Danubian clouds

The plane takes off, for one minute it seems to move toward the downtown, but then turns sharply south, it follows the line of the Danube. On both sides of the river’s strip, the colorful chessboards of arable lands, mining lakes and salty backwaters shine in the vaporous afternoon sunshine.


After crossing the Serbian border, the plane soon reaches Vukovar where the Danube, obeying the orders of the old kings, turned to the east, and still outlines the boundaries of a missing country. The plane, before saying goodbye to that country, and continuing its journey south through the long Serbian corridor in front of the crowded rooms of the small Western Balkan peoples, describes an elegant circle above the last river bend, which, along with its three tributaries, draws a complex circuit on the Bačka plain.


The Erdőd (in Croatian, Erdut) Bend, as the Danubian Islands blog writes, was forced to turn to east by the Erdőd loess range, which rises up to sixty meters above the river. The loess range, extending from Almás to Erdőd, is well visible on the map of the First Military Survey (1763-1787). To the east, at Almás the Drava flows into the Danube, from the south the stream, which the map still calls Weis Graben, and from the north the tiny river of Mostunka. If, on the map of Mapire.eu, you click on Options, and then you set the layer of “First Military Survey” to 0%, you will see that the lake under the former Rácz Millidits and today’s Srpski Miletić, which, in the foreground of the photo, repeats the bend in the shape of a half moon, gathered up from the water of the river.


The afternoon vapors have become thicker, and a multitude of tiny clouds rise up from the hot plain, forming a threatening cloud cup. Sometime, when kayaking on the Danube, we used to look up worried, whether it would be poured upon us before we camped. Below, the Danube is the reality, the paddle strikes, the country borders. From below, the clouds floating above the large water belong to it: they are the Danubian clouds. Seen from above, the three-dimensional world of the clouds is realistic and self-contained: they do not belong to anything, least to the tiny strip meandering on the worn cloth of the earth. Nevertheless, they are the same Danubian clouds. This is why I could send this photo to the Danubian clouds photo contest of the Danubian Islands blog, where it won the first prize. The river has been stretched to the sky, “the foundations flew upon high.”

Tamás Sajó: The cloud looks back

Franz Ferdinand’s three deaths

In the previous post about Sarajevo’s syagogues, a cuckoo’s egg slipped in about the Yugoslav memorial plaque of Gavrilo Princip, unscrewed from the wall by the German army marching into the city in April 1941, and sent to Hitler for his birthday. Now the cuckoo hatches from the egg and spreads its wings.

In fact, the removal of the plaque was considered so important by the German official newsreel Deutsche Wochenschau, that they dedicated an entire half minute to it out of the twenty-four-minute broadcast of the truly glamorous events of the week. By clicking on it, the video starts right at 11:38, at the beginning of the scene.


“In Sarajewo. Hier wurde am 28en Juni 1914 der österreichische Tronfolger Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand durch das feige Attentat eines serbischen Studenten niedergestreckt. Diese Schüsse waren das Signal zum Weltkrieg. – Die Marmortafel, die diesem Ort von Volksdeutschen entfernt, und dem deutschem Wehrmacht übergeben. Sie trägt die Inschrift: »An dieser historischen Stätte erkämpfte Gavrilo Princip Serbien die Freiheit.« Der Führer überwiest die Tafel der Berliner Zeughaus.”

“Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, the infamous terror attack of a Serbian student killed Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. This gunshot gave the signal to the Great War. – This marble plaque was removed by the Volksdeutsche and handed over to the German army. Its inscription: «In this historic place, Gavrilo Princip achieved freedom for Serbia.» The Führer forwarded the plaque to the Zeughaus in Berlin.”

