BEING A CITIZEN OF THE WORLD

Last summer we took a big trip to the Balkans, and during our journey we were constantly reminded of the war-torn history of the former Yugoslavia. Our cameras were often turned on bombed-out buildings, and we marveled at the history, resilience, and beauty of the countries we visited that had been so recently destroying each other.

Belgrade, Serbia

Prizren, Kosovo

Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Traveling in this former war zone made the reports of the conflict we read so casually in the 1990s suddenly engage our interest and touch our hearts.

SERBIA: Parting Thoughts

To kick off this last post on Serbia, I will begin with a few of my favorite images from Novi Sad and Belgrade:

We saw only a two or three McDonald's the entire trip, and this may have been the only KFC, and we didn't actually see it, but we assume it was 250 m ahead as promised:

We passed the 35-story Genex Tower, also known as the Western City Gate, several times during our time in Belgrade. It was built in 1977 in the "Brutalist" style and has to be one of the most unique skyscrapers we have seen. That crazy rotunda between the two buildings is a revolving restaurant. We didn't know about this building when we were doing our planning, or perhaps we would have planned to eat a meal there. Now that would have been a unique experience.

SERBIA: VOJVODINA, Part 2

After our lunch we had a little time to walk around Sremski Karlovi, a small town of about 9,000  situated on the Danube. It was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because it was a Sunday afternoon and most of the residents are Serbian Orthodox.

SERBIA: Vojvodina Monasteries

Like Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia still has some issues with what part of the country belongs to whom.  Montenegro, seen in the map below in the southwest part of Serbia, declared independence in 2006, and Serbia did not seem to object to much, even though it left them land-locked. It is interesting to me that in 1992, Kosovo had done the same thing, but with disastrous results: the Kosovo War, which led to NATO bombing the Serbian armies in Kosovo.

Kosovo and Montenegro shown on this map as part of Serbia

Vojvodina is a region of Serbia in the north that is similar to what Kosovo used to be (an autonomous province of Serbia). Unlike Kosovo, where the population was and is mainly Muslim Albanians and Orthodox Serbs, Vojvodina is both multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. And unlike Kosovo and Montenegro, it seems to be content (for now) to be a province of Serbia.

Vojvodina is the northern end of Serbia, shown here in pink.

As we left Belgrade and drove north, we traded mountains for rich, flat farmland edged with a polka dot border of red poppies:

SERBIA: MARSHAL TITO

One of the biggest shifts in thought I had on this trip involved Marshal Tito, Prime Minister and President of Yugoslavia from 1944 until his death in 1980.  My memories of him are largely negative. I think we Americans are wary of anyone who is power for so long and so completely. He was re-elected each term until 1963, at which point his term was made unlimited. I suppose our members of Congress could easily be in office for 36 years, but all face regular re-election and none are given an unlimited term.

I looked up Tito in my Columbia Encyclopedia, which was published in 1978, two years before Tito's death. The entry is fairly negative, full of words and phrases like "dictator," "secret police," "purged dissident elements," and "repression." However, it does acknowledge Tito's personal magnetism, his work with Nehru of India and Nasser of Egypt, and the fact that he created "the most liberal Communist country in Europe."

SERBIA, BELGRADE CHURCHES

As previously noted, 85% of the population of Serbia belongs to the Serbian Orthodox Church, so it seems natural that the first place we visited with our Serbian guide was the Church of St. Mark in downtown Belgrade. One of the largest churches in the country, it was built in between the two World Wars and completed in 1940. Because of the impending war, there was no time to paint the traditional frescoes found in almost all Orthodox churches, and by the time the church could get around to them, a bigger, more important church was already under construction in the city and sucking up all the funds. (More on that in the second half of this post.)

INTRODUCTION TO SERBIA

Belgrade, or "Beograd" ("White city"), as we frequently saw it written in the Balkans, is the capital of Serbia, and with 1.2 million people, it is not only the largest city in Serbia, but one of the largest in southwest Europe.  Strategically located on the confluence of the Danube and Sava Rivers,

it has been in over 100 wars and has been razed dozens of times. It has been conquered and/or ruled by the Celts, Romans, Slavs, Byzantine Empire, Frankish Empire, Bulgarian Empire, Kingdom of Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Habsburgs.

FROM BOSNIA TO SERBIA, AN UNEXPECTED DETOUR

We reluctantly left Sarajevo in mid-afternoon. Based on how much longer it had taken us to travel from Zagreb to Sarajevo than we had planned, we figured we needed to add a few hours to our estimated travel time to Belgrade, Serbia.  It's a good thing we did.

Everything started off well enough.  We were enjoying the beautiful, mountainous (or would you call that hilly?) country

. . . and impressive garden plots

. . . as we sped through at about 40 mph because we had to watch out for narrow tunnels,

 . . . and friends on the road: