I'm discriminated against all the time
– Slobodan Milošević
I’m trying to find you Zoran, in the crowds in the square
protesting, trying to find you in the history of Serbia.
A Serbian man, soft-spoken, loving his sons,
you sat next to me on the plane. You were returning to Belgrade,
to a Novi Sad bombed out by NATO
different to the place you left in 1991.
I could see the madness coming, you said.
There is a smiling voice to you
and your son with you is twenty-one, same as my own.
He resents the taunts slung at him in
Melbourne University for being wog, Serbian,
but from any place different will do in a country so new
it still thinks it was once terra nullius, empty.
Still, it’s not Belgrade in the latest of its wars.
Trying to understand Serbia is unravelling macramé or
my father’s tangled fishing lines,
knotted and twisted round a braided truth.
History has sometimes been cruel to the Serbs,
you told me, and they hold onto that,
a thorn firmly in the chest,
so you have to go a long way back to understand.
You stretch out for the long flight ahead
as if ready for story time before the videos.
Take the Ottoman’s and the Tower of Skulls, you say.
In 1809 during the first rebellion against the Turks,
Stevan Sinđelić, Serbian commander,
blew himself and his men up to avoid capture,
taking with him all the Turks in the trenches.
Furious, Hurshad Pasha, the Grand Vizer ordered
the heads of Sinđelić and his men be skinned,
stuffed with cotton, and sent to the Sultan.
Their skulls were then returned to Serbia,
952 of them built into a ten-foot-high tower
as warning on the roadside to Constantinople,
hollow-eyed, voiceless, barely bone.
You told me this story to explain how
children can be taught a history of persecution
so vivid it pierces into the mind
becoming mistaken for the present,
lodges there as evidence, as reason enough.
I want to understand how it happens
that a country full of soft souls like yours, slaughters.
In the nineties, Serbia was independent, self-governing
yet the government talked as if it were still overrun.
Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history,
their past, their tradition, their national symbols,
their way of living, often their own literary language,
Milošević shouted, as he drove the country into war and war and war,
the people drawing old blood from the past into a red present.
*Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia 1989 - 1997, President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000. In the midst of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, Milošević was charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia with war crimes including genocide, and crimes against humanity in connection to the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo. He died before the trial could be concluded.
**As of 2013, fifty-four skulls remain in the tower. It has become a symbol of Serbian independence. It is one of the most visited places in Serbia, with 30,000–50,000 tourists annually.
DR Robyn Rowland AO lives in Australia and Ireland. She has six books of poetry, and two CD’s: Off the tongue and Silver Leaving - Poems & Harp with Irish harpist Lynn Saoirse. Seasons of doubt & burning. New & Selected Poems (2010) represents 40 years of poetry. Her work appears in Being Human, ed. Neil Astley, (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). She has read, and been published, in many countries including Turkey, Portugal, India, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia. Honorary Fellow, School of Culture & Communication, Melbourne University, she is currently working on a bi-lingual book with Dr Mehmet Ali Çelikel.