A brewery on the Skadarlija

The Skadarlija, Belgrade’s bohemian street, descends from the old town to the suburbs. Its lower end at the market is marked by an Ottoman-style fountain, a copy of the Sebilj at the Sarajevo market, while at the upper end, there is a memorial column, whose long text lists the great kafanas – cafés, music pubs – that worked in the street in the past century, as well as the great poets, painters, musicians and other literati that made the kafanas famous in Belgrade and across the country.


Some nearby pubs were made famous by other kinds of people. Near the upper part of the Skadarlija stood the kafana Kod Albanije, founded in 1860, where the assassins of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo wove their plans in 1914. Since we have already dedicated a special picture post to their oeuvre in Sarajevo, let us have a picture of its Belgrade bridgehead as well. In 1939 it was replaced by the Palata Albanija.


In the early 19th century, after the removal of the ramparts of the fortress of Belgrade, Gypsies settled here, along the Bibijin stream running down between the ramparts, which also determined the trail of the Skadarlija. The Gypsy quarter, like the Albaicín in Granada, Rixdorf in Berlin or Tabán in Budapest, soon became a bohemian residential area, and later a suburban party neighborhood, far from the iron fist of urban regulation. Its development was facilitated by the large brewery built in 1892 by the Czech Bajloni company in the lower part of the street, which constantly supplied the kafanas with fresh Aleksandar beer.


In 1945, the brewery was merged in the all-encompassing state-owned BiH brewery chain, which went bankrupt in the early 2000s. The huge block of the factory was recently converted for new purposes. On its Skadarlija Street front, the Bohemian Hotel has opened, which, with the factory’s preserved façade and its painted retro architecture, as well as with the use of industrial elements in the interiors and rooms, strives to maintain the visual heritage of the neighborhood. And within the factory’s block, corridors, inner courtyards and warehouses, a seemingly spontaneous maze of small bars has developed, enlarging the street’s old school entertainment choice with the characteristic ruin pub feeling of recent decades.

The forced closures imposed by covid is used for renovation in the Skadarlija district. The allegedly hundred-year-old cobblestones are being re-laid on the streets, and the ruin pubs reconsider their furnishings. A walk in the once bustling, now empty complex is a spooky urbex experience. It is like wandering among the ribs of a long-extinct gigantic animal with an unknown anatomy. What would Berlin not give for such scenery, magnificently ruined and then set up with a well-considered spontaneity.



Slonovski Bal: Papazička Rečenica. From the CD Slonovski Bal: Džumbus (2006)

The sea in Zahesi

I bought the camera in the summer of 2014 in a shop in Tbilisi. I intended it as a work tool. I bought a reflex camera. Thus far I had only taken photos with small compact cameras.

In a short time, the work tool became part of my identity. Its use radically changed my relationship to research. The camera forces you to re-interpret through the lens the meaning of places and people. The flat field and the consequent picture are not the result of a random click. On the contrary, I want to give a conscious visual report on the subject matter of my research. This picture is not merely the view of the space and people existing independently of me, but rather the imprint of an intimate and constant dialogue between us, in which aesthetics and practice merges in an unrepeatable moment.

“What the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once. The photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. The photograph is the absolute particular, the sovereign contingency, the This (this photograph, and not Photography), in short, the Good Luck, the Occasion, the Encounter, the Real.” (R. Barthes, Camera Lucida 1)

The flexibility and practicality of the work tool allows me to constantly reinterpret the environment and society around me. Quickly I discovered that even if I take photos of the same space, my pictures are adjusted not only to research needs of the moment and the intended descriptions, but, as taking photos has already become a part of me, also to my momentary moods and visions. It is also very interesting to put the camera in the hands of my informants, so they shoot with it. These images are “seen-from-inside” views of reality, even more personal representations.


I ran down the stairs of the high-rise building. I wanted to go along the main street that cuts the Zahesi quarter in half, and leading to the Jvari monastery. I was filled with enthusiasm by the device in my hand, the idea that finally I can recount – even to myself – the reality around me.

I got to a hitherto unknown part of the quarter. Some women were engrossed in conversation, the black contours of their clothes sharply outlined in the foreground of the gray blocks of flats. I asked them the way. They stared at the camera, one of them absent-mindedly pointed somewhere. I went that way. Soon I found a small building, half-overgrown by vegetation. On its smooth wall, vigorous figures of dancers and musicians, stiffened only by the immobility of the gray material, not fit for dreams. After the block houses, finally something to test my device appears. It was not easy. I felt I was not yet sensitive enough. After a few clicks, with waning confidence I left the stage.

