AN ATLAS OF IDENTIFICATION

A view of the world, the Fortress as a testament, an unconquerable elevation

The Fortress, far older than Novi Sad, recollects far more and in greater detail than the few centuries of Novi Sad's existence.
In pure convergence, Novi Sad and all of us, people of all sorts, remember – in an established order – the alternating and moody seasons on the Fortress, like we do our morning prayer, or, more likely, the one said in evening hours.
Just as the view from the Fortress is a privilege for those arriving up there, the awakening or weary view of the Fortress is a precondition of Novi Sad's life, of the city's days and the city's nights alike.
In the year 1965, in the midst of our continental summer, when Novi Sad was afflicted by one of the worst raging floods in its not particularly long history, Matica Srpska published my book Novi Sad, grad na reci (Novi Sad, a Riverside City). That is, the book which contained the contributions – in addition to mine – by ten prominent photographers of the day as testimonies to the city's choice and resoluteness to settle on the riverside.
Coincidentally, it was on those evil dates – like launched by our surrealists, our dear Bretons, or by Miloš Crnjanski who cared so much about the Chance Comedian, the river was well settled inside the city.
A memorable event. One which tells how slowly indeed Novi Sad had been approaching the big river.
Anyway, one may say –  with reason so.
As early as in the fifties, Isidora Sekulić – remebering her own excursions and many visits to Novi Sad – asked us, Novi Sad's students with eyes open wide, if we used to go to the Danube. It's not so far – our great woman of letters claimed categorically. – You leave the Danubian Street, and within some fifteen minutes of slow walk you find yourself by the Danube.

What matters here is not our astonishment at the moment, but her memory that kept the city's borderlines by the Fabri Hotel at Danubian Street, the same one often referred to by Veljko Petrović, as well as at the fire brigade magazine known to the younger generations as the Sechuan Chinese Restaurant. Later, another leap in superlative manner took place: an invasion of the Fortress.
To my generation, one which in 1954 gained students' ID booklets of the newly-established university at the building in the center of Novi Sad, near the monument to Svetozar Miletić, the Fortress was a landmark that delineated the end. Or, at least, the beginning of the end. A New World.
At least to myself, who as a highschool graduate came from the southern Srem, an area with the attribute 'swine-growing', everything was quite strange. From the lowland of the village of Nikinci, and of the town of Ruma, I could not – except perhaps in the best auras of springtime serenity – see the hills of Mt. Fruška Gora. At the same time, and all the time so, the proud and high-rising Mt. Cer was distinct, like a tent on a meadow. Across the Sava.
Neither winds nor dreams have limits.
The least believable, and an entire nonsense, was Novi Sad's Danube River taken for a border.
Never more.
In those student years of mine, now so remote in the past, our civilians of the still small town of Novi Sad, were slowly taking over buildings, addresses, latitudes – from the military, in most cases.
All has fallen into oblivion.
The cult mosaic in the Vojvodina Assembly Building emerged only after the Ban Palace designed by Dragiša Brašovan ceased to house the Yugoslav National Army.
Taking hold of the Fortress took place within our first steps on the road of civil freedoms – of moving around, dreaming, idling.
In the time of my – and our – in many ways legendary Youth Forum at No. 3 Jovana Subotića Street, one of the first conspirators of the Fortress, Boško Petrović, put his sketches for the said Assembly Bldg mosaic on display, from March 13 on. The mosaic which still attracts our attention nowadays. Not only within the tidal growth of our parliamentary life.
The Fortress was yielding.
Who to?
As if following the visionary power of Don Quixote, to Boško Petrović, Jovan Soldatović, Miroslav Antić…

