Around the Town

ZEMUN AND ITS MOST FAMOUS CHRONICLE-WRITER, IN NUMEROUS CERTAIN KAFANA VERSIONS
A City within a City
Branko Najhold (1947–2016), chronicle writer and essayist from Zemun, founder of the International Caricature Salon in Zemun, wrote as many as 48 books about his hometown. From prehistoric times and Rome, the Middle Ages to the very day. Through fortresses, ports, the Tower, kafanas, churches, galleries and concert halls, green market and sports clubs, through postcards and caricatures, stories and chronicles, legends of emperors and fishermen. The spirit of that Zemun is still living in some kafanas and studios, as well as on these pages. And bronze Branko is sailing down the river every day from his bench on the Quay into eternity, and comes back again the following day, to Branko’s Zemun

By: Miloš Lazić
Photo and illustrations: Mića Nikolić Archive, NR Archive

It will remain a secret how only one man managed to describe in detail the grand Zemun and seven millennia of its existence, and pack it between covers, spending only three and a half decades for such work. He actually published 46 books (two were published posthumously), which doesn’t reduce the size and importance of his endeavor!
Someone would think that this information was taken from the popular book about the world bizarre, although old Zemun citizens know that their townsman Branko Najhold managed to do it.
His passion was a strange and wonderful way to express love and respect for his town of birth, and it caught him in his childhood. That is why he wanted to study archeology, but he first fulfilled the expectations of his parents ”to graduate a craft one could make a living from”, so he graduated from the Zemun Gymnasium, then from the Faculty of Economy, and spent 17 years working in several successful local companies. Then he irrevocably returned to his first love – the life of Zemun: from endless abysses of the past to the beginning of this century. He was always prone to digging through archives and libraries, musty basements and dusty attics, noted legends and myths, went through archeological sites and discoveries, which made him become – the most dedicated chronicle-writer of Zemun.
These are testimonies which could seem to an ignorant man as fairytales told at kafana tables (and he wrote about kafanas too), and, although it is known that there is a true story behind it, altered to beyond recognition by time and imagination, sometimes vanity. This story is created based on them and the memories of living friends. It is illustrated by the works of Slobodan Bibić, Đorđe Čubrilo and Aleksandar Antić, chronicle-writers who are doing the same, but with their cameras.
Perhaps this story could be entitled Branko’s Zemun, it wouldn’t make anyone mad.

STAR FROM FRANZSTAL

Branko Najhold saved many unusual Zemun stories from oblivion. He pointed out what a mixture of nations and faiths it is. He reminded that, during the World War II occupation, under the authority of the Independent State of Croatia, the Main Street carried the name of Adolf Hitler and Progarski Drum of Herman Goebbels. He walked slowly through the shadows of the Sajmište concentration camp. He indicated that most of the Orthodox monasteries across the rivers were older than Leopold’s Invitatorie from 1690, which was widely used for manipulation. He described how a strange pyramid made of soil was discovered in mid-fifties in the Batajnica district, originating from V century A.D. and for which Professor Đorđe Janković, PhD, confirmed that it was a kurgan, a cenotaph used by Serbs in burial rites. (…)
Even the most notorious cinephiles, those who frequently visited all three cinemas in Zemun, missed a nice testimony about Germans of Zemun.
While people were busy talking about Johnnie Weissmuller, the first Tarzan, originally from Žitište in Banat, where he was baptized as Peter Johan (not John), or American actor and Oscar winner Karl Malden, born as Mladen Sekulović in the vicinity of Bileća, they missed another film diva from our lands. Where and how Branko dug out the story, it is unknown, although the heroine used to live in myths for a long time. It was noted in the three-volume chronicle Zemun, Past Days, Present Days, and should be told again.
When Joseph Pfefer, butcher from Zemun, set off in the eve of the Great War across the great water searching for a better life, everything turned upside down: he was struggling to make a living, and when his wife suddenly died and he started drowning his sorrow and solitude in alcohol, he started earning even less. He finally came to his senses and called his daughter Francisca to join him in the City of Angels, but he didn’t wait to see his child graduate from art school and enter the world of dreams and motion pictures as – Gloria Swanson.
A little girl from Zemun Franzstal became a star of silent movies: she became famous for her extraordinary acting, but also for her five unfortunate marriages and love adventures with great heartbreakers of the time – Rudolf Valentino and Charlie Chaplin.
Branko reminded his townsman about it in the third volume of his Zemun trilogy, but he missed the fact, or didn’t pay attention to it, that none of the numerous encyclopedic entries about the famous actress mention the place of her birth, or what’s even worse, state incorrect data: ”Gloria Swanson, original name Gloria May Josephine Swanson, born on March 17, 1899 in Chicago, Illinois, US – died on April 4, 1983 in New York.” Only those professionally involved in historical tailoring know why.
However, he did mention more internationally renowned people who visited this town.

