The Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1924, p.K11:
The After-War Boom in BelgradeHOW THE JUGOSLAVS ARE CREATING A NEW CAPITAL ON THE BANKS OF THE DANUBE...
BY FRANK G. CARPENTER
BELGRADE—I am again in Belgrade. I visited the city thirty-five years ago when I came around the world from east to west on a sort of honeymoon tour, and I stopped here again twenty years later with my wife and daughter on my second long tour around the globe. In both of these trips I came from Constantinople. This time I have come from the north, riding on the train nine hours from Budapest, the capital of the New Hungary, to this capital of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, or, as it is called, Jugoslavia.
When I was here last Belgrade was a dead town of 60,000 or 70,000 people. The kingdom was then independent, but Austria-Hungary came right up to its borders. At this point the Save and the Danube rivers come together. They throw their arms around Belgrade, much as the Monongahela and the Ohio throw their arms around Pittsburg; and on the other side of them, to the west and the north, lay the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, rich and powerful, aggressive and domineering.
The Belgrade of today is live, aggressive and booming. It is the capital of a country eight times as large as Massachussetts, and of a people one-tenth as many as those who claim allegiance to the American flag. The city has been reborn. It is now shuffling off its old clothes, ragged and worn with the age of almost 2000 years, and putting on the frills and furbelows of modern Europe.
Belgrade has always been a capital of some sort or other. In the time of the Romans, it was known as Singidunum, and had its fortifications. It was a fortress of great importance when the Turks overran Europe, making their way as far north as Vienna, and just about 400 years ago it was captured by one of the sultans. For centuries the people were under the Turks, and it was less than fifty years ago that they became independent and made Belgrade their capital. Indeed, the Turks did not evacuate the fortress of Belgrade until after the close of our Civil War.
The old fortifications still stand. They are huge forts made of brick and earth with a wide moat running around them, crowning the point where the Danube and Save come together.
Taking a Drive in the New City
Come with me for drive through the capital. We shall take a two-horse carriage, for here taxis are as yet almost unknown. Now and then we strike a piece of asphalt or a stone roadway, but everywhere the streets are in sad need of repaving. Belgrade was torn to pieces during the war. It was bombarded by the Austrians from over the river, and outside it one may see hundreds of great shell holes which have not yet been filled.
Within a stone's throw of where I am writing, a new Academy of Science is building, and just over the way is the Franco-Serbian Bank, which would be a credit to Paris. Farther on is the new State Department, which is nearing completion, and on another street they are erecting the new House of Parliament.
All together it is planned to build twenty government buildings, eighteen public schools, an operahouse, a museum, a library, and a new university. The city authorities have decided to make Belgrade the most beautiful city of the Balkans, and they have offered prizes for plans which shall include the buildings above mentioned, a great athletic field and a system of parks, a zoological and botanical garden as well as four ornamental bridges across the Save and the Danube.
The plans must also include a number of churches, railway terminals, and harbor improvements. It will take many years to complete all this, but everything will work to the plan.
Private building of all kinds is being helped by the government. There are no rent restrictions, and all kinds of building materials come in free of taxes. The homes for workers and middle-class people put up within the next two years are to pay no taxes for twenty-five years. Dwelling houses regardless of size are to be exempt from taxation for eighteen years, and apartments and stores combined for fifteen years. It is also provided that the government cannot requisition the new buildings, and all the new laws are in favor of the landlord rather than the tenant. The government passed legislation to prevent strikes, and the result is such a building boom as I have seen nowhere else in my travels.
Twenty Dollars to One Here
I wish I could show our plasterers of Chicago, who are reported to be getting $20 for eight hours' labor, how the best men of their trade work in Belgrade. They are superior artisans, modeling in stucco, producing artistic creations far above those of the ordinary workman. They are now receiving from 80 cents to $1. This is for the men at the top. Common plasterers get less.
The same wages are paid to carpenters, bricklayers, and machinists. Common labor receives 30 or 50 cents a day, and the women who help at the building trades, mixing the mortar and fetching and carrying, receive only 25 cents.
The woman here is almost as much a labor factor as the man. She is to be seen everywhere in the city and especially out in the country. She carries great loads on her back or her shoulders, she hoes and spades in the fields. She rakes up the sheaves of grain, which the men cut up into cradles, and binds them, and she keeps the streets clean.
It is interesting to see how the influence of the Turks seems to have affected the Serbs. Some of the architecture is Oriental, although most of the buildings resemble those of the great European capitals. The Moscow Hotel, for instance, has great bands of green tiles running around the various stories, and over the way is another huge structure wich is faced with rose tiles. A new bank which has just been completed has doors of wrought iron plated with gold, and the new Franco-Serb bank upon which I have letters of credit has a counting room of mahogany, with heavy brass mouldings running around the base and edges of the counters...