My generation also recalls the first students' dormitories up there, in an indescribable informel of damp walls, in the company of rats and owls that not only symbolized the situation but were part of the reality of those days and sleepless nights.
Later, the 1960's of the onetime Vojvodina and – naturally – of Novi Sad, too, were marked by rebellion – which only seemed to be unfounded – and the power that would not give way. Swingers, still so typical among the newcomers to these northern parts, saw an El Dorado of all their daydreams nowhere else but in in our small towns with never-ending Sunday afternoons when we were all, to the last of us, so undeniably equipped with lust for life and also elementary, there behind those high-vaulted gates. It was from the Fortress that those swingers set out for their campaign.
 It was increasingly distinguishable that 'the Fortress' was a word of many connotations, lighting hues, dreams  .What matters here is not our astonishment at the moment, but her memory that kept the
Novi Sad had already seen the motion of those English double-deckers, the buses wedged into the ground-floor and single-storeyed townscape, those we called shakespeares... And to reach those shadowy spots in the shrubs of the Fortress was much easier.
I know of at least a score of occasions when – inside the luxurious darkness, while the sleepy town down there was flickering with lights – soldiers and newcomers of all sorts would without restraint join our sexual equations. Trios were born. Never ever has it been with greater loudness than in those long-gone nights of the sixties that so much excitement imbued the the so-called common sounds of the group grope audio-taped.
Thus, and not only for the great critic, the Fortress resembled an island. Namely, one is supposed to flee from an island.
Later, when Varadin Hotel was opened inside the former students' dorm, we set – outright, and encouraged by Stevan Stanić who did that not by his films and reviews only – to make the velvet there worn out, old and more long-lived than ourselves, as soon as possible.
Everything lay in paintings.
Nobody was in any haste whatsoever.
Regardless of later restoration works that produced reminiscences of the habitat of Miljenko Stančić, the whole setting of Bora Popržan's studio was festive: a large table set there, in a dress, fruits and the moments of breathers.
Loving one another was yet to follow.
Thus, the belvedere became (and remained) a dream taken hold of.
However, the Fortress keeps suggesting: there is no end to either dreams or the conversations of our over-the-rivers folk*.
I shall never forget one of the first large exhibitions in Novi Sad from the time following the 1999 air war. Everything was missing. There was not one blessed bridge.
The times were revived of calm and slow-moving ferry rafts once poeticized by the bard of old-time Vojvodina, Bogdan Čiplić:
Skela prima po sedam kola odjednom,
A kad se stisnu, bude ih i devet.

The ferry took as much as seven carts at a time,
yet if willfully cramped, there would be nine.
Taken from the Fortress, the sizeable paintings by Mića Mihajlović travelled over the river on a raft, and then reached the yet-unburnt local tech building.
It was a long journey of the kind favoured by Constantine Cavafy**: summer heat, silent unrest weighing on.
It seems to me that, facing the Fortress, all of the travellers chase, being chased themselves, like in a verse by Momčilo Nastasijević.