The newsreel emphasizes that the plaque was removed not by the army, but by the Volksdeutsche, the local ethnic Germans, and it was they who then handed it to the army. However, the spontaneity of the dozen of young people, dressed in flawless white shirts and ties, and performing a well-choreographed little march, is quite questionable. Not to mention that the field musicians and officers of the Wehrmacht are assisting in this action, obviously just as spontaneously. And if we also know that the pictures were taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, who then immediately boarded Hitler’s private train Sonderzug Amerika, especially sent for the plaque, to photograph the next day the Führer, celebrating his fifty-second birthday in Mönichkirchen, as he is intensely looking at the plaque, then it will be clear that it was a well-planned and prepared symbolic event.


Hitler is also beholding extremely spontaneously the plaque surrounded by two and half zombies. We know that only Hoffmann was allowed to take photos of him, and only while posing, in poses worthy of a great statesman. These poses were borrowed from the topos repository created by classical and romantic painting and sculpture, which also offer us a clue to understanding them. The one we see here is “the great general contemplating the ruins of Rome” pose. Which also suggests that this plaque meant more to him than merely spoils of war from an unnatural state created by Versailles.

Hitler agreed with Franz Ferdinand’s removal from the throne, even though he condemned the assassins. The Slavic-friendly crown prince, who had a Czech consort, meant to him and to his associates the danger of a compromise with the Slavs and the diminution of the weight of the German element. It is no wonder that he celebrated with relief on Munich’s Odeonplatz the war that settles accounts with Serbia and Russia threatening the German Lebensraum. By accident, this moment was photographed by Hoffmann, who, twenty years later, found the future Führer it in, at his request. No matter whether the figure is really the young Adolf, or, as some say, some retouching by Hoffmann was also necessary to make the identification. The point is that Hitler wanted be in that picture, he wanted to be at the starting point of the glorious German Sturm. It was the zero point of the Sarajevo pistol shot that launched him and the German people on the right track, and now that this track – despite the humiliation of Versailles and through its obliteration – would soon reach its zenith with the overcoming of Russia, the Führer looks back at this starting point when contemplating the Princip plaque.


In 1930 the Yugoslav state, by placing a plaque on the spot of the Princip attempt – albeit setting it as a private initiative – with the inscription “На овом историјском мјесту Гаврило Принцип навијести слободу на Видов-дан 15. јуна 1914” – “From this historical place Gavrilo Princip brought us freedom on St. Vitus’ Day, 15 June 1914” (that is, on the 28th of the Gregorian calendar), managed to achieve the outbreaks of not only its former World War enemies, but also of its own allies. That Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung calls it a “monstrous and intolerable provocation”, is just natural from the German side. But also London Times wrote, that the plaque immortalizes “an act which was the immediate cause of the Great War, of its attendant horrors, and of the general suffering which has been its sequel”. Churchill, in his contemporary The Unknown War calls it the monument of infamy, which, erected by Princip’s fellow countrymen, “records his infamy and their own”. And according to the contemporary British historian Robert William Seton-Watson, the plaque “was an affront to all right-thinking people”.

The Sarajevo Volksdeutsche handing the Princip plaque to the German Army

However, we cannot understand the real cause of the establishing of the plaque if we do not know the myth that it fits within. The clue is offered by the seemingly unnecessary archaism of Vidovdan, St. Vitus’ day, in the text. On this day, 15 June 1318, the whole Serb nation, led by Prince Lazar, was martyred on the plane of Kosovo, confronting the Ottoman army to the last warrior. This is the zero point of Serbian history. One has to get back here, and here one has to restart history, which at that point took a regrettably wrong turn. This is the so-called Kosovo Myth, which was coined by 19th-c. Serbian romanticism, and to which we can lead back all the 20th-century Balkan wars that started from Belgrade. To kill a tyrant on St. Vitus’ Day is an archetypal act, as was done by the legendary Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić, who struck the Sultan after his victory. And vice versa: if a Serbian warrior kills someone on Vidovdan, it symbolically attests that he was a tyrant. Princip’s Vidovdan bullet in one moment produced the archetypal constellation required by the Serbian military leadership to represent the fight for the re-devision of the Balkans as a sacred national war. From then on, the struggle for Bosnia was not just a dog-fight over the territories left by the Turks, but a necessary historical act leading to the correction of national history, which had taken a wrong turn in 1389. This zero point and this myth was faced with the myth and zero point of the Führer contemplating it in the railway wagon in Mönchkirchen.

