Wednesday 13 July: We joined the afternoon bus excursion to Sremski Karlovci. This was the original capital of Serbia when the region was occupied by the Ottoman Turks before it was moved to Belgrade.
It was a challenging tour with the temperature 38C in the shade. After an hour in a bus, with air conditioning struggling to cope with the heat, we arrived in Sremski Karlovci. The heat was a distraction as we walked around the old city centre.It actually had the appearance of a ghost town – hardly any people on the streets and the few shops were closed. There were some architecturally interesting buildings but not a must-see town.
The photos show: one of the older buildings with a metal door; a tobacconist ship that had sculptures in the window made from crushed cigarette packet foil; a ceramicist shop with nice unique ceramics.
We had a little relief from the excessive heat when we stopped at a riverside bar/restaurant for refreshments where we tried the local Serbian beer which was quite good. While there we saw some of the locals drifting past on the Serbian version of a river boogie-board – pieces of polystyrene foam.
A further short drive and we arrived at Novi Sad. Novi Sad was founded in 1670 and is the capital of the Serbian province of Vojvodina.
It was incorporated into the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia) in 1918. It was an area that Slobodan Milosevic tried to annex along with Kosovo and is now part of Serbia.It had the usual church, St Mary’s Catholic church, which had a similar tiled roof to the one we saw in Vienna.
There were historic buildings around the town square, most build by wealthy guilds.
The most interesting was the bee guild building, with its bee motifs. Bees were introduced by the Romans, along with other agricultural activities like wine-making. When the Romans settled they really brought their culture with them.
We were introduced to another custom popular in this region which is that at high school graduation, portraits of each student in the class and their teachers are mounted and framed, and purchased by the families.We have seen these in numerous places, for example the shop window of the student’s parents. Also interesting was the name plaque on the town library, written in 5 languages; Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, etc.
So much for Cyrillic being a common alphabet for Eastern Europe.
One claim to fame is the residence attached to the St Mary’s Catholic church. Apparently the only building in Europe to include Byzantine, Serbian and Moorish styles in its design.Another is the fortress Peterwardein which was one of Europe’s largest defence installations.
More interesting to Frances was the ‘beach’ on the river bank which had hundreds of people frolicking in the summer heat and sunshine.
Of slightly more interest to me was the bombed-out remains of the Serbian media centre, targeted by NATO missiles during the Kosovo conflict.
PS: Some of these photos were taken out of the window of a moving bus - apologies for the quality.
Finally after a long, hot day of travelling, we joined the ship back in Belgrade.