Belgrade, Serbia
I’ve got a good friend called Collins who lives from city to city in Eastern Europe. I rarely know exactly where he is, or what he’s doing. So, my friend Dave and I decided it was time to find him and see what he was up to. And that’s how we ended up spending three wonderful days exploring Belgrade.
Now it’s fair to say that Belgrade isn’t a particularly pretty city. It’s quite grey, graffiti-strewn and full of concrete buildings. But I grew to really like the place.
Day one started exactly how a minibreak should, with some tiny coffees, a plate of cevapi and a wander around Belgrade Fortress. We eventually found Collins and went for some afternoon beers for a proper catch-up before the evening’s entertainment.
It’s always fun to see some live music, so we had secured some tickets for a gig starring local bands War Engine, Chemical Tomb and Nadimac. Because if you get the opportunity to go to a Serbian thrash metal gig in Belgrade, you should always do it. The gig was superb, with all the jagged fonts, flying sweat, long hair, and moshing you’d hope for. One unusual thing we noticed is that crowd surfing in Serbia seems to be very different to the UK. At a gig in London, someone’ll be given a leg up and clamber on top of the crowd. Not in Belgrade. A group of friends moved to the very edge of the room, carefully lifted their friend up to their shoulders then solemnly marched him back into the melée. It was bizarre. After a couple of beers, Dave, Collins and I got stuck in and were also thrashing about in the mosh pit, our limbs flailing wonderfully in all directions, until Collins hit the deck and quite severely injured his knee.
There is some fantastic brutalist architecture in Belgrade, so the next morning Dave and I spent a happy day wandering around looking at some of the highlights while Collins looked into travel insurance. The Western City Gate, or Genex Tower, is a great example of Serbian brutalism, with two tall concrete towers, connected by a little bridge near the top. We managed to sneak into the stairwell and had a wander about the building, admiring the terrazzo floors and stark concrete lines of the building. Next time I’m in Belgrade I’d be keen to have a poke around inside one of the apartments, as they’re probably fantastic.
Our self-guided brutalist tour also stopped by the Hotel Jugoslavija, the Belgrade Stock Market and the Palace of Serbia, as well as a few other buildings which we didn’t know the name of, but we stood and marvelled at, taking hundreds of edgy photos which will sporadically appear on Dave’s Instagram for years to come.
Saturday night was the Champions League final, so we sat in a town square and had beer after beer, for some reason discussing slavery reparations rather than really watching the game. But football and slavery chat was a mere precursor to the Big Night Out. Belgrade is notorious for nightlife, and at the time we visited, was home to a stretch of ‘splavs’, along the river. These party boats have since largely been moved away from the riverbanks, so we were lucky to be in Belgrade when the party was still in full swing. We boarded a splav at about 1am and were drinking, dancing and chatting to increasingly drunk locals until dawn. One group of Serbian lads were absolutely baffled that we’d come all the way from England and visited the Western City Gate. By the time we left the boat it was getting light, and we walked back to the apartment as the sun rose.
The next day, feeling a little worse for wear, Dave and I caught a bus to the little suburb of Zemun, which is where we had found out Collins was actually living. Zemun is a world away from the concrete bustle of the rest of Belgrade, and we sat in a tree-lined square nursing three small coffees and three large hangovers. It’s about an hour’s walk from Zemun back to the main city centre, and we spent a nice chilled afternoon wandering along the river with a limping Collins, stopping at little floating bars as we went.
Eventually it was time to head back to the airport, but there was no sign of the bus we’d expected. With our flight looming, a man pulled up to the bus stop in a car which may or may not have been a taxi, asked if we needed a lift to the airport and said it’d be cheaper than the bus. What could go wrong? Nothing, it turned out. We hopped in and headed to the airport after an exhausting but absolutely superb long weekend in Belgrade.
Oh, and Collins’ knee is now feeling a lot better, in case you were wondering. By the time you read this he is probably living in Romania. Or Albania. Or Georgia. It’s easy to lose track.
