Monument to an unknown gorilla
Goran Gocić
Towns in the country where I reside, Serbia, were urbanised during the Obrenović dynasty in the nineteenth century. A city hall, post office, church and school were erected around central squares, then ornamented with the bust of a distinguished Serbian national, preferably from the area.
The second half of the twentieth century was a time of Eastern bloc ‘socialist realism’. Yugoslavia had its own variant: modernist, impersonal, abstract structures made of concrete were built in the countryside on World War II killing fields. Most resemble gigantic flowers, closer to Henry Moore than a commemorated personality cult.
Today, nobody wants Vladimir Lenin overlooking Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Apple shops. In the neighbouring country of Croatia, some 3,000 Communist-era monuments were blown up, put away or simply abandoned following the Yugoslav civil war of 1991–1995. It is the same throughout Eastern Europe. It is not yet quite clear, however, what should replace such former glory. Perhaps art schools should introduce a new course into their sculpture departments –‘How to build a monument without insulting anyone?’
A starting point:
Victor’s pet
For first-time visitors to the Serbian capital, I recommend checking out Belgrade’s landmark statue, Victor (1928). It is a bronze figure of a muscular, naked man made by the prominent Croatian and Yugoslav sculptor, Ivan Meštrović, whose pieces can fetch a solid six figures at Christie’s auction house. Perched on a column in the city’s fortress, overlooking the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, Victor looks like a 46-foot-tall Oscar statuette. Except that Oscar only holds an oversized sword; Victor owns both a sword and a falcon. And this is where a divergence takes place and things begin to happen – where historical heroic acts begin to diminish in importance and an endearing world of fauna starts to multiply.
New trends:
the Serbian gorilla
Within walking distance of this bird tamer is Belgrade Zoo which boasts a pitch-black, bronze monument of a gorilla. (Hang on, that’s a typo? No, no, not a WW2 guerrilla, or a member of what the French called la Résistance, but a gorilla; a cousin of the chimpanzee and orangutang. No heroic resistance involved, just a desperate struggle not to become extinct.)
Cute. And why not? After all, zoos do have their distinguished personalities among their own resident animals, especially ones that do not belong to European soil. For example, one of the boa constrictors in the same zoo is called Madeleine, referencing Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, who put the squeeze on Serbia.
Perhaps a monument to a gorilla is something unique to Belgrade. Courtesy of an eccentric local businessman’s whim? A gig for a well-connected sculptor who sold his unpopular piece to the right client? An inside joke dedicated to the rising number of pumped-up bodyguards and goons who are known in local slang as gorillas? Belgrade’s bronze gorilla is even saved for posterity in a Serbian movie about a Mafia hit man, The Land of Truth, Love and Freedom (2000) – but it is uncertain who this might be based on.
Visiting the countryside:
birds, but not Hitchcock’s
Driving north from Belgrade, 85 miles towards the Romanian border, is the city of Kikinda, famous for the remains of a mammoth nicknamed ‘Kika’ in the National Museum. Kikinda is also winter residence of the biggest long-eared owl roost in the world. The BBC went there twice to shoot Planet Earth. There is also a house from the early twentieth century with an owl relief on its facade.
So the erection of a monument to an owl in the city centre was rather an obvious step. However, it resulted in some controversy when residents noticed that the sculpture reminded them a bit too much of a (to put it delicately) male member. So, the brick-coloured, 9-foot-tall owl statue was sent back to the artist, who modified certain resemblances. It now again stands proudly erect at the main roundabout.
Travelling in the opposite direction, 145 miles south of Belgrade, to the hot springs of a well-kept spa town, Vrnjačka Banja, one encounters another landmark of the same order. Residents will give you directions around town in relation to the Sparrow. A local joke? Not really. Languishing at the centre of the pedestrian zone is a voluminous bronze sculpture with the features of a bird.
Now, a gorilla is a foreigner, the owl a regular visitor. But one can easily identify the Sparrow as Serbian. The traditional Serbian hat, a šajkača, sits on its head. So, while it may not be one of the proud white eagles from the Serbian coat-of-arms, it is still a genuinely, proudly Serbian bird.
Deep south blues:
I could swear it was a bear
Not far off, 68 miles in the same southerly direction, close to the border with Kosovo, lies a mountainous area of national park with a trendy ski resort, Kopaonik. On my way there, a family of grey foxes crossed the road in the twilight, unfazed by the car lights, so I kept my fingers crossed. Would there be some foxy sculpture in this mountain resort?
Sure enough, next day I discovered a monument right at the heart of the busy pedestrian centre. As with the previous sculptures, most tourists want to take a photo in front of it. When in Rome, do as the Romans do. So I took one, too. But it is made of marble. Bears are brown in Europe and black in the US, but the statue is light grey, almost polar.
I began pondering whether all these tributes to animals were just a weird coincidence. Time, I felt, to go east, towards Bulgaria. Yet, after 155 miles of bumpy riding eastwards, I found myself still deeper in the Serbian countryside. Around here, in the Serbian deep south, you have a feeling that almost anything can happen. Would I find a chimera? Some hybrid creature with two left feet, like that lion statue in Reading where I used to live during my BBC days? Or would this journey culminate, Japanese style, with a monument to Godzilla?
What a beautiful fly mosquito!
Pirot, a town in the southeast which sits close to Bulgarian border, answers such flights of the imagination. But wondering about animals and monuments, and your own apprehension, does not prepare you for standing in front of the monumental cast bronze on the main city square.
It celebrates an insect! A dragonfly, to be precise. Apparently, the sculpture reminds Pirot’s residents of a mosquito – they haven’t counted the wings (a dragonfly has four wings, a mosquito only two). Thus a documentary about this unusual artefact is called A Pirot Mosquito.
I heard a joke while I was there. A young mosquito returns home from his maiden flight. ‘How did it go?’ the proud parents want to know. ‘Great!’ responds the youngster all excited. ‘Everybody clapped their hands!’
Of course, you can take a photo, but you can also miss things. Taking pictures of yet another sculpture of a creature got me to thinking. What if this turns out to be more than a random motif, and becomes more of a system – animals not heroes? What kind of politics is clapping hands at the sight of animals?
Are we giving up our heroes in bulk? Do these ideologically neutral, non-historical sculptures of animals exemplify a painful sobering up from the past? Is Serbia reaching some kind of historical turn? Are the warrior people who stood at the gates of the Christian Europe for 800 years becoming soft and cuddly? Or are they becoming subtly ironic?
Post-communist political correctness:
be good to your dog
Finally, it dawned on me. Perhaps these pet-friendly, sustainable, nature-loving, environmentally conscious monuments are also about sublimated violence – statues to commemorate the hunter and the hunted, a kind of mutual haunting. Perhaps these are monuments that can be read as mementos to endangered species and as signifiers of displaced guilt. My compatriots seem to be lovers of fauna. And not only of sparrows, owls, falcons, mosquitoes and bears, which are domestic breeds, but also species which are elsewhere in trouble. So perhaps, after the harsh, petrified era of Communist laurel leaves and modernist abstraction, Serbia has turned to the sophisticated, politically correct commemoration of late capitalist fauna. Or, as Mark Twain noted, ‘The more I know about people, the better I like my dog.’
Photo by Fred Romero, courtesy of Wikicommons