IN THE SHADE OF VARADIN\'S ROCK

Although it is the very Varadin which makes the anchorage of Novi Sad on the high seas of the Pannonian Plain, and although it is likely that Novi Sad would never have sprung up on the place where it is if it were not for this mighty fortification "on the farthermost edge of Mt. Fruška Gora" (as Leskovac put it) – it seems that the old-time townsfolk of Novi Sad did not share a common attitude to the huge massif revetted with red bricks. The shade of the 'grey rock' which has for hundreds of years been falling from Varadin onto Novi Sad not only attributed significance to the cultivated town, but also, at the same time, veiled it with a shade of fear and distrust, for it symbolized the continental power of the Grand Monarchy. For, the cannonry of Varadin, as well as the gallows there, hung over Novi Sad for too long like a 'sword of Damocles' held by an alien 'force and injustice', despite the fact that the memories of the bombardment of the city that took place on June 12, 1849 were fading out (it was undertaken after one failing, rash attack onto Varadin by Ban Jelačić)* and the Fortress kept 'nearing' the town of Novi Sad which increasingly protruded – through the marshy and willow-overgrown land – toward the Danubian bank.
Not less than by the famous bombardment of Novi Sad which made its near-to-Turkish-style city burned down to the foundations, I am intrigued by the gallows of Varadin: the reason lies not in the cliché that it was Serbian patriots who used to hang there, for that is not the historical truth –  but in an incredibly intriguing, paradoxical, ridiculous stories dug by Vasa Stajić out of the dusty archives of the Town Magistrate. In his "Contributions to the Cultural History of Novi Sad" (“Građa za kulturnu istoriju Novog Sada”, 1947), the unavoidable chronichler of our city and our Vojvodina wrote down the following description of a 1813 event:

"Arrested at Petrovaradin Fortress, tax-payer Jefta Gajin was sent to the Magistrate for trial. He had stolen the leg of the famous robber Kuzman Ugodić, whose body was hanging in the Fortress, which made him a suspect of previously providing a hiding-place to Ugodić. However, he claimed to have suffered from epilepsy since early childhood. He was going to the monastery of Jazak to pray, and a woman there had told him he could get rid of his trouble if he acquired a leg of a hung man and burned it, then drank its ashes with water. The leg, he added, had already decayed and fallen off by itself, and he merely took it up, not cut off. When the story was confirmed, the Magistrate set him free, finding him deserving of sympathy and not of punishment." Stajić put this bizarre little story from the Varadin Fortress into the context of superstitions one could find among the old inhabitants of Novi Sad, and that is how it came under the label of 'cultural history'. It has aroused my interest for more than one reason. First, the very mention of the gallows at Petrovaradin Fortress is simply remindful of the fact that Djava (as the young now refer to it, by reducing the word tvrdjava, 'fortress') had not only been the ground where people sought dancing parties and promenade, love embrace or nocturnal revelries; on the contrary: what it used to represent was a cruel order typical of a large, remote military post on the border of the ever-threatened Balkans. For, this story demonstrates again that the gallows mark the major historical 'elevation' of every military and state force. Once you look a little deeper into the somewhat morbid anecdote, you discover elements of an entire drama, if not a novel.

It has obviously been for a long time that up there, high on the gallows, exposed to the Danubian storms and cold showers, 'the famous robber Kuzman Ugodić' had been hanging. The said Ugodić used to rule the roost in these parts, both across the mountain passes of the Fruška Gora and the oakwoods of the Syrmia and Slavonia, over the swamps along the Danube and the field lines in the heaths of the Bačka. Yet what has remained of him till the present day is nothing more than this record. Why he never entered a history legend as some Little Radojica**? Did he spend his boyhood somewhere in a village near Morović or the Tisa river stamping down the dusty road and the nearby wood, dreaming of taking an easier life from the world? Or did he come from another region where outlaws personified the major manly careers? How did he get caught and sentenced? Did his hanging take place in front of the whole Varadin Regiment lined up in a square rank on the ground between the upper Leopold and Innocent bastions, or his 'glorious' career in robbery ended dryly and without pomp, when his strong body wiggled under the fresh-cut beams – merely in the presence of the Varadin guard on duty, commanded by a seargent suffering from hangover and with only a ritually read sentence hastily murmured out by a court martial judge in a wrinkled military uniform? Of the characters in this drama, there is also the said tax-payer Jefta Gajin, caught with Kuzman's half-decayed leg in his hands. Was it nighttime, or did Jefta take advantage of some bad weather to get the robber's leg – while the guard by the gallows retreated into a doorway to chew on a piece of bacon and take a quarter-brandy swig from a hip flask? This Jefta told a story which is not quite persuasive. A tax-payer is not just a tramp walking around in search of a fallen-off leg under some gallows.  In those times, a tax-payer, a kontribuent [in administrative jargon], was a man with some incomes, an address, a craft workshop, or a small grocery, or a parcel under vinyard, a man registered in government books. So, how did he get inside the Fortress waiting for a good moment to grab a dried-out  corpse?
 On the other hand, the whole story may have been situated onto a wrong place, for the gallows of Varadin were not – historians say – mounted up there inside the walls but on the site near St. Rock's Church. That is, in the broad suburban area of Petrovaradin, where the Majur settlement begins. Yet Stajić, who never demonstrated any lack of accuracy, says that the leg was stolen from "the fortress" – and that can be taken in a strict or a broad sense, which further could mean that the gallows for Kuzman were perhaps mounted on a high-rising place outside of the market scaffolds, in order to have the punished robber swing before the eyes of the crowd, including the people across the Danube, the Orthodox who needed a warning that order had to be maintained, and that the imperial hand hit heavily as the justice of the court would always prove efficient enough. Let us suppose that Jefta did not tell the truth before the Magistrate court but contrived a witty lie. In that case, one may wonder why he took Kuzman's leg. Perhaps he wanted to bury the man but – while trying to get the body off the gallows – was left with the leg in his hands right at the moment when the guard came by. His interest in the leg may have lied only in the possibility of a tattoo code revealing the place where the robber's looted gold was hidden near the Jazak monastery where Jefta had met the mystery-woman who had reportedly given him the 'prescription' for the cure of epilepsy.

