The Kalmyk of Belgrade

Whilst looking for a Buddhist centre in Belgrade, I came across the sad story of the Kalymks and their gift to Belgrade – a Buddhist temple.

Apparently there is a little country in the Russian Federation called Republic of Kalmykia. It is Europe’s only Buddhist country. The Kalmyks are decendend from the Mongols and have a very troubled history which involved two diasporas and ethnic cleansing at the hands of Joseph Stalin. They appear to have a tendency towards  backing the loser (White Russians during the Russian revolution and the Nazis in WW2).

Here is the Belgrade connection:

During the first Diaspora a large group of Kalmyks fled from Russia with the remnants of General Denikin’s White Army to Turkey. The majority chose to resettle in Belgrade, Serbia.

…The Kalmyk political refugees in Belgrade built a Buddhist temple there in 1929. [Source: Wikipedia]

Unfortunately, the temple they built was eventually destroyed and their colony disintegrated at the end of WW2.

The first Kalmyk refugees arrived in Serbia at the end of March and the beginning of April 1920 and settled mainly in the eastern part of the country. The second and the largest group (some 300 people) arrived towards the end of 1920 and settled at the outskirts of  Belgrade. This was the largest Kalmyk colony in Europe. Since most of them were lacking necessary skills for a good job, they used to be engaged in physical labor: as workers at brick plants, or construction workers, or as porters, hired coachmen etc.,  while the women ‘sewed for the army’, and made the slippers. They used to be poorly paid.

In the first five or six years the Kalmyk did not form any sort of organization in Serbia. The Kalmyk Association came into being in 1928 and it immediately took the steps to build a home for social gathering and the place of worship. They finished them in December 1929.

The Kalmyk colony in Belgrade disintegrated at the end of WW II when all of them retreated to Germany and later on either to the USA or Western Europe.

A deserted temple was heavily damaged during the battle for Belgrade (October 1944) when the upper part of the roof (“the tower”) was burned down. A few years later, the whole building was demolished and a new building was erected on temple’s  [Source: Kalmyk Buddhist Temple Online Exhibition]

They are a tragic people. I hope things turned out well for them wherever they ended up.

The Mongol devastations

from Sign and Sight: The destruction of Dresden and Hiroshima marked the beginning of the Cold War. The Allies wrestled for control of the world while the civilian population was taken hostage. By Jorg Friedrich:

“The train tracks crossing the city,” states the US governmental report on the effect of the Hiroshima bomb, “were back in working order by August 8, two days after the attack.” Only then did the gamma waves and neutrons manifest themselves in human bone marrow and start taking deadly effect. Even thin cement slabs near Ground Zero had stopped the radiation. The majority of the 80,000 deaths were caused by heat radiation, shock waves and flying debris.

…The fire storm that enveloped the area around Hiroshima had a radius of 1.5 km and a thermal output of roughly 10 cal/cm2. A one million tonne bomb would achieve 22 cal/cm2. But fire damage was hard to predict, as too many other variables are involved. What role is played by wind, temperature, humidity and the individual incendiary properties of each city?

Data to answer such questions had only existed for ten years. The Luftwaffe had pioneered bombing raids over Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry. But it was only since 1943 that the incineration of cities from the air had amounted to deliberate mass killing. The fire bombing of Hamburg killed 45,000 people overnight, more than the Luftwaffe had achieved in nine months of dropping bombs on England. Only eight weeks earlier,the fire in Wuppertal had resulted in 3,000 deaths, an unprecedented figure until then.

…The historic fires in San Francisco, Hamburg and London had nothing in common with the procedure whereby in only 17 minutes (W¸rzburg) or 21 minutes (Dresden), cities were showered with hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs. These sparked thousands of fires, which within three hours became a flaming sea, several square kilometres wide. Large natural fires normally have a single source, and are driven for days by the wind. But war statistics showed that such winds played a minor role in fires caused by bombs. The real destructive power was not in the wind that drives the fire, but in the fire itself, which unleashes its own hurricane on the ground.

Neither buildings nor people can escape the logic of the elements of fire and air. A fire starts, it sets the air in motion, fire and air form a vortex extinguishing life and all that belongs to it: books, altars, hospitals, asylums, jails and jailers, the block warden and his child, the armourers, the people’s court and all the people in it, the slave’s barracks and the Jew’s hideout, the strangler as well as the strangled. Hiroshima and Dresden, Tokyo and Kassel were transformed from cities into destructive systems. The agent of change is the bomb war, and the bomb war is its construction site. Work continues to this day, its a work in progress. There is hardly a nation not working at it, and the numbers are growing.

A brilliant and horrifying article. Read on here.