunging prodigiously from their massive piers into the turbid yellow water. And up-stream still was the half sunken island of Tzigalnia, where the Serbian advance-guards lay in their trenches and sniped the enemy on another island four hundred yards away across the water. The captain pointed to several black dots lying miles away up the Danube, behind the shoulder of Semlin.

  “Those are Austrian monitors,” he said. “And that low black launch that lies close in to shore down there to the east, she is the English gunboat. Last night she stole up the river and torpedoed an Austrian monitor. We expect the city to be bombarded any moment now. The Austrians usually take it out on Belgrade.”15

  The military museum on Kalemegdan is defended from the elements by a line of obsolete pieces of Serbian, German and Russian artillery. The first room is lined with the spears and helmets of Thracians, Celts and Illyrians, from 1000 to 400 BC.16 There is a good selection of Turkish weaponry from the sixteenth century, including a bow of Tatar maple, the tree much favoured by Ottoman bow-makers over the European yew. There is a muzzle-loading Austrian regimental gun, with the inscription ‘I was cast by Balthasar Heroldt in Vienna, 1655’. And a display case with the title ‘Weapons of the unequal opponents’, with the pick axes and scythes of the Serbian peasants used during their first uprising against Ottoman rule in 1806, arrayed beside the cold, carved steel of their Turkish oppressors. Room 16 is given over entirely to ‘Battles against the Turks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, including a German-language map entitled ‘Victorien der Christen über den Erbfein
d’, which translates as ‘Victories of the Christians against the eternal enemy’.

  In another room, the haunted features of Gavrilo Princip gaze down from the wall, the assassin of the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in June 1914 in Sarajevo, whose shots sparked the First World War. The subsequent Austrian ultimatum to Serbia arrived at the Moskva Hotel, the smartest place in town, because the Serbian government did not yet have a telegraph machine of its own. The machine still sits proudly in a case behind the reception desk. In the museum, next to the photograph of Princip and his fellow conspirators, is an official telegram from Sarajevo – ‘Execution of the verdict in the assassination case of Veljko Čubrilović, Misko Jovanović and Danilo Ilić accomplished without mishap this morning between 9 and 10.’ There are also items from the two aerial bombardments of Belgrade, in the spring of 1941 by the Germans and the spring of 1999 by NATO. There are fragments in the Cyrillic script from books burnt when an incendiary bomb hit the National Library. Beside this is a photograph of the Drava Monitor, a ship of the Yugoslav navy, in action on the Danube near Bezdan against the invading Germans in April 1941.

  From more recent wars, there's a laptop captured from the Kosovo Liberation Army on Mount Pastrik in Kosovo in December 1998, and the cheerfully yellow shells of two cluster bombs, banned under international law, dropped on the city of Niš by NATO planes in May 1999, which killed sixteen and wounded twenty-seven civilians, according to the caption. And finally the combat fatigues of a US airforce pilot named Carpenter, whose F-16 plane was shot down the same month.

  Overloaded by so many mementoes of war, I stumble out into the Kalemegdan sunshine – to yet more war monuments. Ivo Meštrović's giant sculpture nurses a falcon on his left hand and a sword in his right, and gazes down on the Sava river from roughly the spot where John Reed must have crawled in 1915. Beyond the red maple trees, perhaps the descendants of those planted by the Turks, there's a stone to commemorate the feat of arms of János Hunyadi in saving Belgrade in July 1456, decorated with a fresh wreath from a primary school in Hungary. And on the far side of the hill overlooking the Danube stands a statue to the Despot Stefan Lazarević, my old friend from Golubac.

  At one time the hills of cities such as Belgrade and Buda were thick with Turkish gravestones. So few remain today in either city one wonders what these particular men did to deserve the honour of their enemies, or whether it was just their good fortune, and the efforts of the Turkish authorities in later years to restore occasional reminders that their rule was not as bad as it is depicted in local history books.

  One of the most interesting buildings on Kalemegdan is the hexagonal tomb of Damat Ali Pasha the martyr, killed during the battle for Petrovaradin fortress opposite Novi Sad in August 1716. There are little red ribbons tied by the Muslim faithful on the bars across the windows of the tomb against the admonitions of the imams, just as they are on the bushes around Koyun Baba's tomb at Babadag. The sunlight bursts through the bars, and gives a fleeting impression that the green-decked tomb radiates light. The Serbs won the battle for Petrovaradin, and the Turks continued their long retreat across the Balkans.

  A stumpy ship called the Dunav, carrying what looks like fuel, pushes purposefully down the Sava, then carves a wide loop to head upriver on the Danube towards Zemun, past Great War Island. The Danube north of Belgrade is broad and sluggish, especially in summer, moving self-confidently south-eastwards, not a river to be trifled with. In Zemun, a suburb of Belgrade, a friend takes me to his favourite restaurant, right on the shore, to drink walnut brandy and white wine, and eat catfish basted with garlic, and watch the world go by. There's a canoe pulled up on the bank, belonging to a Frenchman in his seventies on his way to the delta. But the paddler himself is nowhere to be seen – stocking up on provisions in town perhaps.