Princip and his fellow conspirators as Vinovdan heroes. Below: The “chapel of the Vinovdan hroes”, erected upon Princip’s ashes, in Sarajevo’s old Orthodox cemetery

The plaque was then moved to the Zeughaus in Berlin, which was then a military museum called Arsenal. Here, a huge exhibition of the symbolic booty was organized, with Princip’s plaque in the middle. They also brought here the French rail car, in which in 1918 the German capitulation was signed, thus washing away the shame of Versailles. The building is today Deutsches Historisches Museum, where similar objects still often pop up, now of course as exhibition objects. Like the Zagreb bronze plaque, which attempted to give a new consciousness to the young South Slavic state by stamping the Hungarian coat of arm under its figures’ feet.

The Gravrilo Princip plaque on the booty exhibition in the Zeughaus

During the siege of Berlin, the plaque was destroyed together with the German myth. In Sarajevo, the Yugoslav partisans replaced it on 7 May 1945, a day before the German capitulation, with this inscription: “With eternal thanks to Gavrilo Princip and his comrades fighting against the German invasion.” For now, the Serbian myth gained the upper hand, in a new, popular tuning. In 1953, when the building was converted into a museum of the Young Bosnia movement, which had organized the assassination, a new plaque was set up with a new text: “On June 28, 1914, from this place Gavrilo Princip expressed with his pistol shot the people’s protest and centuries-old aspirations for freedom.” This plaque disappeared between 1992 and 1996, when the people of Sarajevo also expressed with machine gun shots from this place their aspirations for freedom and protest against the tyranny of Serbian nationalism, keeping the city under a bloody siege. Today it only says in Bosnian and English: “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.”

On 28 June 2014, when this  plaque was inaugurated, another monument was also solemnly set up in Sarajevo. The small square is located at the westernmost end of Sarajevo, which is nevertheless called East Sarajevo. This is the part of the town where the Serbs moved out during the siege, and where, after the war, new housing estates were built for them from international aid. There are no physical boundaries between the two parts of the city, yet there is virtually no contact and no public transport between them. Here, a new, heroic statue of Gavrilo Princip was set up, and at the same time one of the first public spaces of the new district in formation was also named Gavrilo Princip Park. The myth lives on.

The new Princip monument in Google Street View, and its inauguration at the centenary

However, the first souvenirs of the assassination were much earlier than the 1930 memorial plaque. Already a hundred years ago, the local paper shops entered into the service of catastrophe tourism, and immediately started publishing picture postcards, which do not merely represent the Latin Bridge and its environs as a city view, but rather as the scene of the assassination, sometimes marking the exact spot with a small cross.

The souvenir postcards were usually provided with the Franz Ferdinand memorial stamps, which represented, besides the princely consorts, the Sarajevo Basilica, planned but never realized in their memory (see below).

And in 1917, on the third anniversary of the attempt, the first plaque appeared on the spot, marking the location for all subsequent plaques. This plaque was set up by the Austro-Hungarian government on Moritz Schiller’s deli, from which Princip stepped out to shoot the crown prince. The only Bosnian-language plaque with cross and imperial crown said: “In this place, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg suffered a martyr’s death at an assassin’s hand.”

The plaque in front view, and seen from the quay and from Franz Josef street.
Last photo: the scaffolding used to affix the plaque.

Already in 1916, the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina announced a competition for a grand martyr’s monument of the princely couple. It had a Hungarian winner, the excellent Art Nouveau sculptor and architect Jenő Bory (1879-1959), later rector of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, who in January 1915 was commissioned to Sarajevo as a military engineer. Here Pater Puntigam, the director of the archbishop’s seminary, and the chief promoter of the Archduke’s cult, showed him the Archduke’s bloody shirt, and introduced him to the conception of the story which was to be visualized in the memorial.

