Politika
- The Agrarian Question in South Serbia
- Before 29 May 1903
- THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW HOUSE
Politika's front page of 27 October 1926, as read here, carried the following items. In a signed column, Jov. M. Ćirković argued that nowhere in the state administration was there more confusion and chaos than over agrarian reform in South Serbia, a policy he said had gone wrong from the start and sunk ever deeper until no one could tell what it was. A retrospective piece headed 'Before 29 May 1903' recalled the blood spilled on Belgrade's cobblestones on 23 March 1903, attributing much of it to the exuberance of the youth of the day and calling it mostly innocent blood. A satirical item, 'The Mystery of the Yellow House', opened with the report that the government had held a spiritualist séance at midnight.
This reading covers three excerpts from the front page. They were transcribed from the image tiles because the supplied OCR was badly garbled. Text is cut at tile boundaries: the 1903 article begins mid-word and contains one illegible word marked [?], and parts of that article between the photograph and the lower column are not visible. The cartoon caption excerpt stops before its unclear final word. Only the opening of Ćirković's column was read.
Translation
The Agrarian Question in South Serbia
Nowhere in our administration is there more confusion and chaos than in the question of agrarian reform in South Serbia. It went wrong from the very beginning, and afterwards slid further and further into the abyss, so that by now no one can even tell what it is.
Jov. M. Ćirković
Before 29 May 1903
…much more because of the exuberance of the youth of that time, on 23 March 1903, blood was spilled on the Belgrade cobblestones — and [?] as usually happens on such occasions, mostly innocent blood.
THE MYSTERY OF THE YELLOW HOUSE
Yesterday at midnight the government held a spiritualist séance so that, by that means, …
Context
What happened in Belgrade on 23 March 1903
The 1903 piece looks back on the day when, in its words, blood was spilled on the Belgrade cobblestones on 23 March 1903, and it blames much of the trouble on the exuberance of the young people of the time. Other accounts describe a rally of dissatisfied workers and students, organized by Dimitrije Tucović, that turned into open conflict with the police and the army. An article in Vreme names the Great School students Dimitrije Tucović and Triša Kaclerović as the initiators. It estimates about 5,000 participants in a city of about 70,000 inhabitants and calls these the first Belgrade demonstrations to end in a clash with the police with casualties. The accounts give different death tolls. The Wikipedia article on the May Coup gives six deaths, while Vreme says four demonstrators were killed in direct clashes in Terazije, so the exact number is uncertain. The judgment that the victims were mostly innocent is the paper's own view, written twenty-three years after the event.
How the March unrest led to the night of 29 May 1903
The headline's date refers to the night of 28–29 May 1903 by the Old Style calendar, which corresponds to 10–11 June in the Gregorian calendar. After the March demonstrations, King Alexander Obrenović knew he could not win new elections, and he staged two coups within a single hour. About two months later, a group of army officers led by Captain Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis, organized the killing of the king and Queen Draga inside the Stari Dvor palace in Belgrade. After the coup, the throne passed to King Peter I of the Karađorđević dynasty. By heading its article 'Before 29 May 1903', the paper presented the March bloodshed as the prelude to the regicide.
Agrarian reform under the 1921 constitution
Ćirković's column calls agrarian reform in South Serbia the most confused and chaotic part of the administration and says it went wrong from the start. The 1921 Vidovdan Constitution of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes addressed the agrarian question in several extensive articles. In the Constitutional Committee and the Constituent Assembly, deputies debated the abolition of existing feudal and similar relations and the partition of large estates. A study in the journal Tokovi istorije concludes that the constitutional settlement left room for a more conservative application of these provisions than its apparently progressive guarantees suggested. From March 1921 to April 1926 the minister of land reform was Nikola Uzunović, who was prime minister when this issue appeared. The column was therefore criticizing a policy that the sitting head of government had overseen for five years.
The government that the 'Yellow House' satire addressed
In October 1926 the government was led by Nikola Uzunović. His predecessor, Nikola Pašić, had been forced to resign in April 1926 in the face of corruption scandals, and Uzunović became prime minister on 8 April 1926. Uzunović faced internal conflict within the party, and a succession of short-lived governments came and went under him. The satirical caption shows this government holding a spiritualist séance at midnight, which casts the cabinet as unable to find answers by ordinary means. The fragment breaks off before saying what the séance was meant to achieve, so its precise target cannot be fixed. Pašić himself died of a heart attack in late 1926, at the age of 80.
Original
Аграр у Јужној Србији
Нигде нема више пометње и хаоса у нашој администрацији, него што је то случај са питањем аграрне реформе у Јужној Србији. Од самога почетка је наопако пошло, а после се све више и више ишло у провалију да му се сада не зна крсног имена.
Пред 29 мај 1903.
ного више услед бујности тадашње младине, 23 марта 1903 год., проливена је крв на београдској калдрми - и [?] што се обично дешава у таквим риликама, највише невина.
МИСТЕРИЈА ЖУТЕ КУЋЕ
Јуче о поноћи одржала је влада спиритистичку сеансу, да би тим путем