By: +Dusan Mrkich

Lika, October 10, 1997.
I am traveling to Lika, to the place called Smiljan, the birth-place of Nikola Tesla.

The word lika comes from the Greek likos (wolf), Latin liquere (liquid), and Serbian lik - fiber and personality - and this harsh kars has had all of these in abundance, and more besides.

In my childhood, Lika was the far lair of mountains, which separated us from the warmth of the sea, and out of which came thunder and lightning, snows, howlings of wolves, and rumours of shoeless and pillow-less poverty. Although pushing nearly into Central Europe, Lika is the quintessential Balkans, the very fault line of the Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem - Western, East European and Oriental - worlds, a lawless and tortured land of survivors of political turmoils and religious and national resentments, where warmongers of all types could start a war whenever they wanted one. Historians have identified here 36 wars and 350 battles in the past 350 years, the latest carnage taking place from 1991-95, during the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia.

The two-lane highway was curving and rising into the hills and morning mists of Krajina. Places pass.
Slunj. Right after World War II, 6,117 Serbs left here for Vojvodina in Serbia... Plitvice Lakes... Korenica... Here in the year 1700, there were eighty Serbian homes and a priest. In the post WWII years, 6,060 Serbs left for Vojvodina. Bunic, the rebel stronghold. In 1685, the Serbs borderers razed the Turkish fort; the Turks left in 1689. The following year, thirty Serb families settled here.

The Ottoman Turks first appeared in Lika in 1468, shortly after the fall of Constantinople, Serbia and Bosnia; conquered it in 1528; and the very next year. Marched north as far as Vienna; and would do so, again, in 1683. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Lika was a no man's wasteland. The Serbs, after the Turks had overrun their lands - Serbia and Bosnia - drifted westward, to the seacoast, and northbound into this desolate and dangerous wilderness. In 1530, the first fifty Serbian families arrived in Lika. They sought permission to settle, but it is not clear if anyone was sufficiently in charge to grant it. Theirs were large families, perhaps twenty to a hearth, consisting mostly of men of arms-bearing age, because nearly anyone very young or very old had perished along the way.

To stop or slow down further Turkish advances into central Europe, in 1628, Austria formed the Military Borderland - Die Militargranze - or Krajina, a kidney-shaped territory, which, over the next 250 years, expanded and contracted across the northern Balkans, according to the military fortunes of the European powers.

After the Austrian-Turkish wars of 1683-99, the Turks were pushed out of Lika, and in 1712, the entire region became part of Military Borderland. In 1709, "1700 Turks and their children" who did not seep back into Bosnia, and some "Turkish" Serbs, were forcibly converted to Catholicism; 1n 1714, another "400 Turkish poor" were converted. Krbavica. Vukovo. Ljubovo. Siroka Kula. All military places and military names. Kula (tower) was burnt down in 1584. Forty Serbian arrived in 1690.

For a few years, in the early 1800s, Lika was part of Napoleon's Illyrian Province. The Serbs at first fought in the Hapsburg army, then were incorporated into the French forces, and marched even against Russia.

In the belief that Moslems wouldn't trouble central Europe any more, Vienna demilitarized and dismantled Krajina in the 1870s, and handed over its south-western part to the civil administration in Zagreb. The Serbs never accepted this, and in the 1990s were ethnically cleansed from the area.

When the wraiths of fog thinned, occasional hamlets appeared, spread out over the mountain sides. Grass was growing in the wheel-rutted and weed-bordered country roads leading to them. Serbian homes lay in ruins - doorless, windowless, roofless, gutted by fires - not merely vandalized, but ravaged. Sometimes beside a shell of a recently built home, an older ruin stuck out, skeleton-like, a witness to previous wars.

There was little life on the highway. Few cars were going in either direction. Here and there, sat Croat women, reading pocket books, and offering Lika cheese for sale; but peasant women do not read books, and this was no local cheese, because there wasn't a cow or sheep in sight. These had been taken away as war booty two years earlier, glutting the markets and abattoirs of Europe.

A man came out of the gloom of a neglected meadow, tall, straight-backed, with a long walking stick in hand, black-hated, inscrutable, razorblade-shaven. I ask him for directions to Smiljan. He tells me, speaking with, what I take to be, a Serbian intonation. I ask then, if during the recent troubles, he had to go away.

For a moment his untrusting eyes looked at me, relaxed a little, and he said, "Yes, yes, I had to remove myself." Then after a reflection, adds, "It could have been worse." An observation, borne of centuries of danger and courage and injustice and deracinated lives. Perhaps a common phrase here, because Nikola Tesla used it throughout his life.
"Do you know if there are any Serbs in Smiljan?"
"Eleven souls, I heard. But that was before this war. Now I don't know."
The sun came out, a weak disk of autumnal sun, as I entered the village of Simljan, so named after an old fort, but named also for the sweet basil which grew here in abundance.

In 1696, there were seventeen Serbian homes here, and an old church. In 1755, Empress Marie-Theresa, gave permission to Serbs to build a new church. It was consecrated in 1765. In the 1850s, Smiljan was composed of several hamlets, strung out at the foot of a chain of broken hills, each one bearing a different name. The houses were wretched hovels, built of uncut stone, or more rarely of rough hand-hewn beams - and in the case of extreme poverty, of wattles and cow dung - and roofed with thatch straw; people lived on polenta, corn bread and potatoes. Then I saw the place: it just appeared, over the tops of trees and high weeds where the brook should be: a white-walled church with a distaff, rather than a spindle steeple; and not more than fifty paces away, the birth house - both spared from destruction this time - and turned left off the main road, and took the little-used path to the vacant pastorate... thinking of that day, 145 years ago, when Pastor Milutin Tesla arrived here, walking ahead of his tired oxen, his wife Djuka walking beside the cart, looking at her new home and the green meadow. The house then bore the number 227. In old pictures, there was a linden tree in front of the Church. That old tree was now worn down to a decaying stump.

