Through life, one develops but then has to abandon a nostalgic, protective attitude towards things in one’s life, especially places. Any living city is constantly changing, and cherished nooks and crannies, those that remind you of the best of times and people, have to make way.
While it is normal to try to protect what is deemed valuable, one has to realize that it is, after all, an uphill struggle: everything will perish, especially places that have outlived their purpose, which often means economic sense (it is impossible to subsidies everything, as much as we would love to).
As Donna Tartt wisely observes in “The Goldfinch”, “Caring too much for objects can destroy you”.

One such place for me was the building that once housed Sablja dimiskija, an ancient kafana, apparently known for attracting a rough crowd. When I was growing up in the 1990s, the building at the corner of Džona Kenedija and Boška Vrebalova (now Generala Lešjanina), was a leatherworks shop, employing dozens of people who I could see working in the windows, which were open in the summer. Given that my Grandma lived across the road, she made friends with the workers. They would occasionally give me little bags and wallets they produced, and one of them even agreed to adopt a pet rabbit I got for my fifth birthday (I am still not sure what happened there). After the privatization of the 2000s, those lovely people lost their jobs, and the building they worked in started deteriorating. Around the same time, the kafans that were founded in my neighbourhood around the same time as Sablja dimiskija (Morava at the corner with Takovska, Boka in Svetogorska, Kosovski Božur in Kosovska) started closing down as well. My street also lost many houses with gardens, replaced by very ugly five-storey apartment blocks with none of the charm nor the greenery, which gave our cul-de-sac charm.

In the end, it was Sablja dimiskija’s turn to be demolished last winter and off it went, in a week or so. It was not painless – one construction worker was injured – and we still don’t know what will take its place, but it is lost forever, like all other one-storey buildings that made it company when it was built. I had dreams of somehow making it into a cultural centre, but not having those amounts of money, nor being an NGO, my idea of building Radovan Hiršl Centre (named after a neighbour who was an avant-garde painter and writer) will never materialize. The view from my flat will be destroyed, but that is living in the city, being annoyed by leads you nowhere.

And then came the day that I heard that Belgrade’s Automobile museum will be no longer. In a typical way that Belgrade loses its prised cultural institutions, it was a slow-coming disaster, which could have easily been avoided if any of the parties involved wanted to stop it (a similar thing happened with the restitution and relocation of Graficki Kolektiv).

The Museum, founded by the late Braca Petković, another neighbour of mine, who was also a director and one-time Minister of Culture, was housed in an inter-war purpose-built garage and contained many valuable old cars. It was a rare private museum in Belgrade (another is also in my neighbourhood: Kuća Jevrmena Gruijća) and a rare one showing something that many people enjoy seeing (although I visited the vintage car collection only once or twice). It was long known that it would have to relocate, and there were various promises made about its fate (the coolest idea was to house it in the builing below Branko’s bridge, but alas).

Still, the day after the museum said it would stop working, on 8 Feb. 24, the relocation started.
We have no idea what will happen with the cars (some of which were on loan from other collections), what will happen to the unique building housing it, or the life’s work of Mr Petković, a neighbourhood legend, until his passing during the COVID pandemic.
To make things stranger, all of this is happening while the Serbian and Belgrade governments are pompously advertising large cultural projects ahead of EXPO 2027. We have ambitious announcements of mega-opera stages (in a city where opera is not that popular) and multiple museums and cultural (some even without set purposes). Yet, it was impossible to solve the issue of a beloved Automobile museum (one can imagine it could thrive in Belgrade Waterfront, if it was impossible to keep it where it was).

While I have learned that it is dumb to point fingers in these cases, I still can’t shake off the disappointment that a neighbourhood staple and a life’s work of a particularly cool neighbout is gone. It is people like Braca Petkovic who make me think about another passages from “The Goldfinch”:
“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”

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