Day 7: Exploring Belgrade

Today was my rest day and, much to my surprise, I did in fact manage to sleep through to 8am. Maybe three brutal days on a bike is good for one's sleep rhythms.

After a lot of coffee and not a lot else from the rather disappointing Hotel Opera Garni breakfast buffet, I was off out to do some Jack Reacher style shopping for some new pants and socks. Then it was exploring for me!

Although Belgrade has some impressive architecture, a lot of it is these apartment blocks which were loved by communist town planners.

Here you go comrade. Enjoy.

All the busy road junctions have those underpass shopping “malls” which are so redolent of the USSR and its satellite states. Budapest has them, Moscow has them. The only businesses which remain in them now are those marginal businesses that couldn’t survive anywhere else. This place selling dress material, sheepskins and an array of cheap plastic plant pots was very typical of the retail genre.

Sad dying stores

Most of the underground units were closed and covered in nationalist graffiti which I would be seeing quite a lot more of during the day. It goes without saying that this sort of place isn’t going to have cheap pants and socks. Or if they do, they’re going to be made out of some horrendous chemicals therefore it was off to the nearest modern shopping mall for me.

Note the cyrillic transliteration of Starbucks. We’ll come back to that.

After a satisfyingly western capitalist coffee, I trailed round the huge and ugly shopping mall looking for cheap pants and socks. I was ultimately successful but in the Jack Reacher books, he never has to buy a 2 pack of pants and a 3 pack of socks because nobody sells underpants and socks in singles any more.

Since I had more pants and socks that I needed, I changed my pants in the toilet, binned my current pants and socks and wore a new pair of pants and new socks just for my Belgrade exploring. Luxury beyond the dreams of man and, to heap on even more sybaritic joy, I will have a brand new pair of both for tomorrow. You might be asking “why doesn’t the idiot just take two pairs of pants and socks in his bike bag?”. That’s because it’s all about marginal weight losses. As soon as you start adding extra clothing, before you know where you are, you’re lugging around 5kg extra of “stuff” and you need those dorky panniers. Every day my load gets a little lighter as I use some toothpaste, take a statin, and use some SudoCrem but let’s not go into the whole SudoCrem thing right now.

First on my list of strange things to do was the Museum of Illusion which I thought would be fabulous. From a very young age, I have loved optical illusions and I did enjoy quite a lot of the museum but a surprisingly large number of the illusions required you to have a friend to take a photograph of you in a strangely shaped room or reflected upside down or something. Being a nobby-no-mates solo cyclist, I don’t have any friends.

This took me a while to work out.

There were lots of displays of those optical illusions that you’ve seen so many times. Yes, I know the lines are the same length. Quite surprisingly, the museum is impeccably signed with long descriptions of how the illusion works complete with academic references. The illusion below is seemingly quite famous in academic circles.

The top surfaces of both boxes are the same size. The little magnetic piece fits perfectly on both.

After a while, your visual cortex shuts down and it gets a bit overwhelming. There were the obligatory holograms which every museum of this type has to have and I muttered “this is not an ‘illusion’ it’s just physics guys” but nobody heard me because the Museum of Illusion didn’t seem to be doing great business. I was the only visitor.

Creepy kids in a hologram. What’s with that?

Enough of the frivolity, it was time to see some real history.

Almost straight out of the museum I saw this on the side of Republic Square (the Trafalgar Square of Belgrade).

No, that isn’t true. It really isn’t.

I had been reading a lot about the conflicts in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It kicked off with the Bosnian conflict, taking in the conflict with Croatia around Vukovar and ending in Kosovo in 1999. It’s incredibly difficult to work out what happened as the former Yugoslavia imploded. Tito had ruthlessly tied together this country and had somehow managed to hold the ethnic tensions in check. Without wishing to summarise an exceptionally complicated and difficult period, it seems pretty clear that the Serbs were mostly the bad guys. It’s true that almost nobody was charged with genocide but literally millions of people were displaced as refugees as the Serbs set about cleansing ethnic Bosnians, Croats, Albanians from the land that they believed to be theirs.

As I was reading the history of this region, I realised that I didn’t really understand what “ethnicity” means. It’s clearly not any kind of physical characteristics. Everybody in Serbia looks exactly the same as people in Croatia and Hungary and also very white naturally. I suppose I must be “ethnically Scottish” but I don’t feel that I should shell Berwick upon Tweed for months as a result.

It is hard to comprehend that only 25 years ago troops were fighting and killing people in the name of some sort of “ethnic purity” in the middle of Europe.

There’s a considerable amount of old history in Belgrade. It was one of the cities alternately overrun by the Ottomans and then by the Hapsburgs. Again and again. I thought I would take in some historical carnage first.

The beautiful Kalemegdan park surrounds the hill on which the ancient Belgrade fortress overlooks the Danube. I saw that staple of parks the world over. Old blokes playing chess in the sun.

