Belgrade, Serbia

Belgrade, Serbia

In the classic 1963 film From Russia With Love, Sean Connery’s James Bond leaves Istanbul in possession of a stolen Soviet decoding machine and heads back towards Britain aboard the Orient Express, the great train that has played host to so many stories over the years and which sadly no longer runs along its most famous route. The camera pans over a dated looking map tracing the railway from Sofia through Yugoslavia to Beograd. Here we see the train slowing into the station (actually filmed in Istanbul), where Bond meets a contact with the coded phrase ‘Do you have a match?’ ‘I use a lighter’ ‘Better still’ ‘Until they go wrong.’

As arrivals in a strange city go, a luxury train journey involving deaths, Soviet agents and illicit border crossings followed by pulling into a station late at night accompanied by a beautiful woman to greet a local ally has to sound somehow romantic. My own arrival in Belgrade was rather less so.

Following in the footsteps of the Byzantines, the Turks, the Austrians, and not Sean Connery

I left Ljubljana the previous evening and was passport checked at the Croatian border before following the motorway around Zagreb and on to the Serbian border at Batrovci. Here, I was intrigued to see a couple of people from the bus in front, who were Turks, laying out their prayer rugs in the space between their coach and ours to worship during the wait to pass through customs. A little more sleep later, and this time I awoke to clear daylight and the approach to Belgrade’s bus station, which happens to be adjacent to the real life train station where the aforementioned film scene is set. Instead of being met by a swarthy spy pretending to ask for a smoke, I was greeted by a chorus of rotund, moustached taxi drivers trying to attract me with the offer of a lift. After shaking them off, I crossed the grassy area that lay beside the station, which was a veritable minefield of overflowing bins, litter and broken bottles, with a few particularly mangy looking tramps occupying the few benches that were still intact. A grubby red tram that looked like it should have retired years ago rolled noisily past. I followed my nose towards the centre, still taking in the sudden abundance of signs in the Cyrillic script, and was alarmed to be followed by two of the most hostile looking skinheads I could imagine. Thinking on my feet, I paused momentarily outside a fancy-looking hotel that clearly had cameras in front, pretending to look at my phone. The two thuggish men walked on past, of course. Heading on into the city, I soon found more agreeable spots, but the messy, nay, polluted forecourt of Belgrade’s bus station is one of the least inviting first impressions of a city that I can recall.

It soon transpired that much of Belgrade is similarly dirty. I shall avoid judging the place too harshly by suggesting that this was probably down to Friday night shenanigans the evening before, rather than a perpetual state of ‘ah, f*** it; I’ll just lob this rubbish wherever I like. It doesn’t really need to go into a bin.’ The Sava river, which merges with the Danube here, was strewn with bottles, and the pretty Kalemegdan park was also disappointingly shabby. My grumbling aside, the views over the Sava and Danube were wonderful, and I could also see the distant historical city of Zemun and to the south, the skyscrapers of the postwar development of New Belgrade, on the north bank of the Sava.

The Sava (left and centre) and the Danube (right) meet at Belgrade. Great War Island is in the middle of the picture, with Zemun behind. Seen from Kalemegdan Park

In the middle of the rivers’ confluence lies Great War Island, so named because it was fiercely fought over during the conflict between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia. In 1914, the border between the two states lay just to the north of Belgrade, in today’s Serbian region of Vojvodina. The island is an uninhabited swamp and nature reserve with its own microclimate, making it extremely difficult terrain to cross today, let alone for legions of soldiers armed to the teeth trying to launch sneak attacks and counterattacks. I am familiar with the small Kingdom of Serbia’s involvement just before the outset of the war – this I will mention again when I visit Sarajevo – but in general I am much more used to focusing on the British involvement in the First World War. It is easy to overlook the fact that Serbia was utterly ravaged, with the entire country fought over as far south as modern Macedonia and Albania. Estimates suggest that around 26% of the Serbian population was killed in the 1914-18 war. By comparison, Great Britain lost approximately 2% and France and Germany 4% each. Seen in these terms, Serbia was the single biggest victim of that conflict.

