I was apprehensive about visiting Serbia, but I thought I should give it a shot. It ended up being worse than I imagined it would be. I’ve read a lot about the Bosnian War — all the Yugoslav Wars, really¹ — and while there’s plenty of blame to go around² there’s little doubt it was Slobodan Milošević who spearheaded the most militant and divisive nationalist politics as a way of gaining power. I don’t want to hold that history against the Serb people, but the Balkans have been susceptible to populist nationalist movements since forever³ and populist movements can’t survive without some measure of support from the population.⁴ I’ve visited plenty of places with awkwardly high levels of nationalism before — hell, I’ve visited Texas — and it’s always uncomfortable.

Then I landed in Belgrade and got ripped off by a cab driver. Worse, I expected it, I saw it coming, I did everything I could to avoid it, and it still happened.⁵ So I was in a foul mood by the time I made it to the hotel. I grabbed dinner and locked myself in. I spent basically a week in Serbia before I really went outside again.

I’m exaggerating a little, but only a little. I frequently ran to the store for soda and snacks. Between that, some burek and gužvara from the bakery, and the hotel restaurant I got by. I holed up and tried to get some work done.⁶ I’ve been keeping a hectic pace since I left Buenos Aires, and it’s easy to push yourself too hard. Taking a week off isn’t a terrible idea.

And Belgrade’s nice and all, but Serbia isn’t known for being a great tourist destination.⁷ Beyond the generalized larceny of its cab drivers, I’m finding it unwelcoming in dozens of minor ways, some more reasonable that others.⁸ It’s particularly strange because from what I’ve seen, Belgrade is almost exactly the kind of city I typically love: extremely walkable, lots of restaurants, beautiful architecture, people hanging out on the streets until late in the evening.⁹ I did wander around a bit by the tail end of my stay, getting out to the movies,¹⁰ visiting the new Cathedral of Saint Sava, and finding some nice restaurants.

I’m sure I’d have had a better time under more positive circumstances, so I don’t want to put you off too much if you were thinking of visiting for some reason. But I guess that’s kind of the problem; I’m not sure what the reason would be? This is a country where one of the major tourist draws is a tower of skulls.¹¹ There’s a lot about Nikola Tesla in Belgrade, but Tesla was born in the Austrian Empire in what’s now part of Croatia and as far as I can tell never lived in any part of what’s now Serbia.¹² If you want scenic countryside I can think of better places, if you want cheap amenities I can think of better places, if you want a cool nightlife I can think of better places.

And there’s always that unsettling geopolitical undercurrent. I don’t want to make out like the Balkans are threatening or dangerous; like most places the news from abroad is terrifying while the conditions locally seem calm, even cheerful. But it’s hard to ignore that buzzing in the back of your mind. I really liked Kyiv the last time I visited. Things fall apart quickly.

Part of the attraction of visiting Serbia was the chance to compare it to Kosovo, and I was glad to visit for a couple days in the middle of my trip. If you’re considering it, it turns out it’s easier to visit from just about anywhere else than Serbia; there are more daily flights from Zürich than there are daily buses from Belgrade.¹³ It’s event easier and faster and only 30€ more expensive to catch a direct flight from Oslo than it is to take the bus.

Kosovo is weird; it’s recognized as an independent country by about half the UN. Unfortunately, that half doesn’t include Serbia or Russia,¹⁴ so its status remains contested. This reveals itself in a myriad of ways. To start with, there’s passport control between Serbia and Kosovo, even though Serbia’s official position is they’re the same country.¹⁵ Serbia is on the dinar, Kosovo is on the euro. There’s only two buses a day between Pristina and Belgrade and no flights at all, compared to dozens from Albania or North Macedonia.¹⁶

I also got a significantly different feeling as someone from the United States in Kosovo, compared to Belgrade. Not surprising, given the history. I wandered out once over to the Bill Clinton statue on Bill Clinton Boulevard¹⁷ in downtown Pristina for the novelty of the thing. And maybe I imagined it, but people seemed a lot more friendly. I was avoiding cabs, given my experience in Belgrade, but I was eventually forced to take a bunch and despite the language barrier and my obvious cluelessness and a lack of meters in the cabs not a single one attempted to rip me off.¹⁸