Thus, like in any well-written play, the story offers a female character in possession of a secret: sorcery or something else, say, gold. Jefta did not tell her name, which leads to the conclusion that the story did not hold. But the fact that the judges, members of the Magistrate, already knew of Jefta's epilepsy or silently sided with him – lends persuasiveness to it.

Several years ago, when Predrag Marković – then in the capacity of the editor-in-chief of the publishing house "Stubovi kulture" and publisher of my book The Apostles of the Serbian Finances (Apostoli srpskih finansija, 1997) – told me about his preparing a 'postmodernist project' of a series of commissioned novels with that subject, I suggested that he send to his commissioned authors this story about the leg picked up from the Varadin gallows. The idea found no response. First of all, I myself did not dare – after years of my journalistic practice – write any piece with literary aspirations, especially not one about the gallows above Varadin. Although my initial plan included involvement of Vuk Isaković, Crnjanski's hero, who for a while commanded the Varadin Infantry Regiment (but his headquarters were in Sremska Mitrovica, not Petrovaradin), or the sergeant-major Jeftimije Nović of the Petrovaradin Regiment who was short of money needed as deposit for his marriage to the beautiful Pulherija of Krčedin: Emperor Leopold II himself considered the issue. Or, I could have resorted to the imperial lieutenant colonel of the said Varadin's regiment, Count Pavle Branković, who died blind in 1856 in Novi Sad, "seeing nothing and therefore living on his own" (Milan Čuljak wrote about it). Of course, important roles in the novel would have been played – for counter-effect – by the Austrians: generals, vice-marshals and colonels (as commanders of the Varadin Fortress there were an Eszterhazy, Barons Tillier, de Tersi, von Pfeffershofen, von Schmidtfeld, and others); these men used to descend to Novi Sad with large escorts, over the pontoon bridge, and to join in a feast, warning the township authorities of the syphilis spreading down the Danubian Street from the bridgehead (tette de pont) and further through the inns and brothels mostly located in the Danubian Street:  Kod bele ruže (White Rose's), Kod crne četke (Black Brush), Kod sedam švaba (With Seven Schwabians), Kod crvenog vola (Red Ox's), Kod zlatne devojke (Golden Girl's) and Kod bele crkve (At the White Church). Naturally, my imaginary novel would have been inhabited by someone from the 1813 Magistrate of Novi Sad, and at that time the seats there were held by nobleman Đorđe Ostojić of Veliki Šemljok, Đorđe Miodragović, Ćiril Janković, lawyer Jovan Kamber, nobleman Dimitrije Servijski of Turska Kanjiža and merchant Grigorije Hristić.

Did they all witness Jefta Gajin's escape from the punishment? I do not know. I had even thought of involving into my novel a political scandal of the time: it was about the vacant job of the township under-notary which in that turn implied – according to the national parity policy – was a 'Serbian post'; five (no more, no less) Serb lawyers applied for it, and after many complications and 'vote dispersions' Teodor Radnjić won. The town's chroniclers permanently remarked that among the Serbs of Novi Sad there were always too many of the "men of esteem" tending to take up some public office. Yet while thinking out my novel about the gallows of Varadin, I was constantly coping with the problem of counterposing Novi Sad and Varadin without following any banal mould of patriotic verse and fiction that would mean a quarrel between them. For, what is Novi Sad without Varadin's "Gibraltar on the Danube" from which – provided the weather is serene and one is ready to watch far – one half  of Europe and the whole of the Balkans can be seen.
[2002] Dimitrije Boarov