Kalemegdan fortress, after which Belgrade is named

Chess is evidently taken seriously at Kalemegdan, just not today

Dinosaurs face off in Kalemegdan Park

It is a land that has been fought over countless times, and the Kalemegdan fortress is itself a symbol of this history of war and conquest. Originally built by the Byzantines, the fortress’ layers of stone walls were built consecutively by the Ottoman Turks and then the Austrians. The very name of Belgrade derives from the fortress. A landmark for generations of travellers sailing on the Danube, its distinctive white walls led to the name Beograd – ‘White City’. It can thus be said that Belgrade is an English translation of a Serbian name that was first recorded by Bulgarians to describe a fortress of the Eastern Roman Empire that nowadays has a Turkish name – Kalemegdan is roughly ‘battlefield fortress’ in bastardised Turkish. Truly multicultural. Today, the hill and its park are home not just to these old stone walls, but also to a military exhibition and a somewhat incongruous collection of dinosaur sculptures.

Ulica Kneza Mihaila

Dom Narodne Skupštine - Дом Народне Скупштине - The House of the National Assembly, meeting place for the Serbian Parliament

Stari Dvor - Стари Двор - The Old Palace, former residence of the kings of Serbia

Hotel Moskva - Хотел Москва - Hotel Moscow

Having skirted around the city centre on my way from the bus station to Kalemegdan, I now proceeded towards the city centre along Ulica Kneza Mihaila, Belgrade’s premier shopping street. This pedestrianised avenue’s beautiful period buildings were certainly in better condition than the shabbier quarters that formed most of the rest of the city. Here, I was led towards Serbia’s green-domed parliament building, opposite it the Old Palace where the former kings of Serbia resided, and a short distance away the glamorous Хотел Москва (Hotel Moscow). This particular building had its sign written in Cyrillic, but Belgrade was not at all consistent in its choice of script. A triangular roadside sign might show a pair of schoolchildren crossing with the word Škola underneath, whilst the white paint on the road immediately beside the sign would read Школа. Restaurants and shops displayed their names in either or both scripts and billboards likewise took a seemingly random approach to selecting which writing system to advertise in. Is this an identity crisis?

Well, in short, no. In the ninth century AD, the brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius developed a new writing system, Glagolitic, to be used for the translation of the Bible into the Slavic languages. Named after St Cyril, this gradually evolved into the Cyrillic script used today. Like the Latin script, it has a number of different versions such that there are certain letters used specifically for Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian and Serbian, just as the Latin script has letters like ñ, ß, and ř, used for Spanish, German and Czech respectively. Originally, Cyrillic was unified, being used within the Eastern Orthodox Church for the religious language known as Old Church Slavonic. Over time, this diversified into a family of Slavic languages (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Macedonian, Bulgarian and several other smaller languages and dialects). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Serbian language was standardised using a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet. Neighbouring Croatia, a Catholic country, standardised its own language using a modified Latin script. However, the two languages were and are sufficiently similar to form a united standard called ‘Serbo-Croatian’. From 1918, both countries were constituent parts of Yugoslavia and in Serbia, whose capital Belgrade was the seat of government of that nation, the two scripts enjoyed equal status. Today, ‘Serbo-Croatian’ is, for political reasons, regarded as four separate but mutually intelligible languages: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. The Cyrillic script remains associated with the Orthodox Church in Serbia but for everyday purposes, the Serbian people are perfectly adept at using these two alphabets fluently and interchangeably.

The Serbian alphabets
Note that the Latin letters lj, nj, and dž are regarded as single characters rather than digraphs

In the late morning, I was getting peckish and decided that the best place to find Serbian food was Skadarska, a winding cobblestone street regarded as the most atmospheric in the city. I certainly found atmosphere, though not the kind I was looking for, when I was accosted by a near-naked Serbian woman. Her bare breasts swinging vivaciously, she began shouting angrily at a group of people lingering at a junction in the street. She was obese, manly, past middle aged, clad only in unflattering large white knickers, and dripping wet, apparently from swimming in the river. Trudging heavily uphill and irately cursing anyone unfortunate enough to stray into her path, she was a Grendel-like figure, as though having been awoken from a slumber to emerge from the Danube and wreak havoc on the unsuspecting touristic heart of Belgrade. All I can say is that there are many ‘different’ people everywhere and her erratic behaviour was by no means typical of the Serbians I encountered.

Skadarska

In case of disorientation, this sign on Skadarska will be sure to guide you

After this unexpected incident, my lunch was calm and a welcome break from walking around in the now 30˚C heat. A plate of pickled green chilli peppers, for which I may or may not have been charged, was produced for me to pick at as I waited for my main meal to be cooked. The dish I had ordered was karađorđeva, essentially a sausage shaped chicken kiev, with an accompaniment of potatoes. This connection is in fact part of the story of karađorđeva, which, I was told, was originally made by a distinguished Serbian chef when he prepared chicken kievs for a visiting Russian delegation but had to substitute veal in place of chicken. The result he named after the revolutionary Serbian leader Đorđe Petrović, who was known as Karađorđe – Black George. His successors became the Karađorđević dynasty, who ruled Serbia and then Yugoslavia as kings until 1945 when the monarchy was abolished and Yugoslavia became a socialist state.

