“Consider yourself lucky if you happen to be in Belgrade in May” - Momo Kapor
So I followed Momo’s advice and considered myself lucky.
Momo Kapor, author, artist, wit. Belgrade’s answer to Bob Ellis. Momo reckons Belgrade the most beautiful city in the world in May. Quite a boast. Geelong, for one, would give it a run for its money in May. To say nothing of the true regional beauties: Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Zagreb…
Belgrade is as ugly as they come. It was so in 1938, when CL Sulzberger wrote: “Covered in flea bites [from his cheap hotel] I started to wander around Belgrade, an ugly city with which I fell in love”. And so it remains, ugly and loveable seventy years and several wars later.
Looking further into this outrageous claim of Momo’s, it seems that he bases it on the strength of the city’s human adornments: the world’s most beautiful women.
To test it out, I spent half of a May day idling in the crowded cafés on Knez Mihailova, the main pedestrian mall through the older part of town. It is impossible not to stare at the Belgrade girls: tall, black haired and green eyed, eagerly out in their summer clothes after the wrapped up winter, flashing glances every which way. I very quickly started to see Momo’s point.
Ahh Belgrade. The White City.
Capital of the incredible shrinking Serbia.
Perceived in the world as a byword for trouble. On the map of Europe the label next to Belgrade still says ‘here be monsters, war criminals turned hippies, embassy burning hoodlums’.
Belgrade’s bad image deters visitors, which is a shame. Tell a Belgrader you are an Australian with no agenda but to discover their city, and first they’ll be incredulous (‘Why?’, is the first question), then pleased, proud and manically helpful. And then they’ll tell you about their cousin Dusan who lives in Melbourne. And then you’ll tell them about your respect for tennis player Ana Ivanovic, and everyone will go off for shots at a bar.
Travelling Melburnians might notice something familiar about Belgrade. Not just the trams. There is a faint touch of the old St Kilda about the place. Belgrade squats above its own ugly-charming waterfront, the confluence of the Sava and the Danube rivers. Belgrade is raffish and roguish, artistic, under-employed, ill-advised, scruffy, defeated, bleak and romantic. Belgrade is pretty much punk rock.
Sulzberger felt some of this when he lived there. He writes of the place as “a delightful peasant town. It smelled of fog, sweat and meat”. In the simple restaurants (kafanas) he watched thirsty students with no money pass around eau de cologne and he sat with them as they planned insurrections, showing him photos of their military training in the nearby woods. And in the evenings:
There was always and agreeable clatter of horse and oxen hoofs on cobbled streets, the whining horns of river steamers, the wails of accordion and tambouritza music starting up in the kafanas…
Belgrade is a place where the tourist should simply sit in parks and cafes and watch the spin of life. One reason is that Belgrade has almost zero ‘must-see’s’. There are some lovely and important churches, a grand Parliament Building in the Austro-Hungarian style, and some much-loved parks, but nothing significantly older than in an Australian city and little you can see only in Belgrade.
Belgrade is actually one of Europe’s oldest cities — it doesn’t look it. It has been knocked flat more than forty times over the years.
Fitzroy Maclean writes about arriving into newly liberated Belgrade just behind the Russians and Tito and marvelling at the destruction.
Before that, in WW I, the brilliant war correspondent John Reed watched from behind the walls at Kalemegdan as the city was defended from the Austrians. Later he walks around to see the damage:
Everywhere were visible the effects of artillery fire.
Great holes fifteen feet in diameter gaped in the middle of the street. A shell had smashed the roof of the Military College and exploded within, shattering all the windows; the west wall of the War Office had sloughed down under a concentrated fire of heavy guns; the Italian legation was pitted and scarred by shrapnel, and the flag hung ragged from its broken pole. Doorless private houses, with roofs cascading to the sidewalks, showed window-frames swinging idly askew without a pane of glass. Along that crooked boulevard which is Belgrade’s main and the only paved street, the damage was worse. Shells had dropped through the roof of the Royal Palace and gutted the interior…
Hardly anything had escaped that hail of fire – houses, sheds, stables, hotels, restaurants, shops, and public buildings – and there were many fresh ruins from the latest bombardment, only ten days before. A five-storey office-building with the two top floors blown off by a 30.5-centimetre shell exhibited a half section of a room – an iron bed hanging perilously in the air, and flowered wall-paper decorated with framed pictures, untouched by the freak of the explosion. The University of Belgrade was only a mass of yawning ruins.
(The ‘freak of the explosion’ is great).
And then later the mad hand of the Communist architects went to work on their own remodelling. And then NATO did some bombing…
There are still plenty of reminders of the Communist days. My hotel of choice, The Excalibur, is an optimistic moment from the early 1960s teleported forward to the current day. You close the lift doors by hand. The rooms haven’t ever been improved (but are still clean and great value). In the dining room, with its once-futuristic light fixtures and its stained glass windows displaying the coats of arms of Belgrade’s premier hotels, aged waiters in bow ties serve an eternal 1960s breakfast. I felt sad all this opulence had dated so very fast…
Like the old St Kilda, the political is on the surface. It was just prior to the parliamentary elections and the graffiti on the streets was mostly angry stuff directed at the Democrat President Boris Tadic (Tadic je Juda – ‘Tadic is Judas’), the NATO bombing of 1999 or Kosovo independence (‘Kosova je Serbija’ – Kosovo is Serbia), but there was humour as well – I liked ‘Ibiza je Serbija’, claiming that the notorious Spanish party island Ibiza belongs to the Serbs.
So, what to do if there is nothing to see? There are small good things available for not many dinars and little effort. The war museum and the old fortress at Kalemegdan Park are worth your strolling time. You can taxi down to Ada Ciganlija, an island in the Sava River with beaches and cafes and strange homemade bars on the water and every kind of sport or recreation available. Or go to the huge open air fruit and veg market Kalenic Pijaca to find local cheese. You should certainly enter a kafana and attempt to have dinner. Kafanas are traditional bistros and mostly full of smoking men getting loudly hammered on rakija. The food is always simple, fresh and homemade, and generally meat-based (particularly lamb), but Serbian salads are delicious and not to be missed.
December 1, 2008 at 2:18 am |
[...] in Serbia; a list of what an average Serbian salary (386 Euros a month) can buy – at Belgraded. An anti-ode to Belgrade – at Zukointheworld: “Belgrade is raffish and roguish, artistic, under-employed, ill-advised, [...]