When they told me that the twinning of Vrnjačka Banja with the French city of Vichy was planned, I joked that there was some symbolism in that. Namely, these two cities are not only the most famous spa resorts in their countries, but also had something in common during the Second World War. As we know, Vichy was the headquarters of Péten's Quisling government, while the headquarters of the Second Armored Division of the Third Reich was located in Villa Turkulović in Vrnjačka Banja. Hotels were working, waiters were serving guests, German officers were hanging out with girls who were in the mood for socializing...
Eighty years later, we are in Vrnjačka Banja with a group of foreign ambassadors from Belgrade who wanted to get to know this part of Serbia better. Our host is Boban Đurović, the president of the municipality who has been ruling Vrnjački Banja for 12 years. At first glance, you can see that everything is clean, there is no garbage in the grass or in the streams, there are no 10-story buildings like in Zlatibor or Kopaonik, many old villas have been preserved and reconstructed, although there are also those that have remained neglected due to ownership issues.
VILLA TURKULOVIC
In 1936, Dragutin Turkulović built a villa on the left side of the Vrnjačka River. The villa had a telephone with the number 18, as well as 25 luxuriously furnished rooms facing the main part of the park, and one part facing Goč. Around the house was a beautifully landscaped park with rose gardens. The villa had central heating, hot and cold water and moderate prices, especially for large families. In the building, there was a mosaic on the floor with a seahorse motif, one of the few things that have been preserved from that time.
Dragutin's wife, Miroslava Turkulović, had a dental office in the villa. Turkulović's beautiful daughter - Dora - also lived there. During the Second World War, parts of the General Staff and the Ministry of the Army were first housed in the villa, and then it was requisitioned for the German army and housed the Headquarters of the Second Armored Army, whose commander was General Lotar Rendulić. Painter and essayist Miodrag B. Protić in the book Noah's Ark evokes memories of the Turkulović family:
"In the summer of 1941, Teodora - Dora, the daughter of the owner of the pension "Turkulović" - entered our society - a two-story yellow luxury building with a bright stone staircase, ground floor and window frames. Dora was newly divorced, and divorced shortly after marriage. She had a perfect body and a velvety white face framed by reddish hair. Because of the joie de vivre she spread around her with her hats, dresses, costumes and muffs, she looked like she stepped off the pages of a Parisian fashion magazine. We usually gathered at her place in her separate apartment in "Turkulović", to the left of the entrance with a view of the Vrnjačka rečica and the park, talked, listened to music, drank coffee, smoked... One autumn day in 1941, I went, with an easel and a canvas in my hands to meet Dora, according to the agreement. In her place, I found her parents who, scared, told me that because of the general chaos that morning they had sent her to Belgrade. The storm, therefore, began, and the most harmless things ceased to depend on our will. The farewell vision of the wonderful lady from the tragic autumn of Vrnjak in 1941 remained unpainted. I never met Dora again.
Her father later told me that she got married first in Belgrade, then in London, and a man from Vrnj told me that, after returning from London, already in her mature years, she tried to settle in a spa, and then she disappeared again. Once, after 40 years, I spent the night in the "Turkulović" villa, in Dora's house, which was then called "Partizanka". In the lobby, on the marble floor, I recognized a black seahorse ornament. On the canvas of my consciousness, tormented by insomnia, I put down a film about the summer and autumn of 1941: images from an intimate chronicle were mixed with images from general history. Namely, in that same building, in which our group was protected by heavy curtains in 1941, anxiously fantasizing about tomorrow, and I about the business with Dora (whom I wanted to paint), three years later the German General Rendulitz planned a landing on Josip Broz's headquarters in Drvar."