Karađorđeva

A Serbian wedding party

I decided to explore the country’s twentieth century history and in the meantime found my way to the Church of St Sava. The largest church in the Balkans, St Sava’s is easy to find because its striking green dome is visible for quite some distance and I was able to follow a largely straight road all the way up to it. It occupies a hilltop location slightly to the southeast of the city centre, chosen because it was here that the Ottoman Turks burnt the relics of St Sava, the Serbian Orthodox Church’s founder, following a 1594 uprising. Construction began in 1935 and the most significant thing that one notices is that it’s not really finished yet. It is a colossal structure, imposing but perhaps not beautiful. Orthodox churches, though, tend to be most elaborately decorated on the inside. Here it was fenced off, a concrete shell with as yet no interior furnishing, save for a carpeted area with a few icons in the north transept. A smaller chapel next door appears to be taking care of the religious duties in the meantime, and this was indeed richly painted and full of people. A second notable trait, not just of St Sava’s but of many Orthodox churches, is that they are like mini emporiums, with in some cases a variety of stalls arrayed within the atrium behind the west doors, all selling a hotchpotch of icons, crucifixes, candles, and souvenirs. Western European churches are of course also guilty of the same practice, but I tend to notice a discreet corner with one or two books on religion or a notable Church figure, and perhaps a small selection of postcards. St Sava’s, however, had a huge range of wares for sale, including racks and racks of beautiful A4 size icons painted in that characteristic Eastern style, each printed with the name of the saint depicted; Јелена (Helen), Ања (Anne), Наташа (Natasha).

The Church of St Sava

Icons galore

St Sava's is sadly rather lacking in interior decoration

But this adjacent chapel makes up for it

Lavishly painted icons adorn every surface

Before deciding to call it a day, there was one more thing I particularly wanted to see: Tito's Mausoleum. Further still from the heart of the city than St Sava's, my route here took me through some residential areas and past Partizan Belgrade's stadium. To get to the mausoleum, I had to pay to enter the museum at the entrance of the small, sloping park in which the former Yugoslav leader rests, and this was a good opportunity to find out how this former giant of the socialist world was portrayed.

St Sava's seen in the background, with the Partizan Belgrade stadium in the foreground

Tito was born Josip Broz on the Slovenian-Croatian border on 7 May 1892. Following his capture and imprisonment by the Russians in the First World War, he became a communist in the inter-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia and then led the partisan resistance to Nazi occupation in the Second World War. From then until his death in 1980, he ruled Yugoslavia. I had already formed my own judgements of Tito when researching this trip, and this was just as well because the museum’s introductory video didn’t exactly go into much detail on the man himself. Its content could be summed up as 'Hey, have you heard of this Tito guy? Wasn't he great... here's a fleeting bit of commentary on what he actually did followed by several minutes of rousing patriotic music and a montage of him being awarded medals and greeted by cheering crowds of happy, flag-waving children.'

Tito looks pensive outside his mausoleum

Tito's uniform

Not having lived through his lifetime nor widely studied his period of rule, it is hard for me to adequately assess the man. Nevertheless, I do believe that he was in some way great, and given the disentegration of the former Yugoslavia into today's seven separate states, each with their own currencies, languages, identities, and problems, it is easy for people all across the region to look back with nostalgic eyes at the Tito era. Tito made their nation great. He forged his own path, free from the yoke of Moscow that influenced and interfered with the regimes of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany and the other Warsaw Pact states. He took on Stalin in a war of words and won. He made his own calls when it came to international issues, and was acknowledged with awards from both Western and Eastern countries, even being decorated with the Soviet Order of Lenin and the British Order of the Bath in the same year. People were freer and generally had a better quality of life than in the Soviet bloc. Their country was open to foreign visitors, and Yugoslavians frequented the Italian city of Trieste, where they could buy Western goods.

Most importantly, he emphasised pan-Yugoslavian identity over that of the more ethnically homogenous republics that made up the country. Yugoslavia, or more accurately, Jugoslavija, means 'South Slavs'. The underlying tensions between Croats and Serbs, traditionally sworn enemies, were played down in favour of a brotherly spirit of socialism. The fascist Ustaše in Nazi occupied Croatia had brutally killed ethnic Serbs during the Second World War. Such atrocities could be somewhat overlooked with Tito providing a central rallying point. Such partisan nationalism was of course easier to control given that Tito’s regime was still a repressive one and those who denounced him were silenced.

