WHY I LOVE BATTERED BELGRADE
If you want your city breaks rough and ready try Serbia, says veteran war
reporter Eve-Ann Prentice, who finds home-grown food, techno-folk and fake
CDs for the taking
Eve-Ann Prentice
Sunday August 10, 2003
The Observer
Most people grimace or laugh scornfully when I suggest that Serbia is great
for a holiday. Surely it is still full of war criminals, a place of dark
deeds, mafiosi and communist-style backwardness?
Sitting in the Dacha restaurant in Belgrade, surrounded by Serbian folklore
icons and wall-hangings, eating and drinking some of the purest organically
produced food and drink available on the planet, it is tempting to believe I
am having the last laugh. Especially when the bill for a hungry gathering of
12 comes to less than £70, including tip. No GM or processed food here;
economic necessity means that almost everything is home-grown - and it
tastes that way. With a penchant for locally smoked ham, grilled meat,
stuffed vegetables, specialist breads, salads, pickles and soft Kajmak
cheese, most Serbs eat enormous amounts and yet stay enviably slender. This
is probably also because they hardly ever eat butter or milk.
After dinner, we all troop off to sample a couple of the nightclubs and bars
which make Belgrade nightlife some of the most exuberant in Europe. The Tram
bar, with live rock and blues, the Radisa jazz club tucked behind the St
Sava Orthodox cathedral and the Irish bar - where they don't yet have access
to Guinness, but where the theme reflects a passionate liking for all things
Celtic. One of the most famous Serbian bands are the Orthodox Celts, who
perform an eerily accurate rendition of Dubliners' songs, complete with
Irish accents in suitably tobacco-and-whiskey raddled voices.
Spectacularly beautiful young women who look as if they have stepped from
the fashion pages of Cosmopolitan , students, young men in sports clothes,
musicians and writers link arms in camaraderie as they wander the cobbled
streets of the nineteenth-century Skadarlija Bohemian quarter, the
pedestrianised Knez Mihailova Street teeming with luxury shops or Republic
Square with its dozens of pavement cafes. Most Serbs go out for the evening
after 10pm and most nightspots are open until at least 2am - yet there is
rarely any sign of drunkenness or offensive behavior. The atmosphere is
usually of people having a benignly good time enjoying everything from
Procol Harum to Electric Six, Sinatra ballads to Serbia's home-grown brand
of high-energy pop music known as techno-folk.
Last winter I slipped on ice in an unlit back street in Belgrade at gone two
in the morning. Most Serbs can spot a foreigner a mile off (and know we are
Croesus-rich by comparison), so I was unnerved when several huge, crew-cut
young men emerged from the shadows and rushed towards me. I needn't have
worried - they were solicitude personified, lifting me to my feet and
ensuring I was not hurt. Far from snatching my handbag, they carefully
picked the bag and its scattered contents from the pavement and handed it
back to me.
The only time you are likely to encounter rowdiness is after a big sports
event, when patriotic feelings run high, especially when Serbia has won. At
these times, young men lean precariously from car windows and open car
boots, as they drive through the streets blaring horns and waving
bedspread-sized Serbian flags.
Serbia is the ideal destination for anyone looking for an adventurous
holiday, without any long-haul flights, and a love of meeting the locals.
You get a real feeling of being in an exotic location, where the tectonic
plates of Islam, Orthodox Christianity and Roman Catholicism, alongside
socialism and capitalism, have all collided in the past.
It is not the place for travelers seeking Western-standard slick city
breaks. Many hotels are dowdy and run-down after a decade of sanctions and
Slobodan Milosevic communism, with frayed wiring, missing light bulbs and
cracked tiles. They are, however, scrupulously clean. It is a bit like going
on a hen or stag party weekend to Dublin with an extra dash of zaniness
thrown in.
