Thursday, June 12 – Etschka to Alt Letz

We started out at our usual time of 8 Am for Rudolfsgnad. We dropped Miles and Mary Ann off in the village for their own dastardly purposes and continued on to the Teletschka. This is a place where about 8,000 people were buried in mass graves when the village cemetery was no longer suitable due to soggy ground. We then returned to the village where about 3,000 more people are buried in a mass grave. The rest of the old German cemetery is badly overgrown and pretty well inaccessible.

From there we went to Sigmundsfeld. In the pictures from one of our previous trips, Miles had spotted a Dormuth headstone that he had not seen himself. It was hard to read and he wanted to get a better picture. Despite long odds, he found the stone with another Dormuth stone beside it, despite the fact that they had obviously been moved to a disposal pile. With a little shaving cream and some water we got several good pictures revealing great detail.

 

At Lazarfeld we found the mill that had been owned by Barbara’s uncle and their old house beside it. We also found a villa that belonged to a family that married into hers. At Stefansfled we took some pictures of Ray and Carol. The one cemetery was pretty much unchanged, but another one that we had found to be very rough on a previous trip had been allowed to go wild. Dense bush ten feet high obscured the old German part of the cemetery. At Sartscha, the old German part of the cemetery had been just grass with sidewalks on our previous visit, but now it was filled with Serb graves.

We briefly stopped at Konak, which had been an option for accommodation, out of curiosity to look at what we passed up. We pressed on through Alt Letz to Setschanfeld, where Mary Ann had used different records, maps, and satellite imagery to calculate the precise location s of her ancestors’ land and homes. We waited in the shade while she hiked around the village taking pictures. Then we returned to Alt Letz and found the chapel of Barbara’s great grandparents and rescued their portraits.

Finally, after a short stop for beer and/or ice cream, we proceeded to our hotel a little west of Alt Letz by about 5:30 PM. What a great experience! First of all, the building is beautiful. The owner, Radmila Jovanovich, is a doctor who divides her time between Geneva, Belgrade, and this property in her homeland. She purchased the estate fifteen years ago and has been restoring it lovingly for the last ten years. When she bought it, there was no roof and it was home to various animals and plants. She has her own apartment, but has recently decided to rent out some of the spare rooms. We were her first large group. It is not perfect – there is no air conditioning and most of the rooms have only queen size beds, leading to some minor awkwardness – but it quite makes up for any shortfalls with its elegance and charm.

We were first invited to refreshments, including estate made schnapps, in a building that had been used for drying camomile and were then assigned our rooms. Mary Ann and Barbara made a short rip for picture taking with Stasa, and then returned to the secondary building to join us for a very nice meal with complementary drinks. After a long and enjoyable evening we returned to our rooms sometime between 9 and 10 PM.

It was very warm again today, but felt a little bit cooler. It may have been the cooling breeze, or maybe the temperature was a little cooler, or maybe a bit of both. I again saw crops being swathed and combined. No WiFi tonight. Will have to post this some other time.