From memory to landscape and environmental history : the village of Bežanija and my socialistic childhood

Abstract

Historians are raconteurs trained in telling stories and weaving them upon reliable sources. This text is written in a hybrid, polyphonic form, using personal recollections, childhood memories interlaced with visual testimonies – maps, photographs, city plans, and Ottoman and Habsburg documentary sources. It reconstructs a geographical part of the New Belgrade area. The area is situated in the former district of the village of Bežanija, tracking its environmental and landscape history. The great trailblazer in this sort of narrative is Simon Schama. His magnum opus Landscape and Memory, transgressing the disciplinary boundaries as a work of highest literary value, should have a more substantial impact on the ways we choose to tell the stories. The threads of the narrative presented here spin to the modern-day citizens’ struggle to preserve the historical heritage site of the original village and, in another sense, to stop the illegal constructions of private houses on the river flood difference infrastructure – the River Sava embankment. The interplay of the river, its floodplains and people needs to be further pursued with the collaboration of hydrogeologists, urban and environmental historians.