Three Parks in Nineteenth-Century Belgrade

This article addresses the emergence and evolution of parks in nineteenth-century Belgrade by examining three specific examples: Karađorđe’s Park, Topčider, and Kalemegdan. The three parks originated in different historical moments during the century, giving them quite different meanings: a memorial park, a seat of a government, and a town’s promenade. The basic concepts of these parks remained, but they were enriched over time with new connotations: they were important public places and, at the same time, green oases of the city. This text provides a contribution to the study of the relationship between culture and nature in the history of Belgrade’s parks. It places special emphasis on both physical preservations and preservations of their memory, in the context of solving contemporary environmental problems, and is consistent with modern theories of landscape architecture.¹

As in the case of other cities, changes to the urban structure of Belgrade reflected and kept pace with historical events. Frequently, these events resulted in the razing of the city to the ground and its subsequent reemergence from the ashes—it was a rebirth based on the levels of city memories, the ones that had never left people’s minds and souls in spite of their physical absence. In spite of all these destructions, the first settlement had been founded on the hill that sustained its characteristic, indestructible morphology over time. If it were not for the Sava and the Danube flowing through Belgrade and retaining the outlines of its slopes, it would have appeared as if this massive rock might leap and run away toward a plain—the endless vastness of the opposite shore, somewhere towards the north-west. In writing about Belgrade, many authors point to its remarkable geographic and strategic position as the main cause of the fierce battles of the past aimed at conquering the almost invincible fortress—the gate between West and East.

The period of the nineteenth century in Serbia was dedicated to the process of creating the national state. Two national uprisings against Turkish dominion, in 1804 and 1815, along with the military and political struggle, were followed by establishment of institutions necessary to a modern state and which would facilitate the adaptation of the European cultural inheritance. In the period from 1830 to 1833 Serbia managed to gain partial autonomy from Turkish rule, and shortly afterwards, in 1841, Belgrade was chosen as the capital of the Serbian Princedom. At that time, the city was clearly divided into two separate parts: the fortress, the city within the Moat and the area outside the Moat, which was nothing but a field covered with swamps and pond scums and straggling villages. The absolute majority of the population in the Moat was comprised of Turks, then Serbs, Greeks, Romani people, Jews, and Cincars—each nation in its own quarter, or mahala.² There was also the centuries old trade colony of Dubrovnik.

The Turkish army settled down in the Belgrade fortress; between the walls and the city there was a vast area, an open field of the city—Kalemegdan. The rulers of the fortress had never allowed any kind of construction within this zone of three hundred to five hundred meters in width—not even walkways or alleys, because of the cannons of the fortress—nothing was supposed to block their view. The Austrians carried out one of the biggest reconstructions of the fortress during their siege of Belgrade in the eighteenth century. When they left, they destroyed everything they had built in the fort. The Moat was their heritage. In the nineteenth century it was a six-meter-high earthen bastion, with a four-meter-deep ditch on its external side, and widge-shaped ramps and bastions with cannons placed within a certain span, as well as five gates as the entrance to the “inner” city. A broken line of the Moat, which began at the Sava shore, stretched across the Belgrade ridge and then sloped down to the Danube. The economic, business, and cultural life of the city took place within this enclosed space defined by the Moat on the south and...