Butterfly in Belgrade

by Rod Amis

G21 Editor & Publisher

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There was no time for writing while I was in Serbia (Srbija.) In Belgrade (Beograd) there were promenades to take; markets, museums, fortresses, parks and concerts to take in; and chatter, endless chatter, as Dragan, Dragana and I rushed to share as much with each other as we could before I must leave the country. There was also meeting with Rastislav Durman to check out job prospects and an afternoon with the Vicanovic's young friend, Sneja, who translates contracts and other documents for the Chinese. Durman and I were supposed to get together again, so were Sneja and I -- but there was no time

Dragan, Dragana and I were off to the ruins at Romuliana, and then to visit her family in her home city, Zajecar.

I'm not sure where to begin in describing my almost nine days in Serbia. Everyone I've spoken with (and that's few,) of course, immediately ask me what it was like.

I use a few general adjectives (except with Robin Miller, with whom I am staying as I type this) because there has not been time to catalogue it all in my own mind. There was the Tesla Museum, which I have partially described in these pages, the Parliament building made reknowned in October of last year when the Milosevic regime fell and President Kostunica was elected, the central walk in the city of Belgrade -- built directly over the old Roman road.

You can find relics from the Roman era, excavated from beneath the very cobbles, there. It leads to the original Roman fortress which established the city of Belgrade. Now, beyond the park, where a French monument looms, you find the fortress of Stephan the Despot, overlooking the intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers. This was where the Turks stood against the Holy Roman Empire. In the center of the meeting of the rivers is War Island and beyond "New Belgrade" the border for the Austro-Hungarians.

For those who know the history of the country, there is much talk about the Turks and their long domination. Their influences are seen everywhere, even in the architecture of many of the modern "show place" homes, built by people who work abroad, in the countryside. We passed many of these going up into the mountains on our way to Romuliana.

The capstone of this hejira, of course, was this journey to Romuliana. The mountains there reminded me of Utah. And the ruins themselves were more impressive than even two years of hearing about them from Dragana had prepared me for. There are gates and towers still intact, excavated only during the last few decades, before the money ran out... And that is part of the tragedy of Romuliana.

An entire Roman city, built by the co-emperor Galerius -- many believe to build a personal cult -- when he shared the Roman empire with Diocletian.

You walk in Romuliana, amid the columns that supported temples with roofs of glass and breathe the same air as the Romans. At the west gate of the city, in portals, were statues representing Jove and Alexander, from who Galerius claimed he had descended. Even in my exhausted state, I could not but marvel at what other wonders lay below the ground on which I trod. At certain points in the excavation, like the baths, you can see the actual mosaics that were those wonderful floors. In order to protect them, sand has been placed over them.

At the same time, the tragedy lies in that you can see where local farmers have blown away parts of walls and towers with dynamite, carrying away the ancient stone to use in building their own houses. It is enough to make you weep at history being lost...

I had taken my white dove to find my dream, only to see it being despoiled. If Alexander had walked here, once, before Galerius, no one cared anymore. The protectors of Romuliana, named after Galerius's mother, lived on crumbs in order to give the place some chance to survive...

But when Dragana asked me, "Is Romuliana also your dream now?" I answered: "No. It is your dream, but I shall help you to save it. All I dream of is finding Home..."

The great mystery of America for Dragan and Dragana, my hosts, was baseball. They had seen the American "National Pastime" on television, but had never been able to comprehend the rules or why we are so fascinated by it. (When I mentioned this to Robin Miller, on my return to the States, he joked that I should have brought George Will along.) I explained to my hosts that this was a kid's game for which adults were paid giant dollars to play. I explained that it was very simple, really, as a kid's game should be, but that the unifying principal was the notion of getting home.

I have one warning for anyone choosing to visit Serbia: Beware the Serbian brandy.

I like to think of myself as a pretty hard guy. I'm a Scotch drinker, usually. Serbian brandy knocked me on my ass.

You have been warned.

---

It was from Romuliana that we pushed on to Zajecar, Dragana's hometown.

Zajecar is only seven kilometers from the Bulgarian border on the river Timoc. Naturally, the men there love to fish and among the first questions Dragana's brother Milivoje (Michael) -- who we all call "Bootsa" -- and her father asked me was what the fishing was like where I lived in America. I told them that in Northern California, where I had spent most of my life, salmon fishing was king. They nodded and smiled. Before I left that evening, they made me promise that I would spend more time in Zajecar the next time I visited Serbia, so that we might all spend time fishing together.

This was over the formal family luncheon (which I had been warned about by Dragan and Dragana, repeatedly, in Belgrade. "You must eat everything on your plate!") Dragana's mother and father had been in the medical profession, working in the local hospital, before they retired, and lamented that their jewel of a country had been reduced to its present penury. Dragana's father blamed the politicians, as people do in every country I've ever visited.

Dragana didn't want to talk politics. She was the beloved aunt (tetka) and wanted to spend time gamboling with her two nieces, Bootsa's lovely daughters. She had brought presents and clothes for them from Belgrade, as she and Dragan's last visit had been almost a year earlier.

It was obvious that they had missed the time together, to talk and play and enjoy the comforts of kinship.

Dragan, meanwhile, was forced to go off with Bootsa to work on the Citroen, almost fifteen years old, that is their car. We had driven it up to Zajecar and on the way it had started leaking oil, as an old vehicle is wont to do. Unlike other repairs on the sturdy French car, this one could not be fixed with a little glue.

Dragana and I walked through Zajecar that evening while we waited with her niece, called "Nancy," and looked in the shops, passed a wedding party and the school. Nancy reminded Dragana of the concerns of a fourth grader, while promenading in the new fashionable clothes her tetka had brought her from Beograd.

"What will they think, Rod," Dragana teased me in her way, "when you come back alive from living among the Serbian devils and all you have to report is a lunch in a small mountain village?"

Well, that is not all I have to report, of course. I have reported on the demonstrations in Belgrade over Milosevic's extradiction to the Hague, on the Tesla legacy, and on the injustices this tiny country has had to endure.

That second day, when Dragan and I walked through town, while Dragana was working on a documentary film on painters, I passed the old army headquarters that is now only crumbling concrete and bombed-out rubble -- from the NATO bombing. I pass the American Embassy nearby, with boarded barriers around it, but the American flag still flying.

Though most of the city of Belgrade remains intact, while there I saw a few places reduced to rubble. On the route to Romuliana I crossed bridges that had also been bombed, forcing people to use pontoon bridges, and are now reconstructed.

The former Yugoslavia is now reduced to only the states of Serbia and Montenegro, of course. Montenegro is expected to pull out of what's left of Tito's stitched nation at any time now. Two years max. That will leave Serbia as the last vestige of what we once knew as Yugoslavia. And that means we must learn to understand the Serbs, I believe.


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