Who was the first owner of Ćaciland

First owner Pioneer, formerly of the Royal Park, was "his lordship" Stojan Simić (1797-1852), the president of the State Council at the time when the constitutional defenders overthrew the Obrenovićs and came to power in Serbia. He was known for having the most beautiful house in that time Belgrade, as one of the famous "Simić brothers", and for his turbulent political life.

His family comes from the village of Sremčice, near Belgrade, but Stojan and his younger brother Aleksa were born in Boljevci, in Srem, where the family received an estate from the Austrian authorities. Stojan's father Đorđe was a non-commissioned officer in the Austrian army. Đorđe Petrović Karađorđe, a volunteer from Serbia, began his military career in his company of Serbian "freaks". It is remembered how commander Đorđe Simić once scolded and hit his namesake on the head and face with a slice of watermelon that he was eating and because of it he was slow to get up after the command. Later, when Karađorđe started an uprising, Đorđe returned to Serbia and immediately placed himself under the command of his former soldier. Between the First and Second Uprisings, he was again in the Austrian army and fought against Napoleon for a year, then he returned to Serbia at the invitation of Miloš Obrenović. Immediately after the end of the Second Uprising, in the fall of 1815, he was found in Belgrade, sick and ragged, by his son Stojan, a young man from Srem. He gave his father his suit and some money he happened to have on hand, and I, with nothing, set off on a boat down the Danube into the world.

Stojan started serving as a cop in the Serbian refugee colony in Hotin, where he found Karađorđe and Janići Đurić, and then moved to Bucharest to work first in a snuff factory, and then as an employee of Miloš's agent, Mihail German, the Belgrade Cincarin. In his office, he got acquainted with the basic concepts of state administration and as a literate young man, educated in the Fenek monastery, he quickly advanced and moved to Kragujevac, to the duke's office. Prince Miloš saw in him a man who could be found at every opportunity, so he brought him into the civil service. He was soon joined by his younger brother Aleksa. Both were extremely tall, strong and agile guys, that an English travel writer called them Hercules. During his stays at the Kragujevac court, Vuk Karadžić included Stojan in his "peculiar character", which he did not publish during his lifetime because of "cheeky and unscrupulous jokes and mastery in mockery and farting", in which Stojan excelled, and which in Prince Miloš could sometimes be a highly valued trait. The somewhat quieter Aleksa left behind "Memories of Prince Miloš" as one of the most realistic memoirs and sources from that time, even compiled during his opposition period.

For a time, Stojan officially worked as a "Tatar" (court postman) between Kragujevac and Constantinople. Both brothers traveled to other diplomatic missions on the duke's behalf, to Bucharest and Iasi, and Stojan, as a high-ranking official, carried the duke's money with which he bought properties in Wallachia and traded salt through captain Miša Anastasijević and merchant Gica Opran. But he was often a victim of the prince's anger, when he threatened him with beatings. He was able to send him to serve in various places, to be the manager of the scaffolding on the Danube, in Ram and Dubravčica, but he still had confidence in him. When in 1833 Prince Miloš, according to the Treaty of Bucharest, annexed the six remaining nahijas from Karađorđe's time to Serbia, Simić rode at the head of the army that liberated Kruševac. It turned out that during Karađorđe's time, it was his late father, Đorđe Simić, who was liberating the Kruševac nahija, which Prince Miloš also knew, and that's why he entrusted him with that task, as a reward.

Two years later, Stojan, together with Prince Milet Radojković from Jagodina, invaded Kragujevac with an army and forced Prince Miloš to enact the Constitution of Sretenj. Later, until the adoption of the new constitution in 1838, he mostly stayed in Wallachia where he welcomed other defenders of the constitution (Jevrem Obrenović, Đorđe Protić, Radovan Damjanović and others), the so-called the Bucharest group, who worked against Prince Miloš through the Russian baron Rickman. As one of the main leaders of the defenders of the constitution, Prince Miloš took revenge on him, at least verbally, when he went into exile in 1839, jokingly telling him from a ship in Belgrade that "they could change wives", since Simić's wife Bisenija was then in Wallachia, and Princess Ljubica remained in Belgrade.

