By FRANK BAJAK

The oldest settled terrain in Serbia’s capital, the Belgrade Fortress, overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers from atop a 125-meter ridge. Indeed, the city is named for it (“grad” is old Slav for fortified settlement, “beo” means white). The fortifications have endured many breaches.

They’ve been variously overrun and toppled by Goths, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romans, Byzantines, Turks, Habsburg Austrians and Nazis. More recently, NATO warplanes struck greater Belgrade — not for conquest but punishment.

We visited on a walking tour on a hot, late September day following five days in Bosnia.  In Belgrade for less than 72 hours, we would forgo the on-site military museum renowned for its collection of killing machines, ancient to modern.

The omissions and distortions of our tour guide came as little surprise. He is a pleasant-enough fellow in a country Freedom House judges only partly free. Serbia is run by a pro-Kremlin populist swimming in cut-rate Russian oil and fortified by virulent nationalists. Independent journalism is under siege. Violence-prone figures menace on state media. The population is heavily armed. Corruption is serious.

I kept mostly quiet during the group tour but felt compelled to interject when our guide failed to mention the central fact in explaining why Serbia’s bid for EU membership is not going well. It’s not mostly a question of economic readiness, as he implied. It’s more about Serbia’s refusal to let go ethnic Albanian-dominated Kosovo.

President Aleksandar Vucić refuses to recognize an independent Kosovo, where more than 10,000 people were killed and 1 million forced from their homes in a 1998-99 conflict initiated by militant separatists. He and his supporters consider Kosovo a Serb province, and it’s still a powder keg. The U.S. bombing forced then-President Slobodan Milosević to withdraw. Americans are not popular. In a February opinion survey by the International Republican Institute, just 22% of Serbs had a favorable opinion of the United States compared to 88% for Russia.

We felt no hostility. People were friendly and accommodating, our guide included. Oddly, it was a young Londoner in our group who confronted me, suggesting the U.S. role in the 1996 Dayton Peace Accords that ended the Bosnia war was inappropriate meddling. I’m often critical of U.S. foreign policy but consider Dayton admirable. Was it right for the U.S. and its NATO allies (including Britain) to bomb Serbia for 78 days?, the Londoner might have asked. I cringed at some of the targets hit, such as the Chinese Embassy.  

For nearly five centuries until the late 1800s, lands inhabited by Serbs were dominated by Ottoman Turks, who were mostly interested in trade but could be nasty overlords. The Turks built dozens of mosques in Belgrade, including inside Kalamegdan (as the citadel was known). Uprisings by Serbs, mostly farmers, gained with the years.

Our guide showed us Belgrade’s lone remaining mosque but did not mention that a major mosque was torn down in 1878 where the Parliament building now stands. Nor did he mention that the small Muslim minority has been agitating for a new mosque. Authorities tore down a makeshift one in 2017. (It lacked a permit).

To Serb nationalists, religion is inextricable from ethnic identity. They resent as traitors fellow Slavs who converted to Islam under Turkish rule. That bigotry undergirds their ethnic cleansing during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia. Epic poems that inspired the bloodletting celebrate leaving no “Turk” alive, no “Turkish” home standing. Serb insurgents who seized Ottoman-run Belgrade in 1806 slit the throats not just of Turkish men but women and children. 

“Ideas of national liberation became inextricably intertwined with the act of killing your neighbor,” journalist Tim Judah wrote in a 1997 book. Atrocities were terror tools for both sides. The occupying Turks — to enforce control — would lop off the heads of rebellious Serbs and display them on stakes. Some rebels were even impaled alive.

Our walking tour guide spared us the gore. But we did stop at a small sidewalk statue commemorating the Serb boy slain in 1862 by Turkish soldiers in a quarrel. The city was then in an awkward dual governance and Serb police intervened. There was a riot, then a Turk artillery bombardment from the citadel that killed dozens. The Ottomans were in decline, and France, England, Russia and Austria decided on a solution: Serbia would become an independent country.  The Turks left five years later.

Unfortunately for the Serbs, self-rule would be short-lived. The Austro-Hungarians took over and built some impressive public works. But Serb nationalists chafed and one, Gavrilo Princip, shot dead Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. On the killing’s 101th anniversary Serb leaders unveiled a Princip statue in central Belgrade. To them, he was a freedom fighter. To others, he was a terrorist. That the killing set off World War I was secondary. The Bosnian Serbs who donated the statue had a year earlier unveiled a similar work in their self-styled East Sarajevo republic.

Political assassination also stains the present. In 2003, a sniper’s bullet killed Serbia’s first democratically elected prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, just outside his downtown office. More than a dozen ultra-nationalists and criminals were convicted and sentenced. The gangster/politician nexus dogs today’s Serbia. Fear engenders self-censorship. Free speech is on shaky ground. 

