Post Category → News

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 horror of Germany’s war

I have posted before (here and here) on the horrors of Dresden, W. G. Sebald’s book “On the Natural History of Destruction“, and “Crabwalk” by Gunter Grass, about the sinking of the German refugee ship, the “Willem Gustloff”, in 1945 with the loss of a staggering 10,000 lives.

I would like to add a new book to the genre:

The End: Hamburg 1943 by H.E. Nossack

Nossack was the only writer of the time to try recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible,” writes W. G. Sebald about this memoir of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943. Nossack watched the destruction of his city—in the first firestorm achieved by Allied bombers—from across the Elbe River. Only three months after the event, he completed The End, one of the most remarkable literary responses to the phenomenon of total destruction. MORE

You can read an extract from the book here.