I am stopping at a new hotel here which claims to be at the top of hotel accomodations in the Balkans. It has a roof garden with an elevator which runs up but not down for the guests, and a cabaret theater where one can wine and dine from 9 p.m. until 5 o'clock in the morning.
The population of Belgrade has just about doubled since the World War. It had something like 90,000 in 1914. It has about 180,000 at present and it promises to grow right along. Before the war Belgrade had only Serbia, with a population of about 4,000,000, to draw from. It was the capital of a kingdom of about the size of Indiana. Now it is the capital of a land more than twice as large as the State of New York, with a population over 12,000,000.
The country has half a dozen different races, and the people on the street come from all parts of the kingdom. The most of them are Serbs, big-boned, straight and well built, with dark serious faces and features akin to the Russian. The women are tall and fine looking and both sexes walk with a swing. The Serbs are very independent and they seem bound to make their way in building up the new principality...
There are also the Serbian peasants in homespun, often of the brightest of colors, with short jackets, their breeches tied tight around the ankles and their feet clad in shoes made of straps fastened to a sole which turns up at the end. There are women dressed even more quaintly than the men, and the whole makes a perpetual moving picture show, which one would come far to see.
The best place to see the crowd is on Tsaritsa Street from 5 till 9 in the evening. This is a part of the main highway through the city, the roadway of which was paved with wood blocks and laid down by Russian workmen as a present from the Czar Nicholas, after whom it was named. It has wide sidewalks walled with fine stores and the whole makes a good promenade.
At 5 o'clock the traffic policemen, some of whom are armed with muskets, shut off all carriages and cars from this part of the city, and the people walk back and forth just as they do in the Calle Florida in Buenos Ayres and in the Ouvidor in Rio Janeiro...
Here and there along Tsaritsa street and in fact on all the streets of Belgrade are cafes which overflow to the sidewalk. There are tables covered with cloths out on the street, with men and women and children sitting around them, drinking, chatting, and reading the newspapers. Some are writing letters, and others may play cards or dominoes...
During my stay I have met a number of the newspaper men of Belgrade. They are bright fellows, many of them speaking several languages. Two of the men I have talked with are graduates of Oxford, and a third has studied at Cambridge. Nearly every reporter speaks German or French, as well as most of the polyglot tongues of this polyglot nation.
They tell me their newspaper circulations are small, the largest in Belgrade having only about 20,000 per day. There are small papers scattered all over the country, and many party organs and periodicals of one kind or another. The wages of newspaper men are low, the best writers getting from $10 to $12 a week, and the ordinary reporter much less.
One of the lowest paid men on each journal is the jail editor. He receives a retainer or fixed salary of 1000 dinars, about $10 a month, with a present after he comes out of jail proportioned to the length of his stay.
The jail editor assumes all responsibility for anything that appears in the paper. Even if an article is signed [by another reporter]... the jail editor will affirm that the work was his, and when the government orders his punishment, he goes to jail without question. After serving his term, he is taken back on the staff to await [another] offense...
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The Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1924, p.J11:
Where Every Grain of Wheat is a PrayerAMONG THE JUGOSLAVIANS...
BY FRANK G. CARPENTER
BELGRADE — We are again in a motor car this morning, riding through the vast farm lands of the Danube Valley. We have left the blazing white capital of Jugoslavia, have ridden by the trenches where the Serbians lay when Belgrade was bombarded by the Austrians, and are now bumping over the rough stony roads of the country.
Driving through traffic is particularly difficult. Automobiles are few, and the horses and oxen that haul the rude farm carts of the country grow frightened and jump this way and that.
The peasants tramping alone and in groups over the country move out of our way, and Mikovitch, our chaffeur, seems to delight in just grazing the girls... Sturdy, stolid and independent, they are dressed in homespun, and both men and women wear the brightest of colors. Both sexes have their feet clad in opantsis, home-made shoes with soles that turn up at the toe, and bound to the feet with a weaving of straps. The straps run round the leg half way to the knee. The shoes seem very comfortable.
We take note of the farms as we ride, stopping now and then to watch a gang of men and women at work in the fields or to make snapshots of the farm wagons, rude boatlike vehicles, knocked together by the owners, which are carrying men, women, and farm produce over the roads.
The farming country is different from that of Hungary, through which we motored last month. There the tracts were often enormous, the estates of prewar barons and lords having fields of fifty acres each, cultivated with tractors and modern machinery. There the small farms were ribbons of grass or grain, extending on and on, making great sheets or stripes of various colors sawed together with narrow bands of red poppies. Here in Serbia most of the farms are mere garden patches, or little fields of all shapes.
Serbia is a land of small farms. I understand there are larger ones in those parts of Jugoslavia which formerly belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but those have been taken over by the government and are being sold on long-term notes to the people. I am told it is hoped to create 200,000 new farms.
