Novak Djokovic's basement bomb shelter
Unexpected place writing
The joy of the A Level Changing Places unit is that once you start thinking about, teaching or learning it you quickly discover its ideas in many, unexpected, places. A biography of one of the greatest tennis players of all time is not the first place you would go looking for geographical insights.
However, Mark Hodgkinson’s excellent biography of Novak Djokovic opens chapter one with a visit to the basement bomb shelter in which a young Djokovic spent many nights during the NATO bombings of Belgrade in 1999.
He writes of the genius loci, or spirit of place that he senses in that bunker. He offers it as an example of how emotions experienced in a place can leave traces in that place which persist long into the future.
It’s not just the concrete, all cold, rough and unforgiving, that unsettles you. It’s imagining how Djokovic and others would have felt inside this bunker; there’s a sense that this is somehow still a place of fear and confusion and gathering rage, almost as if the concrete all around you absorbed some of those emotions and now it’s radiating them back at you.
There is a sharp contrast in character of place to the area around Kapaonik in the Serbian mountains where a young Novak’s parents ran a pizzeria. It was a ‘place of serenity’ where he would chase rabbits through the trees and where he first picked up a tennis racket on a nearby court.
However, places change. The war left unexploded cluster bombs making the place unsafe for visitors. In their absence nature reclaimed the tennis club as it was absorbed by the forest.
Yet, even as the material conditions of places change our emotional connections to them can persist. When Djovovic returned twenty years later the buildings were derelict, the practice wall was scarred with bomb damage.
But at least the wall was somehow still standing, that it had, as Djokovic put it, ‘endured’, as had his emotional connection with that spot of land.