Since there was no room for a monument in the narrow Franz Josef Street, only a 2×1-meter cast steel plate was sunk into the pavement, with the Latin inscription: “Hoc loco die 28. Junie 1914. vitam et sanquinem fuderunt pro Deo et patria Franciscus Ferdinandus archidux eiusque uxor ducissa Sophia de Hohenberg.” (“In this place Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg gave their lives and blood for God and the homeland.”) Probably this sunken panel gave the idea of that much later, post-1953 monument, which sank the assassin’s footprints into the pavement of the walkway.

No legible photo of the sunken panel has survived, and different sources remember slightly different texts. This one is from Belgischer Kurier, a local version of Deutsche Kurier published in occupied Belgium.

The actual monument was set up on the opposite side of the quay, at the head of the Latin Bridge opposite the house. Two tall columns held the bronze relief of the princely couple, with a small Pietà statue and an eternal flame under it. For the sake of symmetry, a semicircular marble bench was also built at the other bridgehead, where it was possible to meditate on the historical scene.

The memorial column with the relief, and with different mourning groups

The model of Jenő Bory’s relief. Tolnai Világlapja, Aug. 10, 1916

The three units of the monument at inauguration

And this was just the beginning. Pater Puntigam began collecting more tribute to erect even larger memorial buildings to the princely couple: a huge Neo-Romanesque church in memory of Franz Ferdinand, and a youth home named for Duchess Sophie. Both were designed by Jenő Bory. The first three million golden crowns were collected, and Bory was already involved in the execution, when the Monarchy was forced to armistice, and then to retire from Sarajevo. The church was never realized. However, Jenő Bory recalled to have been inspired by it for his own home and studio in Székesfehérvár, the famous Bory Castle. The Serbian troops marching in Sarajevo removed both memorial plaques and the monument. Only the arched bench remained in the site, as an apparently innocent abbreviation of the story, which, however, spoke volumes to the initiates.

The model of the Franz Ferdinand memorial church, and a summary of Jenő Bory’s other monumental designs in Sarajevo. Új Idők, 1916/2, 21-22.

But the story is not over yet. It turned out that the original bronze relief of the monument also survived the stormy century in the cellar of the museum. In 2001, it was proposed in the City Council to restore the columns, and set it up in its original location. For the time being, they erected a plexi plate at the memorial site, with a small drawing of the original sculpture, and a historical explanation.



All this fits well with the new conception of Bosnian history outlined in recent decades, the three pillars of which are the independent medieval Bosnian kingdom, the rich culture and tolerance of Ottoman Sarajevo, and the Austro-Hungarian era of economic and intellectual revival. The public buildings and achievements of Austrian times are emphasized throughout the city. The former Young Bosnia Museum has been converted into a museum presenting the Austro-Hungarian Golden Age in Bosnia. At the centenary ceremony in Sarajevo, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played Haydn’s Imperial Hymn. The epoch of Austria Felix has become a new zero point for Bosnian history. The monument of the assassination stood in the service of a new myth.

Monasteries in Kosovo

I never thought of visiting monasteries under military protection.

This afternoon, leaving behind us a storm over Novi Pazar in southern Serbia, we entered Kosovo via Montenegro by the spectacular road which crosses a pass at over 1,800m. At the border post, while buying insurance (the green card is not valid in Kosovo), the truck drivers warned us of the dangers of the road, repeating langsam, langsam fahren, and drawing hairpin turns in the air, the dizzying descents and loops of some terrifying roller-coaster.
In fact, from up there, the plain was invisible for a long time.





In Peć, we wanted to visit the Patriarchate in the Rugova Gorge, and the monastery of Dečani to the south. The first seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church was founded in the Middle Ages at Žiča near Kraljevo, at that time close to the northern border of medieval Serbia, but as the region was regularly subjected to wars, the first bishops moved the seat of their authority to Peć in today’s Kosovo, protected by nearly impassable moutains.

