RITAM SRBIJE / RHYTHM OF SERBIA
Dvorac duhova u Beočinu / The “castle of ghosts” in Beočin
freely, this building is today in ruins and at night, allegedly, the ghosts of its former inhabitants can be spotted. Finally, every cemetery in Serbia can recount its own local story that causes one’s blood to freeze in the veins, but perhaps none of those tales is as famous as that of the cemetery in the village of Medveđa near Trstenik, which was the scene of events that shook Europe in the early 18 th centu- ry and led to the Serbian word “vam- pir” entering all world dictionaries. The residents of the area, which came under Austrian rule in 1731, called on the imperial army to liberate them from the plague of vampirism that threatened to eradicate the local pop- ulation. The mysterious deaths that began to plague Medveđa compelled the commander of the Austrian Im- perial Army in Jagodina, an officer called Schnetzer, to send a trusted man, Dr Glaser, to investigate the cases and determine whether there was a plague epidemic threatening to expand from the Ottoman Empire. Glaser, a doctor of the Imperial Quar- antine Post, arrived in Medveđa on
FROM MY PERSPECTIVE: GORAN SKROBONJA, WRITER Serbia’s dark side in traditions and literature Serbian tradition is replete with stories and legends of terrible and peculiar phenomena and places, fantastic creatures and monsters – dog-headed psoglav demons, half-horse todorac creatures, plague- spreading čuma ladies, babaroga horned grannies and, perhaps most famously of all, vampires
ALL ACROSS SERBIA ONE CAN FIND PLACES THAT are known for their “bad past” and the ghosts that haunt them. Standing out among them is certainly Dev- il’s Town, a unique location not far from the town of Kuršumlija, which has as many as 202 unusual earthen figures which, as legend has it, repre- sent wedding guests who were petri- fied in order to prevent n bewitched brother and sister from being wed. Lovers of the supernatural in Ser- bia also visit the mystical mountain of Rtanj, which, due to its natural
pyramidal shape, is believed to have been built by aliens many thousands of years ago, and this place was even mentioned by one of the greatest ever sci-fi authors, Arthur C. Clark, who re- ferred to it as the “navel of the world”, convinced as he was that a special kind of energy is emitted from the top of Rtanj. It’s also worth mentioning the “castle of ghosts” in the town of Beočin: built by the once wealthy German Spitzer family as a luxuri- ous castle with greenhouses and a park where peacocks and deer roamed
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