Teodora Dora Turkulović and her sister Afrodita disappeared after the war, and there were rumors that they were raped and killed, which was never clarified or proven. Villa "Turkulović" was nationalized in 1948, and the owners in the building named "Partizanka" were not left a single apartment, but were moved to the villa "Gavrić". Not long after that, they moved out of Vrnjačka Banja. In the eighties of the 2004th century, an annex was added to the side of the villa towards Crkven brdo, and in XNUMX its name was changed to the hotel "Promenada". We asked the receptionist to let us into the part of the hotel where there is a floor mosaic with a seahorse motif, after which Operation Landing on Drvar got its name. He took us to that place, commenting that he couldn't remember the last time someone was interested in it.
photo: Robert Choban…Villa Trajkovic;…
TRAJKOVIĆ HOUSE
Right above Villa Turluković, at the very top of Crkveni brdo, is the house of the former pharmacist Trajković. According to the locals, the most beautiful view in Banja is from its glazed balcony. During the German occupation, the owner and his family experienced a tragic fate. The whole family - father Svetolik, mother Milena, son Miroslav and daughters Vera and Sloboda - were arrested in mid-January 1942. That's when the Belgrade police got hold of a letter from the revolutionary Ivo Lola Ribar, which he addressed to his fiancee Sloboda Trajković. In the Special Police, they persistently tried to force Sloboda to write a letter to Lola to entice him to come. She flatly refused. At the beginning of February, she was transferred to the Banjica camp together with other members of her family. There, on May 9, 1942, they were suffocated in Dušegupka.
photo: Robert Choban…Switzerland;…
HOTEL "SWITZERLAND"
According to spa records and chroniclers, the "Shvajcarija" hotel was once the pride of the famous Vunković family, owned by Milan Vuković, a pioneer of the local hospitality industry. At the beginning of the thirties of the last century, he reconstructed and extended the villa "Simić" and named it "Switzerland". It was a hotel of the highest category, with beautiful rooms, salons with pianos and gramophones, radios, a kitchen that even today would be the envy of the most famous hotels, and with cars in which distinguished guests were brought to and from the railway station. Especially in winter, "Switzerland" was a gathering place for the then Serbian elite, writers, bankers and politicians. It was where White Russians from all over Yugoslavia held meetings, where they slept, dined, drank, sang and mourned for the homeland they had to leave. It was from "Switzerland" in 1941 that Geca Kon, the largest Serbian publisher and bookseller between the two wars, was taken to a Nazi concentration camp. There is a long list of those who regularly visited the spa, such as the royal families Obrenović and Karađorđević, Josip Broz Tito, Ivo Lola Ribar, Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Desanka Maksimović...
Under Crkveni brdo there is a tunnel named after the Nazi general Alexander Lehr, who directed the bombing of Belgrade, as well as the Landing on Drvar. It was built by his order as a shelter for the German Main Staff for Southeast Europe, stationed in Vrnjačka Banja. Its reconstruction and adaptation is underway and the tunnel should soon become a kind of museum space as a new cultural and historical attraction.
photo: Robert Choban…Belimarković Castle
CASTLE BELIMARKOVIC
The most representative pre-war building in Vrnjačka Banja today is Belimarković Castle. It all started when General Jovan Belimarković, who was the king's deputy during the childhood of King Aleksandar Obrenović (and that was perhaps the strongest position in the country), decided to build a fantastic villa next to the Vrnjak church, worthy of Russian counts. Villa "Belimarković", as the castle was called, was built on a slope above a hot spring, and was built according to the model of the Polish castles of northern Italy of that time, and according to the conceptual solution of the general's cousin, civil engineer Pavle Denić, with the design and supervision of an Austrian civil engineer Franz Winter, in the period from 1888 to 1894. The builders were extremely fast, so that most of the works were completed before In 1889, the castle was built from white marble excavated from Belimarković's personal maidan on the slopes of Goča. This imposing architectural building is decorated with sumptuous Renaissance elements and additionally enriched with the spirit of romantic historicism. It is interesting that the heirs of General Belimarković lived there until 1968, but that year the castle was purchased to be used as a cultural institution.
Villa "Belimarković" today houses the Native Museum with an archaeological, ethnographic, historical, artistic and natural history collection. The permanent exhibition consists of three exhibitions: Boatyard - prehistory of Vrnjača, Ethnographic heritage of Vrnjačka Banja i Memorial-General Belimarković's room (old and rare books and newspapers from the half of the 19th to the half of the 20th century are of particular value), while in the off-season it is set Castle of Culture art collection with a rich collection of graphics, paintings and sculptures from the period after the Second World War.
When we visited the "Belimarković" Castle, it was a sunny June day, the entrance was free, the interior of the building was pleasantly air-conditioned, but there were no other tourists during our visit. It seems that most of the guests of the spa today are not too interested in the details of its turbulent history.
