There’s something I find really appealing about the Balkans. If I had to do a Balkan mood board, there would be cute wooden cabins, jars of homemade jam, sunflower fields, rustic gates and scenes of urban decrepitude (Brutalist government buildings, graffiti, garish 21st century billboards full of primary colors vs. a traumatized populace).
In any event, when we were casting about for a place to stay that was near enough to Italy to return with minimum travel stress, we both decided Serbia would be an interesting choice. Eight years ago we spent a fair amount of time in Northern Macedonia, Bulgaria and Albania. More recently we went on a day trip to Slovenia, so I feel like we need to cross off as many former-Yugoslav territories as we can to get the full set.
We left Rome on a direct flight to Belgrade and spent one night in the capital at a comfortable hotel near the centre. On a short walk around the block we heard a loud CRUNCH and turned to witness the aftermath of a fender bender—a taxi had apparently bumped into the car in front. A woman holding an infant jumped out of the passenger seat, no doubt hopped up on adrenaline, and started yelling at the taxi driver, a tall bearded man who looked like a movie assassin. The medium-sized husband/driver hung back, much less eager to get into a tussle with this particular offender.
We had dinner at the restaurant hotel at five o’clock, which was nice. However, there was a bit of a glitch because my numerical deficiencies came into play at the time of paying the bill. I can do basic arithmetic if I have no distractions, but for one reason or another there are times when the numbers switch around on me or I fail to notice a zero or two. It is a condition that has previously caused considerable anguish, not to say panic, in our household. On this occasion, I looked at the bill, calculated a reasonable tip and put the dinars in the faux-leather folder confident that the waitress would think us pretty generous diners. If we were singers or actors, we’d definitely be included in a ‘Best-Tipping Celebrities’ listicle. So when she looked at the bills with consternation, I knew what was coming.
“That’s OK,” I smiled indulgently, all but patting her hand, “The extra is for you,.”
“No, no,” she said with a new and troubling severity. “It is not enough. This is the price.”
I looked at the figure she was jabbing at and realized that I’d paid the tax percentage and the total was a few lines up and had a couple more zeros.
“Ah,” I said and proceeded to extract the proper amount of dinars. Every second I took in extracting the correct bill was a geological era of agony for John. In the elevator, I graciously agreed that he would be responsible for paying Serbian bills for the foreseeable future.
In the morning, we walked to a café for breakfast and looked at the city with interest. Although Belgrade was mainly occupied by the Ottomans from 1521-1915, in the nineteenth century, architecturally speaking, it turned from an Eastern cityscape into a Western one—full of buildings that would look equally at home in Trieste or Paris.
At noon, we took a taxi to the central bus station, scene of a food-poisoning event in our previous travels. In the winter of 2017, John had ingested a bus-station sandwich and suffered an uncomfortable night. Accordingly, although we had an hour before the bus left, we decided not to eat anything but only to drink tea. The café was outdoors, and other customers were smoking like Stromboli
Buying a bus ticket is an involved procedure. First, you decipher the timetable, which tells you which window to go to to buy your ticket (there are about 30 windows). The window opens about half an hour before the bus is due to depart. You pay and receive a paper ticket and a metal token. Then you pass through a turnstile, give the token to an official and proceed to the appropriate bus niche. Luckily our bus was five minutes late, otherwise we’d have missed it because I’d left the metal tokens on our table back at the café.
When you travel in a new country, there are all kinds of rules that seem completely instinctive to the locals but take some time to learn. For example, when we stowed our luggage in the hold, the bus driver said something that sounded like the Russian for “three hundred” and it took us several moments before we realized that in Serbia you have to pay to stow luggage. Then, on the bus, we were looking for our assigned seats and the other passengers indicated through gestures that the assigned seat numbers were a pure fiction.
After four hours we arrived in the mountain town of Zlatibor, which is halfway down Serbia’s western border and about 30 kilometres to Bosnia Herzogovina. It’s pretty well known as a ski resort but, according to a local friend, in the process of being ruined by overdevelopment and mafia activity. The amount of construction evident even from the bus ride in was definitely noticeable—it reminded me of pictures of China in the early twenty-first century. In fact, the bus stopped inside a fenced construction site and we had to drag our suitcases over a field of damp gravel. Luckily, there were a couple of taxis waiting and we were whisked up a very steep hill to Titova Vila, our home for the next few weeks.
As we learned from the hosts of the podcast The Empire Never Ended, this place was named for the Yugoslavia-era building that is now a restaurant but was formerly a guest house. According to them, there was a ‘Titova Vila’ in a lot of towns. Tito built some himself, but quite often a township would build one so that he would come and visit. As it happens, Josip Broz visited this one in 1959, and there is photographic evidence.
Our room was spacious and modern with a big living space and beautiful kitchen. It even had a washing machine! As soon as I’d unpacked, construction activity started just above our head. The sound of drilling, hammering and banging continued until 11pm. John, who has to record weekly podcasts, was concerned. I suggested it might be a one-off—maybe it was just someone putting together an IKEA desk. Then, at 7.30 the next morning, we were woken by drilling. We marched to reception and asked for a different room. The new one was in an older building and the apartment was much smaller, washingmachine-less and redolent of the downstairs neighbor’s mackerel barbecues, but it was blessedly quiet.
My next job, after settling into the living quarters, was to get supplies. I hiked up the hill to Maxi, the supermarket, observing several semi-stray dogs who looked relatively healthy suggesting that they made a pretty good living out of kind-hearted apartment dwellers. There was one dog with Berner-like markings who shunned my proferred dog biscuit and regularly ignored me. Another little white one looked almost like an arctic fox except with floppy ears. When the construction crew saw him they called out ‘Byely!’ (‘Whitey’) as if they were greeting another one of the crew.
I eventually made it to the supermarket and purchased some Balkan delicacies including a kind of root beer, avjar (roast-pepper paste), watermelon and lepinja, a soft spongy kind of flatbread.
In the afternoon, we decided to have a walk around the town to see the sights. Up the hill, there was a ‘summer countryside’ feel, with holiday houses, homemade jam, folksy decorations and cute gates. You can smell the sap of conifers that haven’t yet been felled in the name of construction and people move in the slow and serene way of holiday makers.
Halfway down the hill there was a big Orthodox church that was started in 1993 but not finished until about ten years ago–possibly construction was interrupted by the Yugoslav Wars (1991-1999). I noticed that there was a tiny structure near the church that seemed to have no obvious purpose. Past the church were Serbian restaurants, a big basketball-school complex and a running track winding through a conifer grove featuring eye-catching ‘get fit’ posters.
The cultural center had an information board providing background to a historical event that looms large in the local memory—Operation Halyard, in which both Yugoslav Partisans (communist) and Chetniks (royalist) were key to protecting more than 500 downed Allied airmen and helping them be airlifted to safety. It was the largest rescue of Allied troops behind enemy lines in World War II.
At the bottom of the hill, near the artificial lake, there was more of a ‘tourist trap’ vibe. A giant Luna Park blasted corny music everywhere. On the pedestrian mall, stalls sold pancakes, honey, rakia and T-shirts featuring Nikola Jokić. Beyond that were a bunch of old-timey cafes and restaurants decorated with folksy Balkan paraphernalia. And nestled amongst these were casinos and stores selling brand-name clothing.
In amongst all this folksy glitz, we did spot one old-timey statue. As near as we can make out, it is a monument to the General Krsta Smiljanić (1868-1944), who was born in the nearby village of Ljubiš and decorated more than 30 times in his long career. One of the battles he fought in was Kaymakchalan (1916), where Serbians fought Bulgarians on the Macedonian front and more than 10,000 people died.
All in all, Zlatibor is a pretty good place. Four hours on a bus is a lot but if you find yourself in Serbia for an extended period of time for no obvious reason, I highly recommend it!
