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Sadržaj - Content

Tobacco Road in Serbia

Author: Vesna Duskovic
Since it was first brought to Europe, tobacco became a significant source of income for rulers and states. It was praised, forbidden and criticized. To this day it stayed one of the greatest vices of the world’s population. Smoking equipment: pipes, nargilehs, cigarette and cigar holders, chibouks, tobacco boxes and bags, different forms of lighters and everything else that was used while smoking, became an integral part of all cultures.
Most of these objects lost their everyday use in the mid 20th century, and today, they are just dear personal memorabilia or exhibits in museum collections. As silent witnesses of past centuries, they tell their story about simplicity, vanity, craftsmanship and art. In Serbia, there are few written documents about growing tobacco and smoking. Fortunately, museums saved objects used for processing tobacco and smoking, and their collections enable us to throw light on this important aspect of everyday life in previous centuries. To celebrate the 120th anniversary of the tobacco industry in Serbia, The Ethnographic Museum is exhibiting a part of its modest collection of smoking equipment. We hope that this exposition will encourage many people to look through their closets and attics and find forgotten belonging of their ancestors. Some of them might be willing to donate these artefacts and enable them to continue their life in museums. It is our hope that their good will could help Nis to open a tobacco museum and one day join many of the world’s tobacco centres that have already done that.
 

V. Titelbah, Village life, 1897
 
Angelina Jovanovic with cigarette holder, Belgrade, End of the 19th century

The tobacco culture arrived to our countries south of the Sava River from the East, from Turkey, as soon as the early 16 century, although some surveyors mention only the end of this century, while tobacco arrived in the northern parts of the country by all means thanks to Italians. The growing and use of tobacco very quickly spread on the area of the whole of Europe. Despite opinions that tobacco has medicinal properties, one century after its appearance on the soil of the Old Continent, first sanctions for tobacco growers and smokers were passed. The bans were introduced by rulers in many European countries, as well as the Pope in the Vatican. Smokers of this “infectious” culture were often very harshly sanctioned, there were cases of crippling, and even death penalties. In 1605, Sultan Murat IV of Turkey passed a law under which the person found to have smoked tobacco is punished by sticking a cigarette holder into his nose, after which he would be exposed to public disgrace, and in 1633, the law became even stricter, when the violators were punished with the death penalty.
 

Trade permit, Kraljevo, 1888
Tobacco factory, Niš, Serbia, 1934

 According to laws passed in Russia in 1634, the violators would be crippled by cutting off their noses. As the use of tobacco could not be prevented by bans, there were attempts to pass regulations limiting the places for smoking. One such regulation was passed in Serbia at the time of Duke Milos Obrenovic’s rule. “On December 10, 1824, the princes of the People’s Office in Belgrade wrote to Duke Milos – ...Also at the order of the highly esteemed (from December 3, 1824), we invited yesterday all local guilds and read them a letter that they all understood clearly, which said that no one can dare smoke on the street, or walk around the street with an empty chibouk, or in front of Toma’s café, across the church. And every craftsman should inform his apprentices of this order. “. The sustainability of these laws was impossible in the next centuries. In spite of the prohibition, the growing and use of tobacco were spreading more and more. It seems that in this case the maxim of “forbidden fruit” came to its full expression. It was the only in the last decade of the 20 century that bans on the use of tobacco began to be applied again, based in the first place on the education of citizens about the harmful effects of that “pleasure of humanity” which was used for many centuries.
 

Woman stringing leaf tobacco,
Prilep, Macedonia, 1930
Notice board – “tobacco board”
 

During many centuries tobacco users were mostly men. The use of tobacco was equally common in all economic and social circles. It was almost impossible to imagine a grownup man without tobacco and smoking accessories. Following in their fathers’ footsteps, boys started smoking very early, whether hiding and rolling a corn silk, or with the approval of the elderly who in that way introduced them into the world of adults. There were very few women who smoked. If there are such descriptions in literary works, the women who smoke are usually decadent members of high social circles, or “old Gypsy women with a pipe in their mouth.” Idyllic descriptions of women in harems, or communities which, like Serbia, were under the Turkish rule, show relaxed women who “sit, sip coffee and smoke, and engage in pleasant talks.” In was only after the First World War, at the time of Charleston, that the modern urban woman, after having taken off the corset, and shortened her skirt and hair, lit a cigarette and became an equal member of the “smoking population.”
 

Pipe with stem
Pipe with stem

With time, the trade in tobacco became the occupation of Armenian and Jewish tradesmen and of few Serbs. The names for tobacco traders entered into the everyday language: duvandžije, duhandžije, tutundžije (tobacco sellers), burmutdžije (snuff sellers), tobacco cutters. There were also separate guilds of tobacco and snuff sellers, and their work, just like of other guilds, was regulated with rulings passed by the duke. According to the Decree from 1845 on the trade and handicrafts in the town of Belgrade, the trade was divided into large, middle-sized and small. The middle-sized trade is divided into 10 classes. The second class included the so-called materialists, who among other things sold various kinds of tobacco. According to the census of the population from 1845, the tobacco trade in Belgrade was mostly the occupation of the Jews. Out of 410 men, 216 were tobacco traders, and there were 17 tobacco sellers. Both engaged in the sale of tobacco. Until the liberation from the Turks in 1878, tobacco could be bought at fairs, in some of the meyhanes (bars), from peddlers, and various traders. In the first several years after the withdrawal of the Turks, in southern Serbia tobacco was grown in a free regime as before, both at big and small farms, until Serbia adopted the Law on tobacco trade on June 15, 1884. Until then, the sale and purchase of tobacco in Serbia was conducted according to the so-called “regal”, the provisions on collecting tobacco taxes and the provisions on the introduced tobacco customs tariffs. Only the poor citizens of the Leskovac district were interested in tobacco growing after 1878. Thus in 1886, 302 growers requested permits for growing tobacco from the local authorities, of whom 301 were from Leskovac, and only one from the village of Navalin.
 

Cigarette holder
Tongs for cigarettes

Tobacco has been present on the European continent for half a millennium already, as a medicine, vice, passion, killer or economic gain, and as an ethnologist, I am not entitled to discuss these aspects of tobacco. This time I only speak about its visually more beautiful sides. When it comes to that, without a sense of guilty conscience, we can thank all those craftsmen and ordinary people for having bequeathed to us an incredible wealth of shapes and decorations of various smoking accessories that have been kept in the collections of many museums until today.
 

Tobacco box
Small table – Peškun
 
 
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