Pristnia isn’t the nicest of cities — the decision to “modernize” the city by the Yugoslavian government worked about as well as those decisions usually do — and it’s still a bit industrial and strangled by roadways. But there’s a ton of development happening; I could easily see a dozen residential high-rises going up from my hotel balcony.¹⁹

I wouldn’t have wanted to stay more than a few days. All those massive highways the government put through the center of town really did a number on how nice it is to walk around. But it’s starting to attract tourism; I was in a moderately fancy hotel with one of the better breakfast’s I’ve seen while traveling as well as an indoor pool and a hot tub and a sauna and it cost a third what you’d pay for a cheap room without a window in London. I’m really intensely curious to know what the future holds for it.

I’m moving on to what will quickly be far too long in the United Kingdom, preparing to settle in for six weeks to prep and run a larp in August. I’ll be continuing much the same as what I’ve done here — basically nothing except type on a computer — at least until we get closer and I shift into panic mode.

While I was in Kosovo someone blew up the Georgia Guidestones. The Guidestones were a minor tourist attraction, a set of slabs with an inscription that was put up by person or persons unknown²⁰ in 1980. The inscriptions were written in a number of languages, and translated to a list of mostly anodyne futurist goals: unite humanity with a living new language, prize truth, avoid petty laws.

Of course, vaguely worded sentiments of peace and harmony ticked off Q-Anon and the Christian Nationalists, who believed it was part of a Satanic conspiracy. There had been increasing threats to tear it down, including from one of the candidates running for governor.²¹ And shortly after July 4^th, someone set off a bomb in the middle of the night.

So it’s gone now, the victim of radical lunatic right-wing politics. What bothers me the most about this is that I was planning on visiting them, was literally pricing rental cars when I was in Atlanta in January — it’s about a two hour drive from there — but decided it was too much crammed into a short visit. I’m going to be back in Atlanta in October. I planned on making the trip then.

And now I won’t. It’s the same feeling I have when I flip through a guidebook from ten years ago and it tells me I should visit some amazing Roman ruins in the middle of Syria. The middle of Syria was occupied by the Islamic State in 2015 during the civil war, and the Islamic State decided to destroy most of the ruins because they were blasphemous. I’ll mourn Palmyra far more than I’ll mourn the Georgia Guidestones, but it’s the same feeling.

It’s why I made the trek to Kosovo. Kosovo’s unstable, in a geopolitical sense. I find it hard to imagine it’ll remain the way it is, half-recognized and half-not. The most likely eventuality is probably full membership in the UN. But the idea of unifying with Albania has been floated, along with the continued threat of forced reunification with Serbia. Something will eventually give. I wanted to visit before it did.

If there’s a leitmotif to living during what seems to be apocalyptic times, it’s that you always feel like you’re running out of time. It’s important to resist that feeling; people do desperate things when they’re under the gun. Part of the problem with politics the world over is that it always feels like we’re at a crisis point, that the only time to act is now, that the only option left is the most extreme.

I struggle with that. I have a list of thousands of places to see, still. I’m in no danger of running out. I can lament the destruction of the world’s cultural heritage for its senselessness and its theft of the past from the future without regretting I didn’t get to see it personally before it was gone. But as petty as it may be, I regret it just the same.

Next: London (LHR) to Zagreb (ZAG)
Prev: Kraków (KRK) to Belgrade (BEG)

Footnotes

¹ I’ve been doing a lot of reading about civil wars and ethnic cleansing in general, with an emphasis on more recent conflicts. It feels like it might become relevant.

² For every Slobodan Milošević there’s a Franjo Tuđman, for every Radovan Karadžić a Slobodan Praljak.

³ Mixed ethnic groups living in close proximity with long-standing historical grievances and a succession of ruling powers (e.g., Tito, the Ottomans) which achieved stability by setting the different groups against one another. What could go wrong?

⁴ Look at the difficulty trying to figure out what kind of support Putin has for the war in Ukraine from Russian citizens.

