Day one in Belgrade

On Thursday 17th June I went on a trip to Belgrade in Serbia and this is the first blog post about my short break. After the flight, which included a stop in Zurich, my friend and I caught a taxi to our apartment with a very friendly taxi driver who liked to talk about how great Serbian women are and how it used to be dangerous to support football, think of violent football-mad skinheads but with Kalashnikov’s. After having a quick tour of the city, which was a mixture of old communist concrete tower blocks and modern consumer advertising.
We arrived at our apartment and as we were not staying in a hotel, we had to travel to the local police station to have our passports registered. The station also seemed very old with cracks in the concrete walls and police officers walking around smoking, it was very far from being in a British police station in London. But then, I doubt that it has been refurbished since the collapse of the iron curtain. After we had our passports stamped and received a document which would stop us being thrown into a Belgrade prison when we tried to leave the country, we went back to our apartment to unpack. This did not take long as we were keen to go out and explore the city.

We walked over to the Kalemegdan Fortress (Калемегдан) which is in a park in an area of the city called Stari Grad and it looks out over the Danube. Kalemegdan derives from two Turkish words, kale (fortress) and meydan (battleground) (literally, "battlefield fortress"). Kalemegdan is said to be the oldest section of the urban area of Belgrade and for centuries the population of the city lived only within the walls of the fortress.

The first mention of this city was by the Celtic tribe of Scordisci in the 3rd Century BC, who defeated the Thracian and Dacian tribes who lived in and around the fort. Later on the city was conquered by the Romans and it became part of ‘the military frontier’ on the border of the Roman Empire and the ‘unknown barbaric lands’. The Romans called this fort “Singidunum” and it was defended by the Roman legion IV Flaviae, but not very well during the period between 378 and 441 BC when the fort was being repeatedly destroyed by the Huns and the Goths. There is a legend that the grave of Attila the Hun is under the Fortress. In 476 AD the fortress-city again became a borderline between the Western Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire and the Slav-Avar Kingdom in the North.

The fortress remained a Byzantine stronghold until the 12th century when it fell in the hands of a newly emerging Serbian state. It became a border city of the Serbian Kingdom, later Empire, with Hungary. In the 11th Century, the Hungarian king Béla I gave the fortress to Serbia as a wedding gift because his son married Serbian princess Jelen (most people just give cutlery or champagne!) but it remained effectively part of Hungary.

In 1521, the fortress, like most parts of the Serbian state, was conquered by the Turks and remained under the rule of the Ottoman Empire (with short periods of the Austrian and Serbian occupation). It remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1867 when the Turks withdrew from Belgrade and Serbian. During the period of short Austrian rule (1718–1738) the fortress was largely rebuilt and modernized. The fortress suffered further damages during the First and the Second world wars. So after almost two millennia of continuous sieges, battles and conquests the fortress is today known as the Kalemegdan fortress.

After we walked around and explored the fortress, we went for a walk along the Danube, which I really wanted to see because it flows from Germany to the Black Sea and it is believed that Homo sapiens sapiens used this river to navigate their way across Europe on their long migration from Africa.

Then we walked to ‘Kneza Mihaila’ which is a busy pedestrian area, full of shops and galleries. The commercial and cultural center of the city is along Kneza Mihaila and the pedestrian street is dedicated to Prince Michael, the first ruler of a fully independent Serbia. I brought the Serbian flag from here because I collect the national flags from every country I visit and then we went to have something to eat and try out the local beer. I had a nice beer called Jelen and a pizza with eggs and bacon called a ‘Serbian’.

After the relaxing meal, we walked over to ‘Republic Square’, which I believed would look like Tiananmen Square but when I arrived it looked more like Trafalgar Square. Many people consider Square of the Republic to be the center of the city, it has a large bronze statue of Prince Michael on a horse, which was placed there in 1882 and the square has seen many protest’s from the first anti-Slobodan Milošević demonstrations on March 9, 1991 to the student protest during winter 1996-97 and the pro-democracy rallies in September and October 2000. For this reason, the opposition leader Vuk Drašković of the SPO party insisted on changing the name of the square to Trg Slobode (Freedom Square) but this was never officially done...shame.