A few days ago I visited the monastery of Rača close to the border town of Bajina Bašta in western Serbia. The monastery lies at the edge of the Tara National Park that stretches south west from just beyond the town to the River Drina and the border of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The day was quintessentially autumnal, with a slight chill in the air, the sky flecked with stray cumulus, the leaves of the beech and hornbeam forest that cloaked the steep hillsides transformed to a palette of precious metals – gold, bronze, copper.
From the monastery I took the signed path that lead through forest to the spring of Ladjevac. A thirty-minute walk, the sign said, but perhaps because I was stopping frequently to take photographs, or I was just slow, it took longer. The path was difficult underfoot in places too – washed away by small landslides at a couple of points to leave treacherous grey mud of great viscosity that was tricky to navigate. The track was almost deserted – I saw only two other walkers there and back – but in summer this would have been a far busier place as energetic day trippers and monastery visitors would beat their way through the woods to the spring that has numerous health claims attributed to its water.
The visitors were well catered for as the route was punctuated with picnics spots with trestle tables. But now, out of season in the chill of autumn, no one was using them and the tables and seats had acquired an accretion of fallen hornbeam leaves on each horizontal surface. It was a still day but it seemed remarkable that the fallen leaves had not been blown away by wind or washed off with rain – they lay where they fell, the woodland furniture gently breaking their fall on their inevitable journey to the ground.
What struck me strongly was how considered it all looked, as if some unnamed landscape artist had patiently glued each leaf in place to create a work of art. But no, this was happenstance, a serendipitous confluence of meteorology and season. Man may be the craftsman, the carver of wood, but sometimes it is nature that is the artist. Humankind creates; nature embellishes.