But the bright sun promised everything good. I cared less about the new toy, and more about finding a suitable object, as if Robert Capa had returned to Tbilisi. Lush vegetation all around, a few dilapidated concrete buildings, nothing else. A couple of little boys came toward me on the street, laughing, either of each other or of me. I did not ask. I had to find my subject myself. After a long walk, the sight of a blue spot pierced through the branches. Perhaps an old fountain, or a playground. I never found out. Fish, waves, seaweed. The tiny tiles of the mosaic were carefully arranged by the worker or artist, commissioned personally by Brezhnev, or maybe only by a local functionary, to bring some liveliness in the housing estate. The sea in Zahesi. Kitano in Zahesi.


Kelaptari: Sacekvao. From the album Georgian Dancing Melodies (2012).

Unholy bread

“The important day is today, but the Soviet past is chasing us all the time, and every day is a struggle for existence. In 25 years we can’t outrun Russian chauvinism and crazy ideas, wars and humiliation. However, happy independence day, my dears…” (A young Georgian)


Twenty kilometers. This is the distance that separates the city of Akhaltsikhe from the border with Turkey. Only twenty kilometers, today. In the past, it was almost impossible to cover these twenty kilometers. In Soviet times, the road linking Tbilisi with Turkey was interrupted a few kilometers after the spa of Borjomi, which was already renowned in Pushkin’s time, and afterward became the favorite destination of the Romanovs, as well as the new Tsars of the Soviet Union, with Stalin first of all. The road winds through gorges and valleys, among houses destroyed by time, as well as grocery stores. Every so often it is interrupted by the passage of grazing cows. Occasionally the green landscape is dotted by old and dilapidated concrete blocks. “It is there”, says Giorgi, a local Armenian and longtime taxi driver, “that the soldiers stood during the Soviet Union”. He makes the gesture of holding a military rifle. “And whoever tried to pass, was shot.” And later: “From here on… only with passport.” During the Soviet Union, the region was a prohibited zone, with many barracks. I have many testimonies from Armenians and Georgians sent to patrol this border zone during their military service. The most controlled zones included the spa town of Abastumani, already famous at the time of the Tsars, which in Soviet times hosted officers of the Red Army and their families. Still today there is an important astronomical observatory on the nearby mountain.

Among the several “sanatoria”, many of which have been abandoned, and among the numerous Soviet buildings in concrete, which still house the few people who remain, there still stands a small Armenian church.


“While they were eating, Jesus took the bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples […].» (Mk 14,22)

“Places do not have locations, but histories” (Tim Ingold). Built in 1898 by two Armenian brothers from Baku, the Armenian church of Abastumani is today in very poor condition, mainly because of the heavy renovations and changes in Soviet times. In fact, during the Soviet period the church was transformed into a bread oven. Besides partly eliminating and partly walling the gavit, the entrance hall of the church, the Soviets also added two buildings, partly built from the carved stones of the destroyed parts: a warehouse for oil and coal, and another for the storage of bread (to be sold in Abastumani and the surrounding villages). Still there are the big wooden shelves and the metal trays in which the ca. 3-kg loaves of were baked. The interior of the church is unrecognizable, were it not for the presence of the consacration crosses around on the walls, and a large plaque at the entrance with the description in Russian and Armenian, that explains genesis and construction of the church. Inside you can still see the big pots for the bread dough, and the large oven in the middle of the building.

The Soviet regime has partly attained its goal. The gesture of transforming a church into something else, something secular and industrial, was an attempt to eliminate any reference point and all structures that might stir the feelings of the local population, which, only a few years earlier, represented certainties. For eighty years, the Soviet regime attempted to replace the cult of the sacred with the cult of the idea.

The transformation from a church directly to the production of a foodstuff that has been always taken for sacred in every culture. The complete secularization and industrialization of bread has changed the meaning of ʻbread’ itself, which during the Soviet period, played an exclusively secular role, and even a role triggered by a secular metamorphosis.

