Only when mosquitoes massacre him, and an unidentified element stings his throat as he breathes what should be air, or when the stench infiltrates his afternoon coffee near Moscow, does the average person begin to utter the words: “Ecology”! “Environment”! “Pollution”! Until then, these words are just part of long-unwanted political campaigns and winter reports on the morning program.
I am an ordinary, average person. I live in the center of Belgrade and avoid passing by the manholes in Dorćol more or less all year round. In winter, I curse those who burn—whether it’s home stoves or the central heating plant—either way, I slosh around in rubber boots when it rains heavily and wait for the tram that can’t run on flooded tracks.
I have several close family members, a couple of friends, and colleagues who live in settlements along the Zrenjanin road. I visit them often. But, I time my visits. I’ve been doing it for decades.
If it’s summer, I arm myself with insect repellent, because I’ve returned swollen from mosquito bites more than once, with residents of places like Kotež and Krnjača, who could practically form a political party.
If I had the power to go back twenty years, crossing over the Pančevac bridge would give me the chance to rest my eyes on fields where only a solitary house is occasionally visible. Then rows of single-story houses, followed by the vast endless plain again.
I don’t have a time capsule, nor a helicopter to fly over to the homes of those I’d like to chat with face to face, visit them when they’re sick, or come over for their slava. They don’t have it either when they cross the same bridge to get to work, doctors, new shoes, food, theater, or school.
In the meantime, the settlements of Krnjača and Kotež have gained tens of thousands of new residents. People live in mostly legally unregulated buildings of various sizes. They live with habits—unhabits brought from various places, with promises, probably with hopes of living better.
Wherever they came from, I don’t believe they expected decades to pass, to raise children, marry and marry, bury parents or neighbors and friends, all the time, 5-7 kilometers from the fierce center of Belgrade, to live without sewage. Entire buildings of around forty apartments, with forged fences or those ordinary, with pink, beige-green, or bright yellow facades, or houses in various stages of completion.
They certainly didn’t come expecting that, already from mid-May, they wouldn’t be able to breathe due to the stench of the canals surrounding these settlements, that they would build houses in a makeshift style because if it rains, they gather buckets and garden scissors from neighbors in the third alley. There’s no rain drainage, so sometimes even the entire Zrenjaninski put floods.
Back when I was a child visiting my favorite aunt in Jabučki Rit, much further away from my Dorćol, Kotež, or Krnjača, the canals were quiet places where men went to escape their wives and ponder over fishing rods. I don’t know if and what the guys today fish, but coming to this part of town, all I saw was frog spawn, mud, and smelled such a terrible stench that I won’t be back soon.
The embankment where I watched two storks early this summer and captured unusual scenes of sunsets and butterflies of all colors is threatened by wild dumps. Trees are sticking out of the water in several willows, creating an ideal scene for horror movies, although just a five-minute walk away, some beautiful rare birds are peacefully gliding on the natural lake beneath the embankment.
During the state of emergency last year, municipal workers were pulling out all sorts of things from the canals. Residents, right in front of their homes, throw into the canals everything they have in excess. I don’t know if this is due to ignorance, impudence, laziness, whether it’s a matter of the rule that the house is only up to the threshold where the doormat with the inscription Welcome stands. Even if it’s all of the above, isn’t there a possibility to warn, educate, penalize people—whatever has produced results in the developed world?
My friend and colleague wonders:
1. The canal from the sewage building in Kotež to Bitolj restaurant in Krnjača is full of waste throughout the year. Who is responsible for emptying it?
2. The canal at the first bus station of bus 43 in Kotež is a nest of stench, frogspawn, and waste. Who is responsible for cleaning it?
3. Particularly interesting is the overflow of septic tanks in Kotež, especially around the “Zaga Malivuk” elementary school area, which becomes covered with water that doesn’t drain anywhere but mixes with wastewater from the tanks during heavy rain. Who is responsible for this?
4. Along Zrenjaninski put, there are numerous shops where people go for daily supplies, passing through trash-filled canals, a source of contamination, before bringing it into their homes.
5.Entire buildings have been constructed, for example in Krnjača, and residents have taken on credit from local banks, with a valid building permit, but the entire building is on a single septic tank, which the City empties once a month. Depending on the composition of the household councils, residents may even collect money for emptying the pits in between, but it is not constantly done, and results are not produced? Every time it rains, these pits overflow. Since Metro and some other retail outlets are connected to the city sewer system, the logical question is: “Why aren’t these buildings also connected?”
Everything she mentioned, casually during a phone conversation, I found with dates ranging from 2009 to 2010 – 2021/22 in various online newspapers, portals, and local Facebook groups. Nothing has changed.
If people were being fined – if ten people a decade were fined, they should have learned to be orderly.
How can you teach them to be orderly when they see that various people get building permits by snapping their fingers. People will tell you: “If nobody punished him for building five instead of three floors, they won’t punish me for throwing the stove in the canal.”
If it came down to paying for sewer connection – people would probably agree to it, if eighty-year-old pensioners in Dorćol agreed to the introduction of central heating in their apartments. A man always wants better, just if someone offers it.
For each of the settlements on the other side of the Pančevo Bridge, questions could be asked indefinitely:
* For the marshes and the elderly population living in them because everyone who could has fled.
* For Ovča, where a source of exceptionally mineral water creates an artificial lake, in which mainly old and sick people bathe and smear mud, all next to a canal into which local animals take dirt from their stables.
* The old neglected Bip factory behind which stretches a settlement whose size shocked me, all in the midst of a swamp – who knows what they are filled with as in the vicinity are numerous supermarkets of various goods and warehouses.
* “Elite” pool and spa complexes surrounded by clogged green canals
There are many such stories, but actually only one: the modern human’s need to live in a somewhat orderly environment is achieved through learning, informing, predicting, regulating at the legislative level, as well as through responsible behavior.