Nevertheless, peace never came, and the monastery stood for centuries under the protection of some great power, either the Ottomans or the KFOR.

In Peć, no guide-post indicates the direction to the Patriarchate. Just as the monastery of Dečani will not be indicated later: there are only signs to the Rugova Gorge and its natural park. However, the Patriarchate appeared very clearly on our map, just at the beginning of the gorge, but driving along the long road at the foot of the cliffs, also encountering a joyous Albanian wedding procession, we saw no monastery. Ultimately, coming across a police car at one of these poor taverns bearing the false banner of “pizzeria”, we asked for the way.
The Patriachate? We have long since passed it.
The officer only had an approximate command of English, don’t worry, you drive one kilometer maybe two, I call my colleague, he make you signs when you come on the road, you see him. He made a long phone call, describing the car with a French license plate, and yes, yes, he assures us, he make you signs when you come on the road, you see him, you can go.
One mile, then two, and no monastery in sight yet – just a sort of military camp with long walls protected by barbed wires and one or two watchtowers. A guard we pass by before seeing the tired soldier, who waves us hand without rising from his chair. We are on the right way to the Patriarchate. The guard and the lowered barrier bear the emblem of KFOR, and we must leave our passports there – just as we will do later, in the Dečani Monastery –, after passing the barbed wire entanglements, waiting in front of an armored vehicle, and the military interrogation (of course, we  should also have left our arms there, this is self-evident).



Once we leave the barrier behind, the road gently slopes toward the river, and we are alone. Over the large concrete walls some older walls are revealed. The portal of the Patriarchate opens westward, facing the river, and the monastery appears as an island, encircled with the monastic buildings which form a circle, an orb, in the center of which lies a garden with its canals and mulberries planted in the 13th century – the church is in the background, behind the motionless branches –, as an image of the heavenly Jerusalem.
One, two nuns pass by without rushing. Another with a bucket. Very young and very elderly ones.
Yes, you can eat the mulberries. The old lady dressed in gray lowers the branches, so we pick the fruit. Flies buzz over the creek. The blue juice spots the slabs.

Like in many monastic churches of Serbia, the building complex of the Patriarchate is also painted red, on the model of the churches of Mount Athos, and still there are traces of frescoes on the façade of the narthex. Behind the façade, on the northern side, there is a small cemetery where, not far from the nuns, there lays a man with a feverish face.

But the external architecture with its apses and domes does not immediately reveal the complexity of the internal organization of the building.
Three gates open in the dark narthex. This is not a single church here, but a complex of three joined churches, plus a fourth one at the southern side of the building. The central gate leads into a short nave with a barrel vault submerged in obscurity, like a tunnel to be crossed in the dark to reach the ineffable, the space opening under the dome. This is the church of the Holy Apostles, the oldest of the three, perhaps founded by Saint Sava himself around 1250. The left door provides access to Saint Demetrius, a smaller building filled with light, while the right one to that of the Virgin Hodigitria, a broader and higher church. The fourth, closed church is dedicated to Saint Nicholas.

The bright narthex, paved with marble, completely covered with frescoes from the mid-fourteenth century, prepare you for the vision of the three major churches it precedes. But it was also the place where the Serbian Church held its councils. Hence the emphasis on the mission of the apostles and the message of the gospel. The fresco cycle represents the miracles and parables as they are described in the Gospels, and in the order in which they will be read during the liturgy of Lent. Above the main door, the encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman accompanies the healing of the blind.


Agni parthene (Oh pure Virgin). Serbian church hymn of Greek origin, sung by Divna Ljubojević

The nun joining us is very old, very small and fragile. Leaning on a long curved stick, which is surely higher than her, she speaks with a clear voice, passionately and eruditely. She reads us the pictures as if she were reading a language which is both far away and familiar, she speaks about the images which evoke texts, and the texts that are contained in the images, she connects each fresco to the next one, she reveals what is hidden in the painting, she recalls not only the men of the thirteenth century, but also the thought of their time, and suddenly the frescoes come to life, and the thought takes shape before our eyes. How to convey this moment?