The dragnet is still there, we may have been gone, yet for the several generations that passionately set out to conquer it over the latter twentieth century, the Fortress seems to have metaphysically signified novelty – a sign that always gets adopted but not relinquished at random.
Freedom is the sole feature immanent to those old buildings that have long ago turned into an all-embracing Monmartre.
To me at least, the heaven opened from a window of the Fortress.
No more.
No matter which route we take to reach the plateau which offers a view of the whole semisphere of the starry firmament – whether through the tunnel or another road, or – like birds –  through the skies, you will always get overwhelmed by an orgiastic vibration of numbness and the so-called mini-death of joy, up there.
Once long ago, between the two world wars, Crnjanski described Sremski Karlovci as a love-suburb of Belgrade.
In 1972, when I took him to the Fortress, and – among other places there – to the studio of our most famous and most influential verticalist Jovan Soldatović, who has also greatly altered our flat landscape,  this classic of modern Serbian literature was, with excitement, listening to the sounds of love in the low-growing shrubs there, beside us.
The enchantment of love, in my memory at least, first won the singular granite rock above the plain.
Next, the authentic addresses of workshops were located, of museums, institutes, Atelje 61...
There would be no possibility for Novi Sad, so deep-sunken and intersected with the meanders of the large river, to exist – were it not for the view from above.
No stone.
Just the memories.
The happiest impression ever: in that big studio of Boško Petrović, overgrown with grass and vaulted by a restless tide of butts and smoke, it seems even now that I listen to the breathing efforts of that iron furnace that looked like a potbelly stove. Hand-made things were still appreciated.
And then?
Then, Crnjanski and I peeped into Jovan's* studio through the window: high-rising sprouts of gypsum. A luxurious low relief in walnut. Dried flowers...
And after that?
After that, Nobelists would drop by, Salvatore Quazimodo being the first.
The wine of Karlowitz was madly drunk by Lawrence Durrell. Without a single mention of Alexandria on that occasion.
Let us not forget: never and nowhere have I heard so much talk, as there was at the Fortress, about redesigning, purpose-adaptation, renderings – of all sorts.
Fortunately, the Fortress evaded everyone, including us, the crumpled and superfluous, boring and self-imposing visitors. Its tenants, too.
And then, in a single season and all of a sudden, there emerged the performances of the Over-the-Bridge Theatre (Teatar preko mosta). Mira Banjac** was there to welcome us, and not only in Živojin Miškov's studio.
The times were lacking in comfort anyway.
Environmentalism was solemn, reduced to mere words: no source of money, of change, of turnover. Luckily so.
The vaulted spaces, the mildewed casemates and the dead silence of eventlessness, wherefrom the inmate Antun Gustav Matoš, imprisoned by Austro-Hungary, fled across the pontoon bridge to Novi Sad, onto the market square, and then – via Titel and Pančevo – to Serbia, to the beloved cobbled streets of Belgrade, that was the stage of unfettered imagination now.
To some extent, the Fortress is one of those so crucial, and certainly somewhat mysterious spots, without which it is impossible to either compose or see the vast Pannonian atlas that knows not of borders, the atlas which - relying directly on the endlessness of the onetime bygone high seas – implies tolerance as the essence, the dream, life itself.
That is a watch-tower, but also a grand finale, a magic sight upward, an elevation as a shared-in-common aspiration of all lowlanders.
Naturally enough and in metaphysical sense, too, the Fortress is – to poets and dreamers, to travellers and settlers alike – that particular kind of adventure which resists recounting in any way or place, and which – like poetry – cannot be proved in any other way but by the truth of experience.
There is an often cited anecdote about the renowned German phiosopher Immanuel Kant who in his native Koenigsberg used to happily phantasize and contemplate while watching the pinnacle of the Gothic-church bell-tower accessible to his eyes constantly from his window. That point, a singular focus of concentration that eternally and closely accompanies absent-mindedness, suddenly turned inaccessible. That is, his neighbour had added a new wall or a range to his house, and the illusion of the pinnacle had vanished completely. To Kant, the pinnacle no longer existed. What followed was that the philosopher kept saving every penny until he managed to buy off the obstacle to his 'view of the world'. However, he was weary by the time and his eyesight had become weak. Although the obstacle had been removed, he was now incapable of making out, let alone reconquering the highest point of the elevation on his mind's routes. All had been in vain.
Likewise, in our milieu, it has been due to the carelessness of building contractors, or to the showing-off mentality of the architects, or a third reason, that an intruder would interfere with our phantasies which had for ages been flourishing in relation with the view of the Fortress. To put it clearly, the Fortress is even nowadays not visible – from the chains of Novi Sad's streets and boulevards – as one could reasonably expect.
Nevertheless, some views have remained sacrosanct.
There is a stair flight inside the house at no. 6 of Novi Sad's Grčkoškolska Street from which it is possible, without a telescopic device, to reach the clock-tower on the plateau of the Fortress which is thus aligned with the picturesque tower on the Bishopric Palace. The Danube cannot be seen, abridged by the dream of deleted distances, and everything is really within an arm's reach. A gift sent by God.
There are other viewpoints in Vojvodina, those that surpass the lucky height of the granite rock of Petrovaradin: Vršački Breg*, Crveni Čot**…
However, it is perhaps the Fortress only, so bordered by the big water of the Danube, that offers an impression of infiniteness and at the same time of fortunate situation that endures like eternity itself.
Is there anything or any kind of dream that left the Fortress out?
In the recollections of those who still can recollect, there is an 'entry' of August 15, 1991, when noone else but Milan Konjović himself – exposed there to everybody and under the generous lighting of summertime – painted. In all likelihood, doing that before others for the last time. To me, he was indisputably so much like Kant: while telling us that the hardly reddened stroke on the painting, the canvas, was a hue so brightly and so ultimately singled out as cinnabarine.
Obviously, he saw things – as everything on the Fortress – in a way that differed from ours.
He also confided to me the same, and. repeating the daring claim, said that he had painted at the foot of the Fortress, at Ribnjak, immediately after the war, in 1945 and 1946, and that it was its preceding weariness that had attracted him, for this required a attenuated palette. Doubtlessly the greatest colourist of the modern Serbain painting art, Konjović did not only dream black-and-white, but even liked the TV screen colour-free, in black-and-white contours. (A side-remark: that is how he watched, delighted, that magic serial on Munk.) To him at least, the Fortress – with its powerful 'screens' of Vauban's numb military architecture – embodied the weathered yet powerful erectness.
The most famous scene from the Fortress has been made eternal by the doyen of our photographic art - Géza Barta.
It is the so often reproduced moment when light emerges, so to say, straight from a whirl of the Danube. Bent over the townscape, some forty years ago, and later in the book Novi Sad, a Riverside Town (Novi Sad, grad na reci), I wrote down the following lines:

