After less than an hour's drive from Belgrade, we enter Sremska Mitrovica from the north. Varoš seems sleepy in the May sun. They say that here was a city with over 100 people. But that was a long time ago, seventeen centuries ago. Now it is home to forty thousand locals. We stayed in the very center. We leave our things and immediately go outside to devote ourselves to exploring the surroundings.
Irinej Sremski
Coming out of one passage, we are faced with the Orthodox Cathedral Church, actually the Church of St. Dimitrije.
It was built for three years, it was consecrated in 1794. So the church turns 230 years old this year. First, it was dedicated to Saint Stephen. It was only in 1987 that the saint changed its name - Saint Dimitrije, the patron saint of Mitrovica, or originally Dimitrovica, got another church of his own in the city, because the local Catholic church was also named after him until then.
We enter the church and the iconostasis immediately catches my eye. The icons were made by Arsenije Teodorović, who graduated from the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna. He was Dositej's friend and one of the most prominent Serbs of his time.
The iconostasis reminds me of something I've seen before. Teodorović also made icons in the Church of the Virgin Mary in Zemun. His painting manuscript therefore left a mark on the Srem plain, from Zemun to Sremska Mitrovica.
This iconostasis has preserved a visually told story that really happened in this area. Irenaeus, the first bishop of Roman Sirmium, died as a victim of the persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire in 304. He did not want to renounce Christ and make a sacrifice to the emperor. That's why he became a victim. On the Sava bridge, they cut off his head and threw his body into the water.
When Byzantium handed over power to the Ugars in 1180, the town of Civitas Sancti Demetrii was built on the ruins of Sirmium - the City of Saint Demetrius, a high-ranking Thessaloniki officer who died for the Christian faith in the fourth century, in the persecutions in which Irinej of Srem also died. The Serbs named the town Dimitrovica.
A nice green town
Through the pedestrian zone, in which Trg Sveti Stefana crosses without a visible border into Trg Ćire Milekića, you get to the extended part of the square.
The most striking building is the Serbian House from 1895. It was designed by the architect Vladimir Nikolić in a combination of neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque elements. In addition to the Serbian reading room and the singing society, there was also a tavern, a hotel, and an association of artisans. The building was damaged for the first time in the First World War. Today, it houses a theater and a library.
The first thing you notice in the center of the town is the greenery. The city park, right next to the Serbian House, is a place where people want to stay on nice days. It is surrounded by significant cultural institutions - the "Lazar Vozarević" Gallery, the Archive and the Srem Museum.
One could talk for a long time and at length about all these significant buildings, but my gaze rests on the "Stone Flower" fountain. Perhaps I intuitively recognize a dream carved in stone. The fountain was donated to the city by the daughter of Russian emigrants who fled to Yugoslavia after the October Revolution.
Eleven-year-old Irina Nepokojčicka later became an architect. Local legend says that once, near the end of her life, when she was suffering from grief for Russia, she dreamed of a dove that flew out of a miraculous flower with folded petals. The dove said that she was actually the daughter of Emperor Tiberius who had turned into a stone flower of sorrow, because her father had told the Avar conqueror that he would rather give him his daughter than Sirmium. The dove knew the cure for sadness - Irina must make a stone flower that will shed tears forever. In 1948, supposedly modeled on a flower from a dream, Irina created a fountain that cries for all the inhabitants of the city, into which many armies - Romans, Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Slavs, Turks, Austrians, Ustasha, partisans - entered victoriously. The fountain mourns for the dead instead of the living, who can thus rejoice.
Trees are an ally of the locals, and not, as in some parts of Belgrade, an enemy of the city administration. Streets often have well-kept rows of trees. Those who want to see for themselves can walk along the main diagonals of the city - Kralja Petra and Železnička, which the locals call Ulica platana, or Ulica Sveti Dimitrija.
Sirmium, the populous mother of cities
According to some, seven, according to others, ten Roman emperors were born in this region. Another eighteen of them lived here for a shorter or longer time. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the fame of this city reached the ears of the famous Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus, who called it "the famous and populous mother of cities". This happened in the fourth century. Behind the Museum of Srem, in the Park of St. Sava, 16 centuries later, Rotarians carved these words of Marcellin on the pillar symbolizing Sirmium.
Thus, a sentence about Sirmium's former imperial glory, meandering through time, found its place in the city it marked. Better to say, it settled about four meters above it - that's how thick the two-millennium stone is above the Roman capital, which was dealt the final blow by the Avars in the sixth century. The surviving Romans fled to Dalmatia, as far as Solin, and the burnt city never regained its former importance.
Today's inhabitants, whether they like it or not, occasionally find traces of a great past. There is a legendary story about a worker who, in the last century, stuck an ash in a leather bag with Roman gold coins on a construction site for a department store. There were 33 of them and they are priceless.
A building was erected in the middle of the city to cover the remains of the imperial palace. The problem with it is that the door is closed, and there is a note on it - the group tour will last 20 minutes. It's a new version of "I'll be back in five minutes". Well, from the experience of visiting similar places within the borders of the Roman Empire, from Trier to Alanya, I know that Heiner Müller is right when he says that the ruins are silent. Especially if you ask them why the empire fell.
