In some ways, this building, the Yugoslav Parliament (Skupstina) in Belgrade, is a good place to begin understanding the forces that tore apart Yugoslavia. Construction on the Skupstina began in 1907 and continued through 1932, meaning it was concieved as a Serbian political building for the young, independent Serbia that had vanquished the Ottomans from Serb lands. With the creation of Yugoslavia following the First World War, the Skupstina housed the parliaments of various incarnations of Federal Yugoslavia. Particularly under Tito, the Federal Parliament was a meeting place of relative equals from the federated Republics of Yugoslavia. Following Tito's death, however, the Skupstina increasingly became a focal point for resentment of federal authority by extreme nationalist groups within the individual republics.
After the 1990s break-up of the full Yugoslavia, the Skupstina continued to house the Federal Parliament of the truncated Yugoslavia that has now renamed itself Serbia and Montenegro. In 2000, opposition protestors stormed and vandalized the Parliament in a successful bid to end Slobodan Milosevic's reign as Yugoslav Federal President. On 12 March 2003, Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic, who had been one of the leaders of the internal opposition to Milosevic, also met his end at the Skupstina: he was gunned down on its back steps.
The Skupstina continues to serve as the Federal Parliament Building for the state of Serbia and Montenegro. But just what will become of the Skupstina if and when Montenegro and Serbia go their separate ways in the next few years, given that the Serbs already have a separate Parliament building, remains to be seen.
The Monkey stops by the Genex Tower, Belgrade's tallest building at 115 meters. Showing the Yugoslav flair for concrete architecture, the building houses the former national tourism bureau (Yugotours, in the 26-storey right tower) and apartments in the 30-floor left.
The silhouette of the tower and its signature "skybridge" became familiar sights to audiences watching U.S. and European mainstream media coverage of NATO's deadly assault on the capital in 1999.
The Monkey rests by a geographic marker indicating the global position of Belgrade. The marker ison Belgrade's lovely pedestrianized shopping street, Knezha Mihailova.
The history of the Belgrade neighborhood of Zemun helps illuminate more background to the troubles that engulfed Yugoslavia. Though today a mere 15 minutes from Belgrade's center by bus, as late as the early 20th Century, Zemun was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Ottoman and subseqently Serb Belgrade was a fortified frontier city into the early 20th Centuy, the Sava River their border with the Hapsburg possessions.
Writer Brian Hall describes the period well in his book, The Impossible Country. By the late 18th Century the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires "were losing their vitality, ossifying. A stalemate across the Sava suited them both. From the fortress on the rock the Turks could see the Hapsburg-yellow church towers of Zemun. They could hear the bells that seemed to them a brutish 'bar bar,' a blasphemy, compared to the Koranic lucidity of the muezzin's call." Hall continues, "At this juncture… the cliché of Belgrade as the gateway to the east was born… One after the other, travelers in search of the exotic, the cruel, the opulent—images Europe conjured for itself and imposed on the east like a suitor on the object of his desire—took their last meals and night's lodgings in Austrian Zemun and in the morning crossed the Sava as though it were the Styx." It's worth noting, too, that World War I began with the Austro-Hungarian forces shelling Serbian Belgrade from Zemun in 1914.
Today, while very much part of Belgrade, Zemun retains a village atmosphere. Here the Monkey scans the panorama from a Zemun hilltop back toward downtown Belgrade. Some of the high-rise buildings of Novi Beograd (New Belgrade) are visible at the right, while at the left are the waters of the Danube.
Another view of the Genex Tower. The Monkey longed to dine in the restaurant atop the skybridge, but was unable to ascertain whether it was open (his Serbo-Croat language skills are a bit rusty!). The Genex tower is also known as the West Gate, located as it is at the western edges of New Belgrade alongside a major roadway heading into the city center. It was designed by Mihajlo Mitrovic, and went up in 1978.
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