Monografija - prvo izdanje - niska rezolucija
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the pasha had accepted the Prophet’s green flag from the sultan’s<br />
hands) - a silk rope and two meter deep hole, which everyone,<br />
from the conqueror of the world to the poorest man on earth, is<br />
forced to accept at the end of the day.<br />
His grave didn’t “stay” for long in Belgrade- when the<br />
city’s walls witnessed, though only for a short period, a change<br />
from the Turkish flags to ones bearing crosses (1688), when<br />
the city was plundered by the defeated and by the winners<br />
like never before or after in history, Jesuits excavated the<br />
pasha’s turbe (grave) and sent his skull westward, up the<br />
Danube in the form of a gift to one of their cardinals (they<br />
exhibited the distorted skull in a graceful rococo showcase in<br />
a museum in Vienna).<br />
Heads were traveling downstream as well as upstream on<br />
the Danube.<br />
When four Turkish army commanders, or dahia , rebelled<br />
against the sultan, the four reckless, obstinate and bloodthirsty<br />
governors of Serbia tried to escape on the Danube from the rage<br />
of the Serbian insurrectionists (1804), only to be caught on the<br />
river island of Ada Kale. The day after, only three skinned, salted<br />
and straw-stuffed heads were taken to the sultan who presided<br />
over the Divan (Turkish court of justice). The waves of the Danube<br />
claimed the fourth head, due to the executioner’s ineptness while<br />
washing coagulated blood from the distorted face of death, taking<br />
it away in the river’s flow.<br />
Maximilian Emmanuel the Bavarian proved glorious in war<br />
beneath Belgrade’s walls (1688), leading an attacking army that<br />
was shouting “God and Emmanuel is with us”; again a dwarf of<br />
a giant heart, Eugene of Savoy (1717), found glory in Belgrade,<br />
followed by Marshal Laudon (1789)…Their armies came downstream<br />
to Belgrade, but their victories were short lived – the<br />
Turks traveling up the Danube would again conquer the city, “the<br />
capital of jihad”, which served as a main military camp and base<br />
for all crusades to the West.<br />
And it remained like this until Turks finally abandoned<br />
the Belgrade Fortress in 1867 when the sultan “conferred the<br />
Serbian fortified cities to the protection” by Prince Mihailo in an<br />
expression that was meant to mild the bitter taste of Turkish<br />
losses and defeats the mighty but weakening empire was beginning<br />
to suffer at this point in history. Thus Mihailo ruled over the<br />
newly formed and liberated Serbian state, whose “people rose<br />
56<br />
like grass from the soil.”