Marcus Aurelius, emperor and philosopher, who died of the plague in Sirmium, wrote: "Everything passes and soon turns into a fairy tale and quickly sinks into complete oblivion...". His imperial Sirmium still lives in the name of the land between the Sava and the Danube. Ancient Sirmium was called Serma in Vulgar Latin. So Srem got its name from its capital.
Pig and dog monument
In Sremska Mitrovica, the mango tree got a monument. On the idea of Slobodan Simić, sculptor Vladimir Tović created a bronze mangulica. Next to her we see a dog under which it is written - pulin. Vojvodina shepherd dog. Pulin is - like the country in which it originated, a historical mixture. There are various Pannonian breeds in his genes, among which are Hungarian and Croatian sheepdogs. But Pullin is taller than both of them. They say he asks for little and gives a lot. It recognizes only one master. In Srem, they know how to say: "One Pulin is worth three shepherds".
Let's go back to the larger bronze animal looking towards the column on which is engraved a sentence about the importance of this town in Roman times.
Pigs were a scarce domestic animal after the withdrawal of the Turks from these regions, so the breeding of Hungarian and Croatian pigs increased. From the beginning of the 19th century, Serbia also became a major producer. It was recorded that Miloš Obrenović presented the Hungarian count Jožef Archduk with pigs of the Šumadinka breed. Hungarians called it Terekfajta - Turkish race, or Racfajta - Serbian race. On the estate Kish crossed with breeds such as Bakonji. Soon the breed mixed with existing pigs throughout the empire. This is how the race was born that the Hungarians called Mangarica or Mangalica. How the vowel "a" was replaced by the vowel "u" I cannot tell you. Be that as it may, in just a quarter of a century, mangulica has supplanted all other breeds and become the authentic raw material base for the famous Srem meat specialties.
Why did this pig deserve a monument right in the heart of Srem? The answer can be found in the city market. Unlike the markets in the south of Serbia, where you can admire all types and sizes of peppers and tomatoes, the sight of sausages and bacon takes your breath away at the Mitrovica market.
The producers who offer this treasure of shame know that their goods have customers all over the world. One peasant who has already sold everything from the stall, so he eats extremely nice bacon with brandy. When asked where he bought it, he replies that he only gets it from Zdravko. He pointed vaguely towards a stall. And indeed, it was stacked with pieces of bacon whose profile, as one friend would say, looked like Zvezda's jersey. Behind them are sausages that promise the taste of Srem.
But the bosses are nowhere.
The neighbor says to be patient, he went to get the car, it's the end of the market day, even though it's only noon. And so we wait, chatting with a peasant who is munching on Zdravko's bacon and drinking local plum. He offers us too, and we are about to agree, when the boss shows up.
Zdravko Vetmić, a man who was a butcher with passion for decades, and now, as a pensioner despite heart problems, he cannot rest. He makes "Star Jerseys" for his soul. And for the benefit of regular customers who can travel from the far west in order to get their souvenirs from Sremska Mitrovica. We have nowhere to go either, we buy bacon instead of magnets.
On the Sava
Of course, you can't visit everything in Sremska Mitrovica in two days. We saw the bells in the courtyard of the Catholic church, on which it is written that they were paid for by German and Croatian citizens. We saw the promenade by the Sava and the city beach, which would not be ashamed of much bigger places. We also saw the pedestrian Bridge of St. Irenaeus, named so because it is assumed that the first bishop of Sirmium was executed on that spot.
We drank excellent coffee in the KFTRJ cafe, then we visited the coffee roaster of the same name. We were met there by the owner Milorad Popadić.
He actually completed his legal studies properly. But he kept a cafe on the city beach during the summer months during his studies. His passion became coffee. He felt it was his calling. He says that his son asked him what to answer when he is asked what his father's profession is. "The roaster," Milorad said without hesitation. It would be better for both the country and the people if everyone turned their passion into a vocation, because according to the taste of the coffee in his cafe and the smell of the one we bought at the roaster, Milorad managed to reach a high level in what he does, despite the thick court Acts and paragraphs.
We still have to walk from Srem to Mačva over the pedestrian bridge. On the other side, the Krug raft is waiting for us - it will prove to be one of the most beautiful gastronomic places on the Sava that I have been to. Happy hours spent slowly sipping white wine with unusual appetizers - fried snails - with a view of Sremska Mitrovica, a city that became involved in my family history in the 1960s, but I'll talk about that another time - drove away the historical melancholy.
I gave up my intention to even see from afar the famous Mitrovica prison where the later political elite of socialist Yugoslavia were imprisoned. Slobodan Bajić Paja, later one of the organizers of the uprising in Srem, languished behind those walls. Paja died near a Podmajevic village in Bosnia, the elementary school I graduated from was named after him. I toast to the former prisoner, it will be that I was the only one who remembered him today in Srem.
This afternoon on the Sava, I also toast the tribal leader Sir, the founder of the city. At the root of his name is the Sanskrit "sru" - flow. It is that slow movement of wide water flowing towards Taurunum, the place where I was born.
Bonus video:
