Exploring Belgrade

Me at Tito's Mausoleum

Yesterday was our first full day in Belgrade and we made it count.  We started the morning with a typically Serbian breakfast: burek and yogurt.  A burek, ubiquitous in the Balkans, is a filo pastry stuffed with cheese, meat, spinach, or mushrooms...or anything else.  Then we were off to explore the city.

Our first stop was to join a free walking tour of the city.  We did a pretty solid lap around the city, starting in Republic Square.  We walked up Knez Mihailova, the oldest street in the city and the main pedestrian through way.  Then we headed down to Skadarlija, the bohemian quarter, a cobble stoned street lined with cafes and bars that rings with the sound of Serbian trumpet music at night.  From there we headed to Dorcel, the Turkish quarter.  We saw a monument to the event giving rise to Serbian independence from the Ottoman Empire.  A young boy went to draw water from a fountain and was mistakenly killed by the Turks, which caused an uproar in the city and led to a revolt.  We also saw the only mosque in Belgrade...only one of originally 273 mosques remains in the city!  Even this one has police posted outside 24-hours a day because of the violence directed toward the mosque when Kosovo's independence was declared in the 1990s.  We also walked by what the Serbians call "Silicon Valley," (Strahinjica Bana) named not for the technical nature of the businesses located there, but instead for the caliber of the women who frequent the bars on the street.

The remainder of our tour was spent around the Kalemegdan, the fortress, from which you can see the confluence of the Sava and the Danube rivers.  We've been to so many cities situated on the Danube, it's crazy to see where it actually meets another river.  Along the riverbanks you can see floats, essentially barges and rafts that have been turned into bars and nightclubs, the heart of Belgrade's nightlife.  We also saw "?," the oldest cafe in the city.  It's called ? because when it changed ownership the new owner wanted to name it "the cafe near St. Sava's church" but the priests threw a fit and made him change it, so he put a ? above the door until he could think of something, and it stuck.

After the tour ended we grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed out to the two sights I was most excited about: Tito's Mausoleum and Sv. Sava's Cathedral.  Tito's Mausoleum was incredible!!  It's amazing, in the States, Tito is very negatively associated but over here, even after the fall of communism and Yugoslavia, people in all of the former Yugoslavian republics still say that things were better under communism and worship Tito.  We went on the right day, they were opening a new exhibition so we got in free.  We saw the ceremony to unveil the wall with a giant map of the non-alignment countries on it (Those that refused to side with the US or the USSR).  The Serbians do it right; there was no red tape, no giant scissors, just a plaster wall hiding the map that the Minister of Culture took a sledgehammer to.  The museum was really cool, it had all of Tito's old suits and uniforms, gifts that had been given to him by world leaders, and tons of pictures.  The mausoleum itself was even better.  Besides being absolutely stunning, the "House of Flowers" contained a number of batons.  On Tito's birthday every year, people from all over Yugoslavia would participate in relays to run a lavish baton with good wishes inside to Tito.  Tito accepted all of them personally and eventually changed the event from a day celebrating him to a day celebrating the youth of Yugoslavia.

Kati at Sv. Sava

Sv. Sava was equally cool.  It's the second largest Orthodox church in the world!  It's still under construction and the vast majority of the inside is undecorated and you can see people working on it all the time.  But the outside is unbelievable.  The sheer size of the church is mind boggling.  The giant church was built where it stands because the Turks destroyed many valuable and religiously significant relics there.  After seeing the church we stopped by the hostel for a rest before dinner.

For dinner we went to Little Bay, a seemingly unimposing cafe restaurant.  Yet you step inside to the sounds of Italian opera music and the two-floor building is decorated like an opera house.  You can eat dinner in your own private opera box and, later in the night, they have live opera music.  The food was fantastic.  Afterwards we stopped by the Yugoslavian Federal Association of Globe Trotters, a bar I was told I had to go to because it embodies "eclectic cool."  We had to walk down a street that no longer had a sidewalk until we found a very small sign on the door of an otherwise nondescript building.  Skeptically, I rang the bell and was buzzed in.  Eclectic cool is the only way to describe this place.  Everything was extremely old-fashioned and mismatched.  There was a "garden room" that, despite being in the basement of the building, was open-aired. This hole-in-the-wall bar was really neat.  It's one of those places that you know people only go to if they're regulars or if they learn of it from someone who's already been there.  The musical selections (all classic American) were great as well.  We finished the night with a nice walk down the bohemian quarter to soak in the atmosphere and the Serbian music.