A land of world class beaches and luxury hotels, Serbia is not. It is quite literally a land full of Serbs and others, getting by, looking forward, working if they can, but more than anything else, living life as people have for as long they can remember. Surely much has changed recently you think, and you ask a middle-aged man about the differences he has seen in his lifetime in a place that has been a part of four different countries in the last 17 years.

He looks at you as if you are crazy. “Nothing,” he says. “It is the same.”

Serbia: Everything & Nothing Has Changed

People still feast on pork and stuffed peppers, chased down with a shot of rakia, the local plum brandy. Communism, wars, bombings, embargoes and economic stagnation and life is pretty much the same. People marry young, men are obliged to do military service and finding a job is still almost entirely about who you know rather than what you know. Serbia is a place virtually uncharted by Western tourism and those in search of the usual amenities need not apply or at least not bother venturing outside of the capital, Belgrade.

But a place just being itself, as it always has, is worth a look for people who care to travel rather than tour.It is this lack of pretension and staggering normality that oddly makes Serbia so exotic. Anti-smoking campaigners, vegetarians, the meticulously efficient and those who hate surprises will feel particularly uncomfortable here. Preconceptions of Serbia are likely to abound, but they remain only as long as you don’t pay a visit.There are museums and other such places in Serbia, but you should not visit with a checklist of attractions rather come to meet and listen to people and see life in a place that is most definitely original.

Belgrade is home to about two million people, but the massive socially planned square-block buildings,disordered traffic and party-till-dawn reputation give it a feel much bigger. It is a European capital but feels little like Paris or Brussels. This is the East and one step out of Nikola Tesla Airport and you will know you are somewhere different. Orthodox churches, Ottoman-era fortresses, the Cyrillic alphabet, cigarette smoke and the occasional corrupt cop tell you this is so.

Globalization is creeping its way into Belgrade, and while no doubt welcomed by those who live there, is sure to make the city look more and more like the rest of Europe in the next few decades. The Ulica Knez Mihailova (Prince Michael Street) is an early taste of this with its international clothiers and Italian-style cafes. If there is one must do touristy thing to do in Serbia, it is to visit the Kalemegdan, a massive fortress that doubles as pastoral green space overlooking the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. It serves as an escape from what can be an otherwise overwhelming cloud of Yugo exhaust. The National Museum, National Theater and the mausoleum of communist-era leader Joseph Tito are also worth a look.

Novi Sad in the northern Serbia is the capital of Serbia’s wealthiest region, Vojvodina. The Hapsburgian architecture speaks to the former rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the region’s still significant cultural ties to neighboring Hungary. The city fortress hosts the EXIT festival each summer, a four-day concert-party drawing near 200,000 revelers.

Novi Pazar (New Bazaar) in the southwest is a predominantly Muslim town which exhibits a blend of Islamic culture and significant architecture (good, bad and strange) from the communist-era as the central government was seeking to de-emphasize its increasingly Islamic feel.

There is a serious café culture in Serbia’s capital city and for that matter throughout the country at large. In Belgrade it could be Italian espresso but Turkish coffee in a smoke-filled tea room or cheap domestic pivo (beer) in a neighborhood kaffana is more likely in the rest of the country.

Politics are never far from the tongue of the locals, once you cozy up to a few, serious opportunity for learning about the way things work outside the comforts of suburbia is at hand. Nearly everybody has stories about the wars of the 1990s and all recall with striking accuracy the three-month long NATO bombing campaign of 1999. It is times like these when you realize how long war and its shadows linger. This is the real value of visiting a place like Serbia, somewhere that is or was in the news and then seeing with sudden clarity the real lives underneath headlines. Families, punk teenagers and pensioners just like everywhere else.

The Vranje Church in Serbia

In Serbia, there are Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, Macedonians, Roma, Serbs, Turks, Vlachs, a smattering from the international NGO crowd and more. There are Orthodox,Catholics and Muslims and if you read your newspaper occasionally you will know they do not always get along. To be sure, recent history does tend to keep these ethnic groups in their own closely knit enclaves, but one need not feel unsafe moving through a Serb neighborhood, strolling past open-faced Roma houses or bargaining in an Albanian marketplace. A Westerner in these settings is likely to draw a few stares and generate a few questions, but all come from curiosity rather than animosity. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the southern part of the country, home to a significant Albanian minority and a region continuing to live under the uncertainty and controversy surrounding the status of nearby Kosovo, the former southernmost province of Serbia poised to become and independent country.

The mountains of Southern Serbian look a lot like the Appalachians, but on one side of the valley you will see mosque minarets and on the other ornate Orthodox monasteries. These disparate groups do in fact for most part continue to live side by side, and it seems a particularly strong feeling amongst younger generations that violent cultural confrontation go the way of the history used to ignite passions.

Vranje is an unspectacular but typical Serbian city, filled with Yugoslavian-era cars twice the age of many drivers. High on the mountain above are the remains of Ottoman fortress. In the upper part of town live the Roma, purveying fresh slaughtered meat on street-side card tables, the occasional pig or goose herded by. The city centre, with a few architectural exceptions, could almost resemble a mid-sized American town. A few apartment buildings, shops, post office, bars and restaurants and central promenade decorated with Christmas lights. A few miles from Albanian villages, about 15 miles down the road to the Kosovo border, and 30 miles to Macedonia.

Should you find yourself in the south of Serbia around holiday time, there is little place better to immerse yourself in the age-old tradition of the slava, a sort of three-day feast celebrating each family’s patron saint. It amounts to little more than talking amongst vast quantities of pickled vegetables, grilled meats, potatoes and that aforementioned rakia. After eating you may have your fortune told through eerily accurate readings of coffee grains leftover from a Turkish coffee. Slavas, New Year’s and Orthodox Christmas all converge on the calendar and the season spells doom for nearly every sort of domesticated animal but joy for everybody else. Rakiais strong and tastes as much like a kitchen sink solvent as plums, especially the homebrewed variety. On the upside it really provides the illusion of helping digest a meal and warms you up quite sufficiently during cold winter nights. Go easy though, and be clear with you hosts should you have had enough, for otherwise your glass will be filled again and again.

But then again, this is Serbia and that is how they do things here.

–Benjamin Cunningham

Planning a trip? On your way to / from Serbia, check out Viator’s things to do in nearby Hungary, Romania, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.  

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Destinations, Europe. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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