Thee narthex, the three elongated churches one along the other, the walls, the arches, the domes, everything is covered with frescoes, painted nearly eight hundred years ago by artists from Thessaloniki. High above us, in the church of the Holy Apostles, which pretends to be a replica of the room of the Last Supper in Jerusalem, Christ’s ascension. Below, in successive circles, angels and apostles dancing with hands raised to celebrate the celestial Mass.
On the southern wall, in the lunette above the arch, Christ calling Lazarus. The painter, having not enough place to represent Lazarus standing, chose to show the moment before the call, when Lazarus had not yet risen. A man in red stretches a long ribbon from the corpse sitting in the grave, a ribbon which he strips off him as the sins of Lazarus fall off him; but the most surprising sight is Christ, whose eyes, while leaning forward at the left side of the arch and drawing a cross with the hand, are at the same height of those of Lazarus, and their eyes meet above the man in red, who stops in his work, and waits, with one hand lifted as a sign of interrogation. Above, almost following the vertical of Lazarus resurrected, Saint Thomas slips two fingers into the wounds of Christ – and these are like three questions, three question marks following each other on the wall.
Under the arch, the Nativity of Christ facing His baptism in the Jordan. The two scenes are related to each other by the long silver beam emanating from both sides of the arch, the star of the Holy Spirit. Opposite, on the northern wall, just above the arch, Christ is lying under the right side of the arch, on a pink cloth. This is how He participates in the Last Supper, already separated from the apostles who are almost invisible in the darkness enveloping the table, hidden behind the great dishes. In the scene just behind it, on the arch under the dome, the apostles are in the forefront, in the supper of Pentecost, flooded with light and gold.

A few kilometers away, in another valley in the woods, the monastery of Visoki Dečani was built on the orders of King Stephen Uroš III (1321 - 1331) by a Franciscan architect, Fra Vita, and by Dalmatian builders coming from Kotor.

The monastery of Dečani, also enclosed in the circle of its fortified walls, also protected by barriers, fences, barbed wire entanglements, soldiers, camouflage nets, concrete blocks, reveals itself having an appearance from somewhere far away, perhaps the south of Italy. The refinement of the sculpted portals and windows, the texture of the white stone, the barely dimmed, barely pink marble, the strips of pilasters that run around the walls. From the outside everything seems to announce a long Romanesque nave and transept, but a completely different structure is hiding behind the walls: a narthex with double nave at right angles to the church, the nave and the choir inscribed in a square – and so dizzying when you contemplate, with the head thrown back, all the height of the church (this is the meaning of visoki), completely covered with frescoes.

Foundation charter of the monastery, 14th century. King Stephen Uroš III of Dečani is represented in one of the frescoes of the church according to the Byzantine iconographic formula used for the emperor as a church-builder.

At the foot of the iconostasis, the sarcophagus of the founder, King Stephen Uroš III of Dečani, who died in 1331 and, it is said, remained intact to this day. Behind him, on the western wall, an immense fresco of the Parousia or the Second Coming shows Christ descending from the heaven on a throne carried by angels, with the open Gospel on the knees, and the instruments of the Passion laid out on a strange, black veil. Just above the portal, under Christ the Judge, the Assumption of the Virgin. As in Peć, one of the chapels contains a fresco cycle dedicated to the Genesis, and another to the life of the Virgin; one wall recounts the Acts of the Apostles, others line up the holy soldiers like St. Demetrios and all the archangels, whose swords will slice up the sins. All in all, about a thousand scenes covering the walls.

A taciturn monk follows us slowly in the church, with a voice like a whisper, and strange gestures, like a big, patient shadow at our side. He invites us to see the cells of the monks, and he remains behind alone in the garden.
We have coffee on large tables under the covered arcades. Voices, not far, behind the closed doors. Outside, flies buzz in the trees.