While the post-Milosevic government and Western aid have done much to repair
potholed streets and cracked pavements, there are still many burnt-out
buildings in Belgrade which stand as a stark reminder of the Nato bombing in
1999. The bombardment may have spawned Serb hostility towards Nato
governments, but it did nothing to diminish ordinary people's liking for
American and British culture (they love Only Fools and Horses ) or Western
visitors. Staff at state-owned hotels can be surly, but you must not take it
personally - they are just as rude to the locals. The vast majority of Serbs
delight in talking to the British and many people, especially the young of
Belgrade, speak English.
The influx of overseas aid agencies and investors in the past two years has
also brought the old cosmopolitan air back to the city after too many years
of defensive introspection. The needs of these newcomers have brought
practical benefits; for instance, the first cash dispensers are beginning to
appear on the streets. However, these are new and sometimes do not work so
it is still wise to take as much cash as you think you will need. The
currency is the dinar (one dinar roughly equals 1p), although the euro is
widely accepted. Taxis cost the equivalent of less than £2 for most city
journeys.
One of Belgrade's great treasures is the Danube and its tributary, the Sava.
The Serbian capital sits astride the confluence of the rivers, with the old
city on one side and the self-explanatory New Belgrade on the other. River
cruises give a wonderful eye-level view of rich Serbs at play in their
speedboats, as well as of Kalemegdan Castle which dominates the sweep of the
Danube as it meets the Sava. The fortress, which dates back to early
medieval times, mirrors the city's chequered history under early Serb,
Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule. Well worth a visit are the cafe-bar in a
turret deep in the walls of the castle and the zoo which abuts the castle
walls.
Restaurant boats along the riverbank all look inviting, but the food served
varies enormously from over-priced mediocrity in some to spectacularly good
in others; one of the best is Dialog, once frequented by Milosevic, now on
trial in the Hague, and his wife.
Shopaholics should beware; Belgrade is over-endowed with clothes and shoe
shops, some selling Italian designer wear at about a third of the price in
the West. The Serbs are also masters of piracy and CD shops and street
vendors sell Western pop music and computer software within hours of their
publication in the West - at phenomenally low prices, sometimes under £1.
Quirkier souvenirs are to be found at the large flea market on the outskirts
of the city.
Serbia's tourism industry all but ground to a halt during the Milosevic era.
In the heyday of Yugoslav tourism, in the 1970s and 1980s, five million
foreigners visited every year. Now Yugoslavia no longer exists (the rump
state is now renamed Serbia and Montenegro) and the government is trying to
lure visitors back with a Tourist Organization of Serbia slogan 'Fall in
Love Again'. The regime hopes that between 25,000 and 30,000 foreigners will
visit this year - although only a tiny number are expected to be British. As
part of its drive, however, the government has scrapped the requirement for
visas for nationals of 40 countries, including the UK.
Outside Belgrade, the tourism industry hopes to tempt visitors with Danube
cruises now the bombed bridges have been cleared to leave a pathway for
shipping at Novi Sad in Serbia's flat, breadbasket province of Vojvodina,
bordering Hungary. Hunting trips and tours of monasteries are also planned.
However, one idea of luring British tourists to health spas is unlikely to
catch on in the foreseeable future. Far from being the preserves of pampered
guests taking facials and saunas, these still tend to be grim, cavernous
halls with standpipes of vile-tasting sulphurous waters frequented by
Serbia's elderly and infirm in an atmosphere more of a sad geriatric ward
than a health center promoting beauty and vigor.
One of Serbia's best-kept secrets is Mount Kopaonik in the south - a ski
resort in winter and retreat from the heat of towns and cities in summer.
Towering 6,000 feet above Kosovo and Bosnia, the resort has hundreds of
rooms in several alpine-style hotels and self- catering apartments. The area
is strictly protected as a national park and the bird and plant life are
spectacular, with edelweiss and other mountain flora carpeting the slopes
when I was there in late May. The lodges and hotels are prettily built, but
while the air outside is crystal clear and reviving, the room I stayed in
was dismayingly musty. Again, realizations of the economic problems still
besetting Serbia are needed to get the most from a holiday here.
Factfile Eve-Ann Prentice visited Serbia with the National Tourist
Organization of Serbia. The organization can arrange packages, flights and
hotels.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003
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