Brodovi nad gradom

Brodovi nad gradom is a book of Osijek's very intimate topography, from Turkish history, through the nineteenth-century spatial (lack of) self-awareness of Osijek to Osijek's "socialist renaissance", a story about a city that gives the friendly eye of the storyteller little secret insights into spaces, buildings, mysterious street networks, into historical sediments that are reflected in the changes in the names of streets and squares, in Pannonian mildness and stubbornness. Osijek, Yugoslavia, is the narrator's childhood heterotopia recreated in the story of his own surreal urban genetic code.

At the beginning of Nenad Rizvanović's book Ships over the City, a motto from Walter Benjamin's childhood in Berlin is stated about wandering through the city as a sensory skill in which detail and emotion merge, about the city as a metaphorical forest through which we wander in a sweet haze of deliberate disorientation. Adopting this motto almost literally, Rizvanović's Osijek in the book becomes a historical symbolic forest through which the unnamed narrator wanders, mapping in his mind the networks of Osijek's alternative city history and gossip, finding paradoxical coincidences between the historical memory of the city and his own upbringing in the same city.