Team Basil were up and off before 8am. Almost unheard of. We had a date with a Free Walking Tour in Belgrade at 11am, or so we thought, and the owner of our campsite had said, on a bad day, it could take 2 hours to get to the centre of Belgrade.
We needn’t have feared. Probably because it is a Saturday we were parked up on the West Bank of the River Sava (which joins the Danube in Belgrade) by shortly after 9am. A relaxing cup of tea was called for and then we set off for Republic Square for our rendezvous. The walk was across a large bridge over the River Sava with a view of Belgrade’s citadel and old town and then through increasingly pedestrianised streets.
When we arrived at the designated spot there was a group already assembled and we were told the walk would start at 10.30am rather than the advertised 11am for reasons we never had explained.
Our walk was round the more modern part of the city, which I suspect is a less interesting than the old town. The guided tour of the old town was at 4pm and didn’t fit well with our itinerary.
The guide, who I would guess was in her late 20s, spoke good English but to be honest the parts of the city she had to show us, with the exception of an the interesting art nouveau Moscow Hotel and The St. Marka Orthodox Church were, in my opinion, not very interesting. Our time inside St. Marka was amusing as a large plain lady who would make a good walk on as a Soviet heavy, wandered around our group shouting “shorts” disapprovingly. My shorts were long enough for me not to be ejected, but one girl was told to leave in no uncertain terms.
More interesting than the buildings was our guide’s potted history of the Serbias featuring oppression from everyone from the Ottomans to NATO, without once making any reference to any possible aggression from Serbs.
We were shown the remains of the media building bombed by NATO and a memorial to children killed by NATO in the bombings, but there was no mention of why NATO might have bombed Serbia. The only reference she made to the break up of Yugoslavia was a vague “there were some civil wars”. When she described the NATO bombings she at one stage said “they targeted Hospitals and Schools”! Well I’m pretty sure nobody in NATO deliberately targeted such establishments.
I don’t blame her for mentioning the bombings. If I had lived in a city which had been bombed I would want people to know about it, but there should be be some mention of the context, especially since the vast majority of our group of nearly 30 were born before or only shortly after these incidents. At times it felt more like a tour of Serbian propaganda than a walking tour of Belgrade!
At the end, just to push her a little on the subject, I asked her what the youngsters in Serbia’s population’s view was of the International War Crime Tribunal in the Hague and the many Serbian’s convicted of war crimes. She told me that most of the population, including young people, felt the trials were biased against Serbia. It was an answer that made me sad. If the younger people in the population still believe that the world (Russia excepted apparently) had it in for them, it will be a long time before Serbia takes its place in a modern Europe.
On the basis of today I would not recommend Belgrade as a destination for a weekend break. Not because of our young tour guide, but because the area we saw was just not very interesting by comparison with other capital cities we have visited, Sofia being one that springs to mind since we visited only a week ago. I must emphasise that we did not see anything of the old city and that may be fascinating, but I can’t comment.
On the other hand we have enjoyed the little we have seen of Serbia. Beautiful countryside and we have met some lovely people. It is noticeable that it is not much of a destination for tourists yet. We have seen virtually no motorhomes, apart from the six or seven we have shared campsites with and the number of people speaking English, or I suspect any second language, is much lower than any other European country we have visited, so communication can be difficult.
A chat with our campsite owner, when we got back, re-assured me that not all Serbs were quite so blind to the possible culpability of their own forces during the break up of Yugoslavia, but then he qualified that by saying it may be because he has lived so much of his life outside Serbia!
Tomorrow we hope to reach the Plitvicka Lakes in Croatia. It will be a very long day’s driving and so there may very well be no post tomorrow, not least because we will have spent the whole day on a motorway!
