Tašmajdan Park

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Tašmajdan Park (Serbian: Ташмајдански парк / Tašmajdanski park), colloquially Tašmajdan (Serbian Cyrillic: Ташмајдан) or simply just Taš (Serbian Cyrillic: Таш, literally: Tash), is a public park and the surrounding urban neighborhood of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Belgrade's municipality of Palilula. In 2010–2011 the entire park saw its largest reconstruction since its creation in 1954. In November 2021, the park was declared a cultural monument and placed under protection. With the adjoining faculty buildings, it forms "Tašmajdan and University Center" protected spatial cultural-historical unit.

Tašmajdan begins 600 m (2,000 ft) southeast of Belgrade's designated center, Terazije, covering the extreme south-west corner of the Palilula municipality, bordering the municipalities of Vračar on the south and Stari Grad on the west. In a narrower sense, Tašmajdan occupies the area bounded by the streets of Takovska on the north-west, Ilije Garašanina on the northeast, Beogradska on the southeast and Bulevar kralja Aleksandra. The majority of the area is occupied by the park itself (central, east, west) while the northern and extreme western sections are urbanised. In a wider sense, it occupies the additional area to the north (between Ilije Garašanina and 27. marta streets) and east (between Beogradska and Karnedžijeva streets) The latter is also known as Little Tašmajdan. Tašmajdan is bordered by the neighborhoods of Palilula on the northeast, while it extends into the neighborhoods of Vukov Spomenik, Krunski Venac and Nikola Pašić Square on the east, south and west, respectively.

The neighborhood of Tašmajdan forms a local community ( mesna zajednica ), sub-municipal administrative unit within Palilula. It had a population of 4,887 in 1981, 4,373 in 1991, 4,018 in 2002, and 3,073 in 2011.

Almost two millennia ago, Romans were extracting stone from the quarry located in the area for the building of Belgrade's predecessor, Singidunum and for many surviving sarcophagi from that period. It was recorded that the Romans used this stone for the construction of the city's aqueduct in 69 AD. The castrum of Singidunum had tall walls, built from the white Tašmajdan limestone. After the Slavs settled in the area, because of the white stones of the fortress they named the city Beligrad, or "white city".

The quarry remained operational during Ottoman period, thus giving the name to the entire location ( Turkish taş, stone and maydan, mine), though it was also used for the extraction of saltpeter by Ilija Milosavljević Kolarac, which was used in the gunpowder production. Due to the proximity to the town, basically all stone buildings and walls in Belgrade from Ottoman period were built from the stone extracted here.

Some historians believe that this is the actual place where the remains of the Serbian Saint Sava were burned at the stake on 29 April 1595 by the Ottoman grand vizier Sinan Pasha (area known as Little Vračar) and not the Vračar hill itself or Crveni Krst, another alternative site. Little Vračar ( Serbian : Мали Врачар ) occupied the area along the Tsarigrad Road, starting from the modern crossroad of the Takovska Street and Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra. Sinan Pasha transported the remains from the Mileševa monastery in the golden casket and later scattered the ashes over Tašmajdan.

When an international congress of Byzantinologists was held in 1927 in Belgrade, some of them gathered with Marko Kuzmanović, a protopope of the Saint Mark Church. As Kuzmanović wrote, based on previous researches, they all took 60–70 steps from the church altar to the east and ended up on the small mound, called Čupina Humka from where both the Sava and the Danube rivers could be seen. Then they told him that this is the exact spot where the remains of Saint Sava were burned. On that spot today is the Poslednja Šansa restaurant. Historians who claim that Tašmajdan is the right location include Jovan Rajić and Sreten Popović.

During the 1717 siege of Belgrade, parts of the battle were in Tašmajdan. Austrian army, headed by Eugene of Savoy, defeated the Ottomans, under the command of Hacı Halil Pasha. The Ottomans suffered heavy losses and had to hand over Belgrade to the Austrians, which kept it under 1739. The locality of Čupina [H]umka itself was named after captain Milija Lešjanin Čupa. He gained prominence in the 1717 fighting but was executed on the future Čupina Humka location in 1725.

During the First Serbian Uprising and the subsequent Siege of Belgrade in autumn of 1806, leader of the Uprising Karađorđe set his camp in Tašmajdan and conducted the liberation of Belgrade from there. He has done so, as from this location, up to the Stambol Gate of the Belgrade Fortress, there was an open field. One of the heroes of the uprising, Vasa Čarapić, was wounded at Stambol Gate and died in Karađorđe's tent in Tašmajdan.

The Čupina Humka mound was used for public reading of decrees and laws. It was here that on 30 November 1830 the Sultan's hattisherif (decree) was publicly announced, declaring autonomy (de facto, internal independence) of Serbia and granting hereditary ruling rights to the Obrenović dynasty.

Ruling prince Miloš Obrenović ordered the relocation of the cemetery to Tašmajdan in 1828 and in 1832, when he decided to build a merchant area along the Sava river, he also relocated the inhabitants of Savamala neighborhood. In the churchyard a school for 35 pupils was built in 1837, which was only the second elementary school in Belgrade at the time. During the Čukur Fountain incident in June 1862, and the subsequent bombardment of the city by the Ottomans from the fortress, thousands of women and children found refuge in Tašmajdan's caves.

Because of the vicinity of the cemetery in Tašmajdan, there were many shops of funeral equipment and stonecutters. Small shops in time evolved into larger facilities, mostly selling old and cheap goods for the poorer citizens. Mostly owned by the Jewish merchants, these second hand shops formed the predecessor of modern flea markets, stretching along the street to the location of modern Law Faculty.