  Mustafa Zade, also known as Köprülü the Virtuous, was one of the better Turkish Grand Vizziers of the seventeenth century, and it looked for a while as though he might reverse the decline of the Ottoman empire's fortunes. The siege of Vienna had failed utterly in 1683; Buda was lost in 1686. In 1690 Köprülü advanced at the head of a large Ottoman army and retook Niš and Belgrade. In the summer of 1691 he marched north beside the Danube from Belgrade to meet the Austrian Prince Ludwig, who came south from Petrovaradin. They met at Slankomen. Turkish superiority on the river failed to compensate for the better armed, better commanded Austrian army on dry land. A deadly barrage of musket fire met each successive Turkish charge. ‘When defeat appeared imminent Köprülü himself, hoping in the last resort to save the day, led a desperate charge. Calling upon Allah, he cleared his way with a drawn sword, flanked by his guards, through the ranks of the Austrians. The heroic gesture was in vain. Their ranks stood firm. He was hit in the forehead and killed by a bullet. His guards saw him fall, lost courage, and fled. His commanders, who might for a while have concealed the news of his death from the troops, broke into lamentations and allowed it to spread, thus undermining morale and creating a general panic,’ wrote Patrick Kinross.17 ‘For the Ottomans, the death in battle of their last shining hope … was a crucial disaster. Hungary was lost to them. So … was Transylvania.’

  Stari Slankomen shimmers in the summer haze, a clutter of red-roofed houses along the shore, and a tall church on the higher ground. Just opposite, the blond Tisza, known higher up as the black and the white Tisza, high in the Carpathians in Ukraine, flows into the Danube. The Tisza was poisoned by a spill of mercury from the gold mine at Baia Mare in Romania in January 2000. Almost all fish life along five hundred kilometres was destroyed. Some heavy metals flowed into the Danube, but the main damage was to the Tisza.18

  In May 2011, as I travelled up the Danube, the Bosnian Serb military leader Ratko Mladić was arrested in Serbia after sixteen years in hiding. I had seen his handiwork in Bosnia and well knew the fear the families of his victims had of him, and of the adulation of his former soldiers. Unusual among officers, he always personally led his troops into battle. That meant that whenever atrocities were committed, he was never far away. In July of that year I am invited to the house where he was caught, in the little village of Lazarevo, not far from the Tisza and Danube rivers. Branko, Mladić's second cousin, sits in the shade under a mulberry tree. There's plum brandy on the table, and fizzy juice for the driver. Branko's neighbour, Nenad, is the first to speak. ‘It was five o'clock in the morning. I'd just walked over to Branko's garden to water my peppers, the big red ones which we call “elephant's ears”. When I looked up, there were policemen everywhere – in uniform and plain clothes. “What's up?” I asked. “Did someone die? Or are you here to buy a pig or a lamb? – Branko has both.”

  Neither, they replied. “We need you as a witness, for a house-search.”’

  Ratko Mladić was well known and well liked in Lazarevo. Many simple, rural Serbs regard him as a man who won battles, and who was on the run for sixteen years, not from justice, but from anti-Serb sentiment in the world. Atrocities like the three-year siege of Sarajevo, the shelling of civilians, and the cold-blooded killing of thousands of non-combatants at Srebrenica, tend to be either disbelieved, or quickly glossed over in such company. The more so since Mladić has many relatives in Lazarevo and, as it turns out, was a regular visitor both in his army years and since, when he was the world's most wanted man after Osama Bin Laden. In the early 2000s, Mladić even kept bees in the village. At that time, armed bodyguards stood close by, to discourage any attempt to seize him. ‘Your gun is showing,’ Nenad, ever the joker, told one of them at that time. ‘It's meant to be showing,’ the man told him, pointedly. Interestingly, the Serbian police never showed any interest in the village, fuelling theories that the state security organs knew very well where he was all those years, but chose to leave him in peace. A week before his arrest, Mladić's son Darko visited Lazarevo for the feast day of Saint George. The general was ill, his supporters had run out of money, and he was tiring of a life in hiding. The absence of commandos, and the peaceful, almost routine, nature o
f the whole operation, give the distinct impression that it was all arranged in advance, with Mladić's agreement.

  ‘I am the man you are looking for,’ he announced, as the police walked into his room. Seated in his track-suit, one arm limp from a stroke, the general was sarcastic, but polite to them, who seemed amazed to find their quarry here. ‘Which one of you is the American?’ he asked. ‘Who is the one who killed my daughter?’

  The suicide of his twenty-three-year-old daughter Ana in 1994 may have tipped the scales in Mladič's mind and turned him from a rational, ruthless soldier into an irrational military leader, capable of mass murder.

  They found two pistols in the cupboard, American made. When the police inspector asked him about them, Mladić said one was a gift from a volunteer in the war. Mladić tried to reassure the police that he had no thought of escape or of violence. ‘If I had wanted to, I could have killed ten of you, because you were just one metre from my window. But I didn't want to, because you are young people, and you are just doing your job.’

  By nine that morning, Mladič was sitting in a black jeep, being driven to the War Crimes court in Belgrade. Within a year, he was on trial for genocide and other crimes against humanity at the International Tribunal in the Hague.