THE ELIZABETH BRIDGE,—BUDA IN THE BACKGROUND.
The minute you cross the Danube at the Servian frontier you begin to feel the influence, although a waning one, of a nation that has been struggling desperately for hundreds of years to regain her lost provinces—the Turks. It is not so noticeable in Servia as in Bulgaria, not so noticeable in Bulgaria as in Bosnia and the Herzegovina, but it is there, nevertheless; the sullen, silent suffering of a nation of stoics, whose forefathers were defeated in their murderous attempts to Mohammedanize Europe only at the very gates of Vienna itself.
The fact that Servia entertains exaggerated fears for her own is brought to the notice of the traveller—and forcibly, too—at Zemlin, on the Austrian side of the Danube River, opposite Belgrade. At this point one of King Peter’s ominous-looking arms of the law, resplendent in epaulets and gold cord, boards each and every train from the west. Although his trailing sword appears to be no little hindrance to his ease in getting about, his temper remains unruffled and he examines with polite suspicion the passports of all who expect to leave the train at the Servian capital. The name of the owner of the passport is jotted down on a piece of paper which, later, in the depot, is handed surreptitiously to a pair of warlike individuals who guard the exit to the street, while the customs officials are demanding excuses for the contents of your grips. Between these two warriors you must pass out from the depot and give them your name, which is forthwith checked off the list previously furnished by the portly train inspector.
But this is not all.
Upon arrival at the hotel you are handed an information blank, which must be filled in with your name, address, occupation, religion, where you came from, how long you expect to remain in the city, your ultimate destination and such data as would facilitate the authorities in bringing you to earth in case you attempted to cut short the life of the King or incited the natives to revolt.
One of these blanks, for you must fill in two, is kept at the hotel; the other is sent to police headquarters. No matter how insignificant you may imagine you are when in your mother-country, you are under the eagle eye of the government continuously in Servia. Your every move is watched and made a note of. It matters not even if you change to another hotel; the police are immediately notified to that effect. You are branded as a suspicious character and will remain so until you prove it or leave the country, vindicated.
Your first impressions of the metropolis of Servia are apt to be a bit disappointing, and especially so if you arrive at night, for Belgrade is anything but an imposing city, even in the daytime. You are driven rather recklessly through streets of very uneven cobbles, miserably lighted and apparently abandoned by human beings. The business, and, at the same time, residential part of the city, in which your hotel is located, looks down from the crest of a hill upon the squalid, old Turkish quarter on one side, from which emanates a veritable vapour of highly seasoned cookery, and the poor Servian district and warehouses on the other. To the west, on a cliff overlooking the junction of the Danube and the Save, are the Kalemagden Park and the old fortress, the guns of the latter having been long since silenced by the Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which forbade Servia fortifying her Austrian frontier.
“The cheerful boulevards of Belgrade,” as one author earnestly puts it, may have been in existence at the time the phrase was coined, but I very much doubt it, because of the dearth of evidence of these alleged “boulevards” ever having deserved such flattery.