Eastern part of Tašmajdan was a location of one of the first horse tracks in Belgrade. First modern horse races in Belgrade, based on those held in Western Europe, were organized in 1842, by the former British consul-general George Lloyd Hodges. During the reign of prince Mihailo Obrenović, horse races became an annual event since 1862, with prince himself being one of the participants and creator of the rules. He organized three annual races: for the officers, for the public horsemen and for “anyone else who wanted to participate”. But for decades, the city had no regular horse track. Originally, the races were organized in the, at that time, outskirts of Belgrade: eastern Tašmajdan from 1863 (modern Vukov Spomenik neighborhood, close to the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law and Metropol Palace Hotel Belgrade area), and from the 1890s in Marinkova Bara.

After the successful Second Serbian Uprising when Serbian prince Miloš Obrenović ordered the building of a new town around the old Kalemegdan fortress ( Savamala neighborhood), he also ordered that the old Serbian cemetery from Varoš Kapija (near Zeleni Venac ) be moved to Tašmajdan, which was done in 1828. New cemetery was intended as "international" contrary to the existing practice, so beside Serbs, it was also the burial place for Hungarians, Germans, Greeks, Italians and French.

In the mid-19th century, near the modern crossroads with the Takovska Street (named Ratarska then), was where city ended at the time, and the fields began. The Batal mosque was located there, giving its name to the developing neighborhood. Kafana Valjevo was located where the Czech embassy is today. At the crossroad was the house of the Savić family, used as a medical facility and across it was the Marić pharmacy. Next to the pharmacy was a curvy road which was leading to the Tašmajdan cemetery. The cemetery wasn't divided into parcels, but had numerous narrow, crossed paths, grown into bushes. This was also the location of Fišeklija, a series of gunpowder stores, where gunpowder was sold in fišeks, cone -shaped bags made from waxed paper. The stores developed in the second half of the 19th century, after Prince Miloš ordered for gunpowder stores to be removed outside of the city due to the safety reasons.

Already in 1880, city newspapers were reporting on the bad condition of the Tašmajdan cemetery. The burial lots were purchased in the Saint Mark's Church, which became quite wealthy, but the cemetery was neglected. Also, as the land was owned by the church, city administration had no interest into arranging the cemetery itself. Part of the cemetery on the side of the Takovska, belonged to the Catholics and the Lutherans. The hill in the direction of modern Seismology Institute was allocated for the graves of soldiers, drowning victims, suicides and non-Christians in general, except for the Jews, who had their own cemetery. Newspapers described the cemetery and the surrounding area as the "shelter for rascals and danglers, who tear the flowers, steal monuments, defile graves with slurs and in other ways, so that cemetery is an abomination of Belgrade where there is no any piety for the deceased".

In the western section of the cemetery the Catholics and Protestants were buried, Serbs on the central promenade, while area around modern Seisomology Institute was left for the soldiers, suicides and drowned ones. In 1835 a small Palilulska church was built. Some of the most important Serbs from this period were buried in the churchyard, including politicians Toma Vučić-Perišić and Stojan Simić and Stevan Knićanin, philologist Đura Daničić, botanist and first president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts Josif Pančić and philanthropist Ilija Milosavljević Kolarac. Belgraders protested because new cemetery, built on an inhabited fields, gardens and vineyards was away from then downtown, but already in the 1850s, the area surrounding the cemetery was completely urbanized.

Also, as the city expanded, cemetery became inadequate. One the one side, it became too small for the function of the city's main graveyard. On the other, once projected to be on the outskirts of the city, as Belgrade grew, Tašmajdan practically became downtown and close to the Royal court. The first official initiative for the removal of the cemetery came in 1871 from Mihailo Jovanović, Metropolitan of Belgrade. As the city was in the financial crisis at the time and was not able to buy such a large lot for the new cemetery, mayor of Belgrade Vladan Đorđević donated a patch of his land to the city for the purpose of establishing a new cemetery. City government officially obtained land in 1882 and gradual restriction of burials was conducted until it was fully closed 1901. It was moved to the newly built Belgrade New Cemetery, several blocks to the east, beginning from 1886 and the moving was finally completed in 1927 with park being planted instead of the old cemetery. However, many bodies from older periods were not moved and remained below the park.

As many weren't relocated because they had no surviving family members. or their families weren't interested or solvent enough to pay for the relocation, city administration was left with the large number of tombstones. Some of the stones and bricks were sold, earning nice income to the city, but still, many remained. Administration decided to reuse them for construction works around the city. The stones were used for the 1927-1928 works on the Belgrade Fortress (pathways around the Big Staircase in Kalemegdan Park which connected it to the fortress' Lower Town, parts of the Pobednik 's pedestal), for the partial paving of the Ruzveltova Street and for the construction of the Tašmajdan pathway between the churches of Saint Mark and Holy Trinity. Belgrade chronicler Zoran Nikolić labeled the fortress path, made of the tombstones turned with the inscribed sides down, Path of the "Former" Deceased.

This was the usual practice in the Balkan history in general (the old, reused materials are called spolije ) as there are numerous Greek, Roman and Byzantine remains in the region. Still, citizens protested when former tombstones were used for the works on the fortress. One of the stone benches was made in such a manner, that the name of the deceased, Aksentije Jovanović, was clearly visible, together with the carved cross and skull and crossbones.