⁵ Officially, you’re supposed to buy a voucher at the cab stand in the airport, because Belgrade knows all the cabbies rip off the tourists. It was closed. I then tried to take the bus but couldn’t get my bank card to work for cash, then tried two different online taxi apps but both failed, then tried to book a car service but was informed I needed to book at least two hours in advance. So I went to the cab stand and told them I needed to stop at an ATM on the way.

The official fixed rate for a cab ride downtown is 1,800 dinars, or about 15€. The cabbie I got tried to charge me 10,000 dinars. I refused to pay, got out of the cab, and tried to get change for the 5,000 dinar note I got from the ATM only to find the small kiosks nearby absolutely refused to break that much money. I then set off to my hotel on foot — hotels will typically have your back in disputes with cabbies — with the taxi driver becoming increasingly abusive and starting to shove me around. I eventually agreed to pay 4,000 dinars to get rid of the asshole, and after I pulled out the 5,000 dinar note the cabbie just grabbed it out of my hand and left while hurling insults.

⁶ I have two larps running in the next four months with the first of them breathing down my neck so I’m rapidly entering panic sweat season.

⁷ Compare to Croatia or Montenegro. All the major tourism, unsurprisingly, is along the coast. Serbia’s landlocked.

⁸ My bank card doesn’t work in most of the ATMs, which feels like a perfectly reasonable complaint. The fact that the cuisine is incredibly meat-heavy and most of the restaurants don’t have English translations of the menu posted outside is less so. And I’ll freely admit that it’s petty to be bothered by the fact that it’s semi-difficult to track down diet soda here, but I am.

⁹ Most of the Balkans seems to be divided between the rural places where everything closes at 6pm and the urban places where everything’s open until the middle of the night. The first night I got in late, around 8pm on a weeknight, and asked at the front desk how late the restaurants were open, worried I’d need to rush out immediately. The desk attendant hemmed and hawed and finally offered that most of the places were probably only open until midnight, but if I was worried the restaurant next door usually closed around 1am.

I ate around 10pm. Most of the restaurants were still full, if not packed.

¹⁰ I saw Thor: Love and Thunder. Thor’s love interest was Džejn Foster.

¹¹ Next time I’m in the area, I’ll see it.

¹² Tesla is ethnically a Serb, but then we’re back into questions of nationalism. Ethnic pride — as opposed to cultural pride — is just never going to sit well with me.

¹³ There are no flights between Serbia and Kosovo at all.

¹⁴ Russia’s veto is what keeps it from being formally acknowledged.

¹⁵ You can have huge problems if you enter Kosovo from somewhere else and then enter Serbia, since you won’t have an entry stamp for Serbia when you try to leave.

¹⁶ This is a problem if you’re trying to return to Belgade having missed the 11:00 bus, as I did. The next one left at 23:15.

I’m still not entirely sure how I missed it — the gates weren’t posted anywhere, the schedules weren’t listed, and they weren’t announcing departures, so it’s possible it arrived late and left before I noticed it — but I was there 15 minutes early and circled the place multiple times and never saw it.

¹⁷ There is reportedly also a George W. Bush Boulevard as well, although no statue. I felt less inclined to seek it out.

¹⁸ It would have been easy to, as well. The cab from the hotel to the bus station took about seven minutes. The charge was 3€. I wouldn’t have blinked if they said 5€, or even 7€.

¹⁹ They looked pretty nice too, modern designs incorporating brickwork and landscaping rather than cheap, chunky concrete blocks. I can’t say how well constructed they are or what the finish would be. My experience in New York suggests a lot of builders have learned to splurge on lobbies and rooftop sun decks while still being unable to install a watertight plumbing fixture.

There’s also the question about where the funding is coming from. Apparently a lot comes from Albania — Kosovo is overwhelmingly ethnically Albanian and religiously Muslim, which is why Milošević was able to rile up the Serb minority.

²⁰ Although we have a pretty good idea

²¹ Ironically enough, as far as we can tell the person who built it in the first place was themselves a Christian nationalist who was expecting nuclear war and hoped to rebuild civilization — white civilization — along their lines. That explains the weird eugenicist warning on the Guidestones to “guide reproduction wisely.” But all the rules are so vaguely written they could mean just about anything.