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Serbia: The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was formed in 1918; its name was changed to Yugoslavia in 1929. Various paramilitary bands resisted Nazi Germany's occupation and division of Yugoslavia from 1941 to 1945, but fought each other and ethnic opponents as much as the invaders.
The military and political movement headed by Josip TITO (Partisans) took full control of Yugoslavia when German and Croatian separatist forces were defeated in 1945. Although Communist, TITO's new government and his successors (he died in 1980) managed to steer their own path between the Warsaw Pact nations and the West for the next four and a half decades.
In 1989, Slobodan MILOSEVIC became president of the Serbian Republic and his ultranationalist calls for Serbian domination led to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines. In 1991, Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia declared independence, followed by Bosnia in 1992. The remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro declared a new Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) in April 1992 and under MILOSEVIC's leadership, Serbia led various military campaigns to unite ethnic Serbs in neighboring republics into a "Greater Serbia." These actions led to Yugoslavia being ousted from the UN in 1992, but Serbia continued its - ultimately unsuccessful - campaign until signing the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995. MILOSEVIC kept tight control over Serbia and eventually became president of the FRY in 1997.
In 1998, an ethnic Albanian insurgency in the formerly autonomous Serbian province of Kosovo provoked a Serbian counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in massacres and massive expulsions of ethnic Albanians living in Kosovo. The MILOSEVIC government's rejection of a proposed international settlement led to NATO's bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999 and to the eventual withdrawal of Serbian military and police forces from Kosovo in June 1999. UNSC Resolution 1244 in June 1999 authorized the stationing of a NATO-led force (KFOR) in Kosovo to provide a safe and secure environment for the region's ethnic communities, created a UN interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) to foster self-governing institutions, and reserved the issue of Kosovo's final status for an unspecified date in the future. In 2001, UNMIK promulgated a constitutional framework that allowed Kosovo to establish institutions of self-government and led to Kosovo's first parliamentary election.
FRY elections in September 2000 led to the ouster of MILOSEVIC and installed Vojislav KOSTUNICA as president. A broad coalition of democratic reformist parties known as DOS (the Democratic Opposition of Serbia) was subsequently elected to parliament in December 2000 and took control of the government. DOS arrested MILOSEVIC in 2001 and allowed for him to be tried in The Hague for crimes against humanity. (MILOSEVIC died in March 2006 before the completion of his trial.) In 2001, the country's suspension from the UN was lifted.
In 2003, the FRY became Serbia and Montenegro, a loose federation of the two republics with a federal level parliament. Widespread violence predominantly targeting ethnic Serbs in Kosovo in March 2004 caused the international community to open negotiations on the future status of Kosovo in January 2006. In May 2006, Montenegro invoked its right to secede from the federation and - following a successful referendum - it declared itself an independent nation on 3 June 2006. Two days later, Serbia declared that it was the successor state to the union of Serbia and Montenegro. A new Serbian constitution was approved in October 2006 and adopted the following month.
In February 2008, after nearly two years of inconclusive negotiations, Kosovo declared itself independent of Serbia - an action Serbia refuses to recognize. At Serbia's request, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in October 2008 sought an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on whether Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence was in accordance with international law. In a ruling considered unfavorable to Serbia, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion in July 2010 stating that international law did not prohibit declarations of independence. In late 2010, Serbia agreed to an EU-drafted UNGA Resolution acknowledging the ICJ's decision and calling for a new round of talks between Serbia and Kosovo, this time on practical issues rather than Kosovo's status. Serbia and Kosovo signed the first agreement of principles governing the normalization of relations between the two countries in April 2013 and are in the process of implementing its provisions. In 2015, Serbia and Kosovo reached four additional agreements within the EU-led Brussels Dialogue framework. These included agreements on the Community of Serb-Majority Municipalities; telecommunications; energy production and distribution; and freedom of movement. President Aleksandar VUCIC has promoted an ambitious goal of Serbia joining the EU by 2025. Under his leadership as prime minister, in 2014 Serbia opened formal negotiations for accession. In 2023, VUCIC and Kosovan Prime Minister Albin KURTI verbally agreed on the Implementation Annex to the Agreement of the Path to Normalization of Relations between Kosovo and Serbia.
CIA World Factbook: Serbia
Area of Serbia:
77,474 sq km
Population of Serbia:
7,379,339 July 2009 estimate
Languages of Serbia:
Serbian 88.3% (official), Hungarian 3.8%, Bosniak 1.8%, Romany (Gypsy) 1.1%, other 4.1%, unknown 0.9% (2002 census)
Serbia Capital:
Belgrade
BELGRADE WEATHER
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Serbia and Europe, 1914-1920 Marković 1921
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Servia by the Servians Stead 1909
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Belgrade, the White City of Death Ames 1903
History of Modern Serbia Mījatovīć 1872
Servia and the Servians Denton 1862
History of Servia von Ranke 1847
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