“It is then a major disaster, in which the culture is shown to be extremely fragile and precarious, yet indispensable and irreplaceable. The same cognitive categories and symbolic figures through which a community perceives and understands the world and makes it thinkable, lose their meaning at the very moment when they are most needed. It seems that the world literally ends there. The perception of the whole and the sense of an imminent and irreparable doom become unbearable.” (G. Ligi: Antropologia dei disastri)

During Soviet times, a loft was built behind the brick oven, which was also used as a warehouse. Still there are some mills to knead the dough and perhaps to grind flour. To date, the traces of wax and soot near many crosses are a sign of how, over the years, the church has been visited by the faithful, bearing witness to the reappropriation, if not of the whole building, but at least of its recognition as a sacred place.

In Georgia, the process of transition was one of the most delicate in all the former Soviet world, not only for the violence accompanying it, but also for its contradictions.

Honoris causa

Whoever goes in search of a lost time, also knows that the imprints left by plaques removed from walls, their orphaned nails jutting out into the air, and flagpoles that have lost their function, are as much the documents of the history of a building, as the time that is marked when they stopped scraping the ad stickers off from the windows, so that the moss, the sumac, the graffiti can freely breed on the building.


The former museum of minerals and fossils, in what was formerly Breslau, was erected in 1866 in place of the former St. Matthias bastion, as the final building of the university, which was established in the gorgeous Jesuit convent that lined the river Oder. When, after 1945, with the total destruction of the collection the building lost its purpose, and, not incidentally, also changed its country and language, it was subsequently occupied by the pharmaceutical faculty of the new, now Polish university. Judging from the imprints left by the multitude of plaques which were previously to be seen on it, the building may have been too big for the university, and it was shared with a number of other institutions. The imprints of other plaques bear witness to the names, doomed to oblivion, of the neighboring streets. The familiar size and position of the imprints of even more plaques suggests that they probably erected monuments, more lasting than bronze, to events and persons no longer non gratae, over a period of almost fifty years. Small plaques, like flocks of sparrows, serve as a schematic diagram to the wires, pipes and tunnels running under and upon the ghost building, as long as they remain, and as long as it stands. That this will not be long is clear from the most recently placed plaques warning of collapse. When this agony might have begun, I don’t know. The sumac trees have already reached the second floor, but as late as, 2003 they attached yet one last plaque, the only one you can see today.

Kőbánya

On the splendor and fall of Kőbánya we have already written, but we will also write more soon.

Patios de Odesa

La Calle Polaca (que desde mayo de 2010 lleva el nombre del presidente polaco Lech Kaczynski, muerto en el accidente aéreo de Smolensk) es una de las más antiguas de Odesa. Ya figura en el mapa de 1805, publicado diez años después de la fundación de la ciudad —según escribe Anton Polyakov. En muchas de sus viviendas -por ejemplo, las de la casa número 5 visible aquí abajo, escenario de varias películas ambientadas en Odesa— hay escaleras secretas y pasadizos subterráneos que conducen hasta el puerto cercano. Estas casas, que vieron tiempos mejores, dieron cobijo a toda una serie de personajes de renombre cuando la ciudad vivía su edad de oro. Su memoria ya solo la guardan las paredes y algunas webs mantenidas por vecinos enamorados de Odesa. Pronto diremos algunas cosas sobre ellos.

Courtyards of Odessa

The Polish Street (which since May 2010 bears the name of the Polish president Lech Kaczyński, killed in the Smolensk plane crash) is one of the oldest streets in Odessa. It already figures on the map of 1805, published ten years after the foundation of the city – writes Anton Polyakov. From many of its flats – for example, from those of house number 5 here below, the scene of several films on Odessa – secret staircases and underground passages lead to the nearby port. In the houses that once saw better days, a number of renowned figures of the city lived in the golden age of Odessa. Their memory is preserved only by the walls and by the various sites compiled by the local lovers of the city. We will soon write more about them.

Thirty-five stairs

The planks of the footbridge once already fully rot away, and the bridge passing over the railway station became impassable. They say that the workers going over to the Central Railway Workshop – now a dilapidated industrial monument – then broke through the walls along the railway, and walked across the rails between the trains passing every five minutes, until one of them badly gauged the time to pass across. Then the bridge got new stairs. But it was a long time ago that the decaying factory quarter got even this much attention, and the water, the salt, the time have already written their separate ways into the graining of the wood again.