Now where are they???

Lots to cover in this update. Our time in Belgrade was interesting. Although Belgrade is one of the oldest cities in Europe there isn’t a lot of ‘old’ left to see. We visited the Church of Saint Sava, the second largest Orthodox church in the world built from 1935 to 2004. In 1595 the Ottoman Grand Vizier burned the coffin of Saint Sava on the location where the church was eventually built 500 years later.

The Church was built to accommodate 7000 worshipers. Our house and barns would fit with plenty or room left for the cars and the tractor.

We visited the Nicola Tesla Museum and experienced a few of the demonstrations used by Tesla to convince investors to support his work. Most of Tesla’s work was done in the USA but he’s a Serbian home boy so . . .

Electrons from the high frequency transformer short across the air gap to the overhead ground and also cause the fluorescent tubes to glow. Good party trick and it worked on George Westinghouse who supported Tesla financially.

The odometer on Anita’s bike clicked over to 3000 km. It’s taken a lot of chocolate croissants to get us this far. It’s a hard life.

4:30 Friday morning we were on our way again following the Danube south and east. We crossed from the north side to the south at the fortress town of Ram. 10 years ago the Turkish government paid to rebuild the fort as the Ottoman’s were the last occupants and left in kind of a hurry. Reconstructing the fort included removing 20 feet worth of rubble that had accumulated inside the fort as each winning occupier just built on top of what ever remained after their conquest. The inner court yard included a large round windowless, doorless tower built by the Roman’s in the first century to Jupiter the god of war. When the fort was rebuilt in the 1400’s by the Ottomans they recorded that even though they were Muslim and Jupiter was a Roman god they weren’t going to take any chances, so the tower remained.

Yesterday and today the landscape around us changed. We (finally) left the Hungarian plain (and at least for the moment the extreme heat) for the foothills of the Balkan range rising south of the Danube and the Carpathians to the north. This morning we rode thru the beginning of the Iron Gates of the Danube, the water gap formed by the river.

The Golubac fortress that guards the narrow Iron Gate, the Danube goes from almost a mile wide down to just over 500 feet. Ram and Golubac were the first fortresses in Europe specifically designed for cannon.

Below I am once again posting Noel Coward’s song ‘Mad Dogs and English Men Go out in the Noon Day Sun’. It was in the last post however, according to SubStack’s stats, only 16% of you clicked and listened to the song. That just won’t do, we could all use a silly song now and again and most certainly now! So click on the video, you don’t have to memorize anything or sing along but it will be good for you.