Three years later, when the constitutional defenders overthrew all the Obrenovićs from the country, not only Prince Mihail, Stojan Simić became the president of the State Council, a body that had more power than the new Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević, who had arrived from emigration. Since Alexander didn't even have a house in Belgrade, Stojan Simić sold his just-built palace, which was located between today's Old and New Palaces, to the state, so that the state would give the prince and the ruling family a "lodge for living". Simić lived there for only a few years. That house had a yard. When Aleksandar Karađorđević moved into his house, the yard was turned into a palace garden, which in the middle of the last century became Pioneer Park, and since April of this year "Ćaciland".

photo: Museum of the City of Belgrade

Details about the king's garden are available from the memoirs of King Peter and his childhood friend Đorđe Simić, Stojan's son. Both of them wrote that they played in the palace garden "full of haystacks" and trees around which they chased each other, therefore, in the current "Ćaciland", remembering how Stojan Simić's house became a "mansion", and that the people all the time called it "Belgrade inn". At that time, the palace garden had long been a landscaped palace park with several buildings for adjutants and other palace services, colonnades of flowers and paths. There, on the site of the so-called Little Castle next to the street, was built the magnificent building of the court of King Milan (today's Belgrade City Assembly), in which the Obrenovićs did not live, but only held holiday and state ceremonies. King Petar laid the foundation stone for the New Palace (today the building of the Presidency of Serbia) on the site of the former building of the Ministerial Council (Government of Serbia), and on the site of the former Batal Mosque, behind the back gate of his yard, he laid the foundation stone for the National Assembly building, as a sign of symbolic and permanent reconciliation between the past and present time and heritage, "Turkish" and "Serbian".

Stojan Simić built a new house for himself in 1844, across the street from his old house, where the Monument to Russian Tsar Nicholas is today. Its entrance was towards Abadžijski Sokak, today's Ulica Králjica Marije, and the windows were towards the palace. From those windows, the Simić family looked into the windows of three princes and three kings from two alternating dynasties for the next 60 years. She also watched the bloody feast of officers who in 1903 threw the massacred bodies of King Alexander and Queen Draga Obrenović out of their windows into the street. And she watched, after the May Revolution, how the son of Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević, King Petar, a schoolmate of Stojan's son Djordje, returned after 45 years.

When Đorđe Simić and Jelena Karađorđević, Petrov's sister, got married after her return from exile, she moved into Simić's house. Then she had the opportunity to enter her birth house, the court, because they were both received and given as gifts by Prince Mihailo, during his second reign, unencumbered by dynastic narrow-mindedness. Jelena died young, in Italy, on Lake Como, and Đorđe remained a widower. After the death of Prince Mihailo in 1868, the prince's widow, Princess Julia, came to his house several times from Vienna, because she preferred to stay with her friend Bosa, Đorđe's sister (the most beautiful Belgrade woman of that time), than in the court ruled by the governors and the minor Prince Milan.

Đorđe Simić sold his house to the Russian Embassy and moved to a house closer to the Cathedral. He is remembered as "the last Serbian diplomat of the 1913th century", prime minister, minister, president of the Serbian Red Cross, deputy in Vienna and Constantinople and, according to one chronicler, "a great opponent of King Milan". He composed a manuscript about the "downfall of the Obrenović dynasty", which he did not publish during his lifetime. He was married three times, and his youngest son was born in his later years in Vienna in 1921, but he did not maintain that marriage either. He lived gallantly, aristocratically, believing that "nobleness obliges". He died the same year as his peer Petar Karađorđević, in XNUMX, having seen the creation of Yugoslavia. In that name, before his death, he moved to Zemun.

The "Belgrade Inn", as the people called the original house of Stojan Simić, was demolished in 1904 after King Peter moved to the Old Palace, and the palace buildings in the park towards the National Assembly were demolished in the 50s. Then the whole area was turned into a public area for the citizens, called Pionirski park. The symbolic connection between the building of the National Assembly and today's buildings of the Old and New Palaces, connected by a magnificent park, has represented not only the center of Belgrade since the mid-XNUMXth century, but also the representation of Serbian statehood for two centuries on one urban and architectural rectangle. Today it is an "Open Air Museum".

But in 80 years, no one has ever thought of turning that magnificent space into anything frivolous. It would be an emblematic attack on the entire modern history of Serbia, spanning two centuries.