Letters written to Tito by admirers

Batons from the Relay of Youth

Tito's tomb

Tito’s world was by no means perfect. He accumulated a significant and damaging amount of foreign debt, and he clearly had a luxurious rule and built up a cult of personality, as so many long lasting leaders of undemocratic states do. His mausoleum was testament to that, featuring gifts from various foreign delegations, a huge collection of adoring letters written by admirers and well-wishers then and now, an active visitors’ book with plenty of people expressing their longing for the Yugoslavia of old, and a display of batons brought to Tito during the annual Relay of Youth, held to conclude on 25 May, Tito’s official birthday. Surrounded by all this paraphernalia, his marble tomb lies surrounded by small plants and alongside that of his third and last wife Jovanka, who was positioned beside him following her death in 2013.

Leaving the mausoleum behind, I was left rather moved to consider the sentiment with which Tito is regarded by many, even to this day. Following his death, Yugoslavia never again found the same sense of central unity and later leaders, such as Slobodan Milošević, would oversee its bloody collapse. Unlike Tito, Milošević was a rampant Serb. For him, the interests of the other Yugoslav republics were secondary to the interests of Serbs. With the country at an impasse, disgruntled Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from Yugoslavia, triggering two wars. The brief Ten-Day War saw Slovenia consolidate its independence in July 1991. Milošević was prepared to let that country go, given that it is a very homogenous country and there were almost no Serbs living there. Croatia and Bosnia were another story, each having important Serb minorities, and for Milošević, it was better to wage a cataclysmic series of all out wars than to concede and allow those states their independence. Ethnic Serbs across the region were fuelled by Milošević's rhetoric and proud Croats and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were similarly polarised. The success story of national unity and independent socialism had become Europe's bloodbath. Croatia and Bosnia hosted wars from 1991-1995 and 1992-1995 respectively. The epicentre later moved to Kosovo, where war broke out between ethnic Albanian militant groups and Serbian forces, leading to a refugee crisis and NATO intervention. Macedonia alone gained its independence peacefully, though it too was afflicted by an insurgency in 2001.

In the context of the wars and the genocides of the 1990s, it is not hard to see why many across the region view the Tito era with rose-tinted glasses. The region remains fragile today, with tensions still present over the Kosovan declaration of independence from Serbia and routine issues with violence and racially-inspired hooliganism among football fans of the Serbian, Croatian and Albanian teams. All this is to précis an extremely complicated set of conflicts, but for a fairer and more in-depth coverage of the Yugoslav Wars, I recommend the excellent 1995 BBC series The Death of Yugoslavia.

The tiered brown Yugoslav Ministry of Defence Building, now a bombed ruin, is the second in from the left

St Michael's Cathedral stands proud of the other buildings in Belgrade's historic quarter

Belgrade itself was the centre stage in the latter stages of the Yugoslav Wars, being badly damaged during a three month NATO bombing campaign in 1999, with the intention being to force the Serbian (then still called Yugoslavian) army to withdraw from the ethnically Albanian province of Kosovo and to secure that state's autonomy. The legacy of the bombing is still visible, with the Yugoslav Ministry of Defence building currently standing as a ruin, and some of those I met mentioning how much the Serbian people hate NATO, and how they view Russia comparatively favourably. From one of the bridges that spans the Sava, I tried to envisage the city’s cluttered skyline, pierced by the tower of St Michael’s Cathedral, being targeted from the sky. It is rather incredible that such a beautiful, culturally rich city with its mighty domed church, its resilient stone fortress and even its angry nude swimmers, a thriving capital in the middle of Europe and standing on one of its great rivers, could have been so devastated so recently; my visit was a day after the seventeenth anniversary of the conclusion of the bombing campaign.

Not wishing for these solemn reflections to weigh me down, I enjoyed a balmy summer’s evening wandering around the city and taking in a little of a concert at Kalemegdan before lightening my spirits further with an England football match. Alas, the agony of optimism! I saw the goalless first half of the Three Lions’ tie with Russia and then proceeded to the bus station. It was the following day before I found out that the result had been a 1-1 draw, foreshadowing the team’s terrible tournament. I wasn’t bothered; I had Bosnia to look forward to.

Belgrade seen from the west bank of the Sava, with Kalemegdan Park prominent on the left

The Sava shortly before its union with the Danube; the historic centre of Belgrade lies on the right bank