Knight to rook four.

The fortress itself is free to enter and I wandered around happily looking at the various fortifications and a very strange display of photographs of swimming in the Danube through the ages. Not really sure what this was about but the photos were interesting. Seemingly swimming in the Danube has been a thing for a long time.

Thank god for the strategically positioned leaves.

To be fair to the Belgrade Fortress, the views from the balustrades are stunning. Here’s a panoramic view from the modern suburb of Zemin all the way to the Danube flowing south where I will be heading tomorrow.

I’m in two minds about the value of panoramic shots.

Right outside the main walls is the Serbian military museum. This is a crazy random collection of ancient old cannons, and tanks jammed right up next to modern hardware. This is a battery of SAM missile launchers which saw service defending Belgrade when NATO bombed it in reprisals for the Kosovo atrocities.

These are supposed to have brought down a F117 stealth fighter.

On a marginally lighter note, I saw the smallest tank in the world. It is hard to convey just how tiny it is. It is definitely somewhat smaller than my Volkswagen eUp. Probably less environmentally friendly and a bit of a pain to use to go to Waitrose for the shopping. Given that the Serbians are all pretty tall — see the Lego™ haired vaccine-sceptic Novak Djokovic as exhibit one — the chance that any solder could fit in this was small. Maybe it’s a kiddie tank? Maybe it’s pedal powered? Who knows?

A teeny tiny tank.

It was time to grasp the nettle of the NATO bombing of Serbia and the bombing of Belgrade in particular. Even now, 25 years later, opinion is very divided about whether NATO should have done this, whether it was “legal” or a commensurate use of force. My own view isn’t really very important here but what was happening in Kosovo was a humanitarian crisis and there was some debate as to whether or not it should be considered genocide. The military campaign brought the fighting to a close pretty quickly and that is a good thing.

One of the very contentious issues was the American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Three people died. There are a lot of conspiracy theories flying around. This was the first use of a B2 Spirit stealth bomber — the coolest looking plane ever — which flew all the way from the US to carry out the mission. It had the latest GPS guided weapons systems so why did it hit the Chinese embassy? One theory is that the Chinese had negotiated to buy the wreckage of the F117 which had been shot down to gain access to its stealth technology and the Americans bombed the embassy as a punishment but the most likely reason is a cock up. The cock up theory of history is always pretty persuasive.

The underlying causes of the Kosovo, Bosnian and Croatian conflicts are many and varied. I remember Serbian friends of ours in the early 1990s telling us about a terrible atrocity that the Bosnians had committed during which they had filled an Orthodox Church with children and then set fire to it. According to them, that justified strong action against the Bosnians — or maybe the Croatians or maybe the Albanians. It was only after some time that I managed to work out that this had happened sometime in the 16th century.

That being said, probably the strangest cause de la guerre in the whole history of human conflict is the Ðorðe Martinović Incident. At one point the world teetered on the brink of a global conflict due to somebody making up a lie about what happened when he was doing unspeakable things with a milk bottle.

NATO bombed the Yugoslav Army Headquarters and the Serbians have left the ruined building as a monument to their lost war.

Modern munitions do damage.

The side of the building was completely covered by an absolutely gigantic poster. The cyrillic said “We love Serbia”. Which is all very well but I’m not really sure that your army marching about with their faces covered is a good look. The snood really says “paramilitary nutters”

Let’s look like the baddies.

It’s time to do the cyrillic thing now. As soon as you cross the border into Serbia, you see cyrillic in lots of places. Almost exclusively on road signs, bus timetables, notices of opening times etc. Things which are government controlled. The Serbian government is promoting the cyrillic script for Serbian because it’s “our national script”. “We want our cyrillic back” or something.

Now here’s the interesting thing. Serbian is just Croatian or Bosnian. It’s all the same language — Serbia-Croat. But almost uniquely amongst languages it can be written either in a latin script or a cyrillic script. There’s a perfect correspondence between the two — it’s a digraphic language.

So, for example, the “D” in latin is the “Д” in cyrillic. The “Ш” in cyrillic is “Š” (the “sha”). The spelling of the words is exactly the same, it’s just a transliteration. The “Д in the “incident” above is the “Ђ” which is the “dje” sound. So the language is the same. It’s as if we in English replaced letters with different shaped symbols.

If this all sounds pretty pointless, you would be right. Despite all official communication to and from the government having to be in cyrillic, unsurprisingly, the invisible hand of capitalism works its magic. If you’re making drinks or clothes or adverts why do a cyrillic version for 6m people when you can do a latin version and reach a market of nearly 30 million Serbo-Croat speakers. It’s exactly the reason why we have bottle caps attached to our bottles in the UK. Governments find it hard to force regulatory alignment, but Adam Smith finds it easy.