"That murky sky over the massif of Petrovaradin Fortress, above the water, that is the sky over Toledo painted by El Greco. The sky and that fortress - jutting out into the water, the Danube – which in the nights awaiting storm is calmness that stirs unrest and re-invokes the memories of old wars..."
The imposing character of the Fortress, with those slanted transverse lines Andre Lhote would love so dearly, by no means allows for short pace, intimate milieu, small-scale genre...
Milenko Šerban, painter of chlorophyll and green Pannonian light, produced two paintings made in the late twenties, his post-Parisian days, depicting scenes from Novi Sad.
On one of these, the no-longer extant Armenian Church is all made up of planes arranged in an almost cubist manner. Yet even so, it is a distinct artistic testimony of an edifice that no longer exists, one we – my generation – fixed in our memory as a street-car stop right in front of it.
The two small yet significant canvases by Šerban were solely interpreted with associations to his studies in Paris, with Lhote.
But it is possible, or at least closer to the truth, that Šerban's picture of the Fortress not only invoked but also suggested such a tiered order of things, a comparative and superlative degree of our movement toward light, toward the heights that lure one, as in the works of Pascal and Matić*, in a sinister and suicidal voice.
Miroslav Antić used to dream of, paint and enjoy the height of that rock from which he could fastest fly down, like the birds he was so fond of, and land on the Danube. The teenagers on school excursions would stop here not for some rest only, but also for setting themselves free and friendly to the cannonry and stuffed animals in the museum halls.
The Fortress is a museum, yet one from a different kind of phantasy, altered, with free winds and weather vanes that preferably befriend storms and disasters of any kind.
It was only from the Fortress that the large Viennese ships of the last century and the one preceding it looked like dreamboats.
There is also a story about the rich burghers of Novi Sad once travelling as far as to Vukovar in order to see their dear relatives and friends embark on one of those big white vessels and then sail, in an adaggio manner – as the ship and the river would have it – downstream to Zemun. You imagine the on-board life: brass, cognac, stirring horizons above the water...
Later, well, later they would get onto a train and arrive from the opposite direction to the same, or not quite unaltered, Novi Sad again.
Now that we are talking about ships, which measure time and set timetables according to that unique clock with its big hand showing hours and small hand showing minutes, it should not be forgotten that the above-mentioned Milan Konjović, painter of the summertime sunfires in our continental climate so faithful to the dog days, has written down that he had for the first time  seen exactly the same sun on a ship whereon a Turk was frying coffee and serving it in the fincan cups on the bottom of which - the sun was ablaze like pure gold. It may have happened right under the Varadin. One can never know.
The Fortress is a real trial for the artists. Never is it a mere visual motif that attracts attention in  tourists-intended brochures or cheap souvenirs. The gloomy superiority of the Fortress seems to a priori annihilate the appeal of kitsch, and it certainly shows no understanding for sentimental, rash scenes of tearful partings or the forms of weekend-lasting joys.
Above the Fortress, clouds are completely different from those above the Bačka-.
Since the birds are ever and eternally the companions of waterways, of river-streams, there is a brilliant side to the fact, taken in reverse, that the seagulls coming from the direction of the Black Sea make Novi Sad – a seaport.
Seen side by side with scenes from an art studio, the onetime studio of Stevan Maksimović at the Fortress, the city down there suddenly seems to be more yielding and, in a way, like a family-place. Thus, the urban character of Novi Sad, still essentially reflecting schoolfellowship and – in a way - family life, can be understood only when seen from aside, from above.
The Fortress is an unaccountable yet so true attribute of Novi Sad.