FAMOUS GUESTS OF THE KONTUMAZ

Only when hierodeacon Filaret, future Bishop of Mileševa, in 1984, one year late, before the chapel of the Russian church, later renovated church of the Monastery of Holy Archangel Gabriel, organized a small ceremony observing 150 years since the arrival of Alphonse de Lamartein to our lands after his long wandering in the Orient, many remembered that the famous French romanticist stayed in Zemun as well. It was a fact known in the Association of Serbo-French Friendship, founded in the Zemun Gymnasium at the time we were still a Francophone country, but Branko was the first to discover that the poet, during those seven long weeks, was ”guest” of the then inevitable Kontumaz, quarantine, forced isolation for travelers from the south established in order to protect Christian Europe from epidemics of dangerous diseases! Furthermore, probably ashamed and insulted, he wrote much more beautifully and in more detail about the small town on the other side of the Sava (thus got a monument in Karađorđe’s Park in Belgrade and a street behind its back).
Five years later, Hans Christian Andersen, who is still enchanting children’s imagination with his fairytales, managed to avoid such ”purgatory”. He also wandered around the Orient, arrived to Zemun by steamboat, spent only two days in the port, and continued up the Danube without debarking. According to what he noted while watching from the deck (and Branko discovered and published it), it seems that he didn’t like the town too much.
When Dragan Rumenčić, famous architect, caricaturist and painter (as well as rower, basketball player, boxer, jazz musician, and a lot more) from Zemun gave a kafana in Belgrade his collection of paintings Belgrade which no Longer Exists as a gift, it was discovered that Mr. Briesly, former mayor of the capital of the ”empire in which the sun never sets”, also visited Zemun. Paintings of disappeared Belgrade used to be exhibited in London, and he, the first man of the city on the Thames, was also at the exhibition opening. He found out where the artist was from and, according to his words, he tasted the best fish stew in the world in Zemun, so he never misses an opportunity to show his respect to any person who comes from Zemun. He really liked the exhibition, so Rumeni gave him one of his miniatures as a gift.
Reputable guests rushed to the town on the Danube when Branko organized the first International Caricature Salon in mid-nineties, which filled up the gallery in the Port Authority building … and in the years after! That is how people got to know that seven supreme caricaturists originated from Zemun in the past eight decades (most per square meter of living space), which is an unrivaled spiritual treasure.
Dragan spoke that his aunts used to take him to Pelivan pastry shop on Sundays: they would wash his face, comb his hair, dress him in a sailor suit, and set off. The tram passed the Sava swinging over the Bridge of King Aleksandar (opened in 1934, after the accession of Zemun to Belgrade and the assassination in Marseille), climbed up to Terazije and continued to Mali Vračar, the hill in Tašmajdan where the Church of St. Mark was raised, turned around and returned to Zemun.
They would leave the tram on Terazije, bustling with life. The flower rondel with a wonderful fountain fit well the music of the promenade orchestra, which discretely gave rhythm to the strollers. A view over the desolate Srem bank spread from the wide terrace between Moskva and Balkan hotels, while the Gardoš hill and the Millennium Tower could be anticipated in the mist. The park under the Terazije terrace was ringing with children’s laughter.
This Sunday matinee was a ritual even Germans respected during the occupation. However, there was a raft instead of the tram, and the orchestra changed their repertoire and played compositions of their countrymen, mostly marches and waltzes. Because of those waltzes, it sounded as if the Straus family was born in the Belgrade Varoš-kapija.
The sentimental journey of Dragan Rumeni initiated Branko, so, besides ”Daily stay for adults”, he was also dedicated to sweet inns for the youngest ones.

SWEET LIFE

Chronicle-writers of the capital city missed the information, and Branko reminded them, that the first pastry shop in Belgrade was opened already in 1845 by Sima Nikolić from Zemun, as a ”zucker pastry shop” and almost overnight became as popular as the still few coffee-shop and inn owners. Sima set the foundations of a new guild, which made famous local representatives of the sweetest applied art in the middle of the previous century.
Sweet life in Zemun began half a century earlier, when Anton Swartz, painter from Augsburg, arrived in the town under Gardoš, and sent a plea to the Magistrate to accept him as a contributor (taxpayer, to the joy of Vienna, Pest and local administration in charge of self-governance), and allow his wife to open the first pastry shop in the town. They did, but the Magistrate is more important in this story.
The Magistrate in Zemun was founded already in mid-XVIII century, in 1751, which means that the people of Zemun have already enjoyed partial self-governance since then, which their neighbors from the right bank of the Sava had to wait for almost an entire century, even longer.
There are people who believe that ”sweet life” began much earlier, when the first vine arrived to the Zemun district, which had to be in the Roman times, at the beginning of the new era. Bruno Mozer was most prominent in that humanitarian business since mid-nineteenth century. His winery survived even after the last war (”Navip” – national wine cellar) – until recently, when it infamously perished, leaving people of Zemun sighing melancholically whenever they pass its dried-up cellars.

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Fleets and Dugouts
Although people say it is about seven millennia old, Zemun was first mentioned between the I and VI century A.D under the name of Taurunum, as a fortified city with a military port, seat of the Danube fleet of Limes, defensive area of the Roman Empire from barbarian tribes coming from the north. The fortification was on Gardoš, where remains of an ancient necropolis still exist, and the civil settlement and commercial center were in the foot, where the center of old Zemun is today. The settlement was later named Zemlin, and the name is obviously of Slavic origin, given due to many dugouts (Serbian: zemunica) in the porous sandstone of Gardoš visible from the Danube.

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Two Brankos
In the early 1970s, at the time of mayor Branko Pešić, ten Srem villages (out of the seventeen which used to belong to the Zemun District) were integrated into Zemun. Entrepreneurial Branko, born in Zemun, managed to force them into the city not because of expanding Belgrade, but so that their citizens would get asphalt roads and public transportation, electricity, waterworks and lucky ones even sewage systems. Branko Najhold also wrote about this other Branko, who got a street near the house he was born and spent his entire life in.

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Bronze Memory
A strange monument is standing alone at the Zemun Quay in a myriad of others. It is made by a newly cast park bench and a skinny tall man at its end, with his dreamy eyes gazing across the Danube, towards the Banat side – Branko Najhold and his love.
The composition was not placed by the city or the municipality. It was placed by Bojana Ivanović, Branko’s widow. Because of that memorial, she spent the money saved for ”rainy days”. When asked by family, friends and acquaintances – why? – she’d reply with a simple truth: ”He deserved much more.”