ABSTRACT
This is a story of a place that has followed extremely turbulent paths, a place that has marked the fate of nearly 100,000 people, a place of many names and a place of ‘dissonant voices’ from the past. The first urbanised space on the left bank of the Sava River in Belgrade, the ‘Old Fairground’ – the Staro Sajmište – was originally built in 1937 as an international exhibition for the trade and industry of Serbia. But beginning in March 1942 with the arrival from Berlin of one of the notorious gas vans (Gaswagen), created for the mass killing of Jewish people during World War II, its trajectory changed and it became a death camp, a concentration camp and a place of torture and execution (but later a place of artistic life and creativity). It is this connection of Belgrade to Berlin, through the strong memories and symbols of the history of the Holocaust, that makes it particularly apposite to recall Karen Till’s observation, in her book on memory and place in Berlin, that places ‘are not only continuously interpreted, they are haunted by past structures of meaning and material presences from other times and lives’ (Till 2005, 9). After seventy years of existence, the Fairground, this place of great historical significance, today exists as both a physical and a symbolic space, and one with strong dissonance at the core of its identity.