One 2023 death threat reported by Human Rights Watch singled out a journalist at the independent news site KRIK who had reported on a dramatic drop in the cost of a contract killing.

Corruption and negligence wreak rot. The opposition blame it for the deaths of 15 people in the late October entrance collapse at the renovated rail station of Novi Sad on the Budapest-Belgrade line. The international rail artery is being upgraded with 85% Chinese financing. We’d need to fly to Budapest as a result. 

Then there is the Trumpian twist in an after-story of the 1999 U.S.-led bombings. A Defense Ministry building in central Belgrade badly damaged in the raids and never repaired is on land the Vucić government agreed earlier this year to lease at no cost to the U.S. president-elect’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. In exchange, Kushner would build a luxury hotel, apartments and a museum. Kushner reportedly got the inside track thanks to Richard Grenell, who was ambassador to Germany under Trump and later U.S. special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo.

Not on view when we visited Belgrade was the U.S. stealth fighter the Serbs shot down during the conflict. It’s at the aviation museum (at Belgrade’s airport), which was closed.

We didn’t have great luck with museums. We tried the Tesla museum (Where we were told to wait for an hour in line outdoors under a punishing sun to buy tickets for a guided tour — the only way to see it). Oh well.

The House of Flowers, where the late Marshal Josip Brod Tito’s mausoleum houses a compact museum, was a better choice. It is abutted by an annex devoted to re-evaluating the “disputed history” of Yugoslavia. Tito kept it together by suppressing ethnic resentments, spurning the Soviets and insisting on non-alignment.  

Vucić cares little for that legacy. Indeed, the “Blue Train” used by Tito to crisscross the continent has been slowly retired. Visitors until recently could gush over its walnut, mahogany and cherry Art Deco interior. The cult of personality around Tito is all but gone. For a decade after his 1980 death sirens sounded every May 4 at 3:05 p.m., anniversary of his fatal cardiac arrest, and people observed a minute of silence. 

The National Museum is worth a visit to peer into the Serbian soul. Uroš Predić’s masterworks especially. I also learned that the largest number of Serb saints come from the Nemanjić royal family (1166-1371). The Turks famously burned the body of one, St. Sava, in 1595 upon hauling it to Belgrade from a monastery (there’s a painting). 

We walked along the Danube across from Great War Island – floating restaurants line the bank — to Zemun. It had a bustling Saturday market and fish joints. On a hill with a view of Belgrade is a 19th-century Orthodox church, the Hariševa Chapel, dedicated to the “military saint” Demetrius (Move over, Mother Teresa). It was locked, unfortunately. The interior art by Pavlé Simić is apparently spectacular.

On our Uber ride back from Zemun we got a better look at the crumbling Hotel Jugoslavia. The city’s classiest hotel in its heyday, visitors included Queen Elizabeth and U.S presidents Nixon and Carter. It was partly damaged in the NATO bombing, never fully repaired. As AP’s Dušan Stojanovic reported after our visit, the hotel is set to be demolished and replaced with a pair of high rises to include a luxury hotel and apartments.

The notion of more skyscrapers, extending a high-rise building boom, is widely bemoaned. Who can afford such living? Russian oligarchs? The city’s Sava River waterfront is mockingly deemed Belgrade’s Dubai. Locals also grumble that the central rail station was moved far from the city center to accommodate the facelift.

Visually, Belgrade is quite handsome if the waterfront is overlooked. In 1876, a reporter for the Illustrated London News described its architecture as “equal portions Cairo and Paris.” Much of the city center was destroyed in 1941 when Germany bombed Belgrade into submission. Three years later, the Allies also bombed, in support of Tito’s advancing communist partisans.

Once again, most of the victims were civilians.

Suggested reading:

“My Parents: An Introduction” by Aleksandar Hemon. The Bosnian-American writer was born in Sarajevo to a Bosnian Serb mother and a father of Ukranian descent. He fled in 1995. Hemon is best known for his 2008 novel “The Lazarus Project.” This book is an affectionate, clear-eyed nonfiction portrait of parents and family life in Tito’s Yugoslavia before it all came crashing down. The uprooted parents relocate to Canada. Hemon celebrates the community, including his dad’s choral group, that nourishes them.   

“The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia” by Tim Judah. A 1997 book by a journalist who lived in Belgrade during the breakup of Yugoslavia. It brims with historical context. A quote Judah cites from the British historian Edward Crankshaw reflects the book’s thrust: “Centuries of existence under oppression may bring out the best in a people, but it may also magnify the worst.”