Also, in Serbia, cyrillic is seen as…”rural”, “traditional”, “old”. Latin is seen as “modern”, “young”. Guess which is going to win in the end?

Anyway, enough linguistics and orthography. As you might tell, I’m fascinated by all this stuff and it was a real joy to be in a country which is the only country in the world which is fully “digraphic”. There you go, come for the bike stories, stay for the linguistics.

Next on the list was the Nikolai Tesla museum. Apart from the Lego™ Haired Vaccine Skeptic, Tesla is probably the most famous Serbian. They’ve got his ashes in some sort of golden sphere and so that sounded like a great visit.

Would you like to wait 45 minutes in 35C sun to see some ashes. Nope.

There are lots of other sights in Belgrade but I was starting to flag a bit.

The parliament building. I think.

After my experiments with fried cheese which would be more accurately described as battered polystyrene and the greasy lamb in a pot last night I really didn’t fancy another experimental outing for lunch. So I stopped at McDonalds and wolfed down some of that lovely standardised food that the West is so good at producing.

Don’t judge me. You hadn’t had fried cheese last night.

I went back to the hotel, did some admin, had a much needed snooze. When I woke I discovered that my bike bag is now in Romania. This is one less thing to worry about. I had asked the Hotel Marmorosch in Bucharest to try to sort out something with DHL in Romania and they had definitely worked some magic. Kudos to them.

Another little insert here. Anybody who says that Generative AI is going to revolutionise anything is talking out of their arse. In particular, they have probably never used an AI in anger. They’ve probably got “people” do do that for them. I tried for about 2 hours in Budapest to navigate the “highly advanced DHL AI powered help system”. It was absolutely useless as all Chatbot systems are and just redirected me to web pages which…surprise!…redirected me back to the chat box. This is a bubble and it’s going to pop. Badly.

The main thing to worry about was now not whether or not I would be able to get my bike back from Bucharest on a plane. It will be getting to bloody Romania on a bike.

AirTags are a "sufficiently advanced technology to be indistinguishable from magic" © Arthur C Clarke.

Post snooze I went to the Serbian National Museum which was pretty mixed. The ethnographic and archeology stuff on the ground floor is very impressive and well done. It does put Serbia and Serbians at the very heart of pretty much ever advance in history from fire, through metalurgy to the wheel which gets a little tiring at times but the exhibits are good.

Beauty in the past was a very different thing.

The art on the upper floors is very “meh”. The same can be said of the Zepler Museum which is sort of a Tate Modern to the National Museum’s National Gallery. That analogy would be better if both of the Belgrade galleries had anything that you might think of as…not shit.

This guy looks exactly like Nandor the Relentless in What We Do In The Shadows.

Here’s a triptych which for some reason was done in 2009 about Margaret Thatcher.

Searing social commentary about the UK from some Serbian bloke.

The next week is going to be challenging especially on the nutrition front. After my fried battered polystyrene experience I thought it best to load up on some normal food. I found a rather nice place called the Saša Bar which, surprisingly, wasn’t a bar but was an upscale joint which had proper cutlery, table cloths, napkins and waiters that didn’t spit in your food — I assume.

Minestrone soup? Not minestrone as we know it Jim!

Main course had to be steak and chips and here’s what I got.

The phrase “low residue nutrition” is not applicable here. Honest.

That was it. Done with Belgrade. Did I enjoy it? I enjoyed not cycling a bike and, in many places, Belgrade feels like a normal European city in the summer. Ice creams, street vendors selling tat, women shopping in lovely summery dresses, kids running around having fun. However, there’s an edge to it. Most people in Serbia who are now over the age of 40 were cheering on Milošević in the 1990s as he ordered some of the most vicious campaigns since the Second World War. There’s still a current of this that runs through Serbian society. Unlike, say, the Germans who have stood up and said “We were the bad guys and now we’re going to be the good guys. Sorry.”, it doesn’t feel like Serbia has come to terms with its past. There’s also a lesson for poisonous grifters like Farage. When you whip up this ethnic and racial stuff it can end very badly indeed. Before you think that that couldn’t happen in the UK, remember the Nazi party got 2.8% of the vote in 1928. By 1933 they were in power.

Enough of the politics. It’s time to get back to detailed descriptions of scary bike riding and my undercarriage. I warn my dear readers that I have been reading a lot about the history of Romania and in future blogs there’s going to be quite a lot of that sad and sorry story.

The next seven days are going to be on a bike every day until I dip my front wheel in the Black Sea. I’ve done some rerouting to keep myself off the busier roads — I’ve had a few emails and texts suggesting it would be better not to die. To be honest, I’ve had enough of whimpering in the gutter. Most of the days will be less than 150km which makes it easier but the infrastructure along the way is going to be much more basic.

Kind of looking forward to it.

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