The door of the church was open: the door handles removed; the sanctuary was empty, cold with disuse, its walls bare; the wind blew leaves throughout the door. The church, rebuilt in 1986, with the contributions of emigrants from Krajina, was never consecrated. Not far from the church door, there was a remnant of a monument to Tesla: an iron hook stuck out where the head used to be, and the wording on the marble slab was patiently, letter by letter, chiseled away, except for the very last line, which read, Raised by relatives and friends, 1950.

A few paces away, lay the little graveyard, gnarled in dew-heavy weeds and besmirched by broken wood, metal, mortar, and military items, dying in the shadow of the encroaching woods.

On July 12, 1936, the local Serbs celebrated Tesla's 80th birthday, and wanted to build a deep well beside the church, but had no money to do it. Five years later, on the Feast of St. Elijah the Prophet, August 2, 1941, Croats burned down the church and the birth house, and massacred 530 Serbs of Smiljan, who had by now rotted away in a communal pit, somewhere "south of the church". In the 1970s, the federal government planned to raise a memorial to the victims, but never did.

I crossed the patch of grassless lawn, to look at the house. This, of course, is only an approximate replica of the wooden house, built in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, renovated in the late 1870s, again in 1904, and in 1936, and built anew, by the Government in Zagreb, in the mid-1980s. All that remained of the original house is, perhaps the stone foundation.

The door was locked, and the handle broken off. I looked through a window: nothing there, but bare floors and bare walls, cold and blind. One of the basement windows was knocked out, and there was a makeshift wooden ladder pushed through it: technical papers and physics books lay scattered about on the dirt floor. A mouse wouldn't stay here.

Smiljan was electrified in 1958, but there was now no evidence of electrical wires leading to the house.

There had also been a barn near the house, but that wooden structure, or whatever had become of it over the years, was burnt down in 1941, and again in 1992 - together with all its contents, which included an old cart, a crib, a stove, and twenty-three other objects from the times when the Teslas lived in Smiljan. The brook below the house, called Vaganac, had dried up years ago. There was not a stalk of basil about. Not a fruit tree, or a trace of a garden; only silence, hollow, uneasy and blasphemous.

I looked across the desolate country toward Mount Velebit, the fog-pressed lair, where, in my childhood, I imagined mountain fairies slumbered and played, and where Prince Marko, the folk hero, lay asleep.

Leaves on the trees were decaying and falling down on the forest floor, but while the forest will be in leaf again in Spring, the Serbs will never again return here any more.

Tesla visited Smiljan for the last time in 1892. His mother died that year in Gospic, where his father Milutin was appointed priest in 1863, when Nikola was only seven. After the funeral he went back to Smiljan and visited Plaski, Raduc, Medak and Gracac, where he placed the ailing sister Milka with one of their aunts, and visited the monastery in Gomirje, where Uncle Petar was the iguman. He left Gospic on May 22.

Tesla would never again return to Europe or see the place of his birth, which, over the next one hundred years, would be part of some half-a-dozen different countries, and suffer three wars and two rebellions, which rivalled in slaughter anything that happened here since Octavian, the future Caesar Augustus, marched through the Illyricum in 31 BC, in a war of extermination against the natives who did not fit in his new world order.

Tesla would always remember Smiljan, especially "in winter, when the snow was six or seven feet deep... its dry cold and snow of immaculate white... the house, the church, the pasture, the brook below the church, and that forest above the church - all, as if it were before my eyes now".

I do not go gurther afield on this day. In Gospic, there were a few people about, dour and unwelcoming to a stranger. The Serb part of town was completely destroyed. The Church of the Great Martyr St. George was burnt down in 1941, rebuilt in 1964; the Croats blew it up in 1992, paved over the foundations and rerouted a street over it. The Tesla statue on the town square was also blown up. There was a Nikola Tesla Street; but there was no marking of any kind on the school building, where Tesla was both a student and a teacher, or on the apartment house, where the Tesla family once lived. In the Public Library no one knew of Tesla's cataloguing.

Milutin Tesla's birth house in Raduc was burnt down in 1942, in a gunfight between Serb royalists and communists. Djuka Tesla's birthplace, although "under the protection of the state" from 1945-91, went to ruin, because the local Croat functionaries wouldn't allow any repairs to it; in September 1993, in the Medak pocket, every single Serb house - 312 homes - were burnt down, and everything living - human and animal - killed. The stony church in Senj was burnt down in 1941.

Here in Gospic, in 1941, the Croat Government Minister announced his program for the solution of the Serb question in Croatia: one third to be killed, one third to be converted to Catholicism, one third to be expelled. Following decades of ethnocide, the program was accomplished in 1995 when, from August 4-7, 212,000 Serbs from western Krajina were ethnically cleansed, with full support - military and propaganda - of western governments, led by the United States, Nikola Tesla's preferred and adopted country.

On return to Canada, I wrote to the governments of all the countries where Tesla once lived, to Rime-Life, which had recently counted Tesla amongst its 100 most significant people of the millennium, and to UNESCO, seeking protection for Nikola Tesla's birth place. Only the editor of Life and the Czech President responded. Havel promised to instruct his Ambassador in Zagreb to intervene with Croat government. But my request that Tesla's birthplace be designated a world herritage site has been turned down by the government in Zagreb and by UNESCO.