Europe

Belgrade

Posted by Jim St. George on September 7, 2017

Posted in: Europe, Serbia. Leave a Comment

Enjoying lunch at one of Belgrade’s many lovely sidewalk restaurants. The food is great and an unbelievable bargain at prices that are almost embarrassingly low.

A funny thing about our arrival in Belgrade: for the first time in many months we really didn’t know where we were going next.

Well back in 2016, you see, we were making plans for 2017 that included lots of time with friends along with visits to places in peak tourist season; think Japan during Cherry Blossom season or the Amalfi Coast in the middle of the summer. So we started booking places long in advance and soon had booked everything up to Dubrovnik. Then we added our plans through Bosnia with Marc & David and booked a flight to Belgrade. After that, though, we were uncommitted.

Thus our first item of business in Belgrade was to figure out the answer to the question “What’s next?” And the answer is that we’re going to do something very unlike Mark & Jim; we’re going to rent a car for a month and drive around the rest of the Balkans. We would normally take buses but the big problem is that we’re likely to be making a lot of relatively short stops and we would just be spending too much time on buses to make it work right. So – for the first time in our nearly 30 years together – we’re going to take a long road trip. We’ll see how that works for us.

Mark up at the Kalemegdan Fortress at the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers, parts of which date back to Emperor Justinian in the 6th century

Now, back to Belgrade, the White City. Today the capital and largest city in Serbia, its history dates back to at least the 6th millennium BC. It was conquered by Rome during the reign of Augustus and subsequently changed hands repeatedly between the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarian Empire, and the Hungarian Kingdom before it became the capital of an independent and powerful Kingdom of Serbia. That didn’t last, though, and it was captured by the Ottomans in 1521 after which it periodically changed hands between the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Finally in 1918 with the demise of both the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian Empires, Serbia was named the capital of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, a position it was to retain until the breakup of Yugoslavia starting in 1991.

During the years of Tito’s reign Belgrade was often a fashionable, elegant European capital. While his form of socialism was no more successful than that of the Soviet Union, the country still put on the best face for foreign celebrities. Our hotel – Metropole Palace – displayed glamorous photos of A-listers running the gamut from Sophia Loren to Che Guevara, Elizabeth Taylor to Haile Selassie, and Bridgette Bardot to Louis Armstrong staying there back in the day. It used to be quite the thing.

The National Assembly of Serbia at night. Not visible here are the pictures of Serbs killed by horrible, evil Kosovar Albanians. The Serbs, you see, hate pretty much everybody, though our experience is that Albanians are actually pretty nice.

Today? Not so much. I’d hoped to be enchanted with the city but it was a hard place to fall in love with. Part of it, for me at least, is the history of war criminals running the place as recently as the 1990s. Beyond that, though, the city was subjected first to the ugly architectural experience of 20th century communism and then the NATO bombings of 1999. For the next several years Belgrade and Serbia as a whole suffered economically as then-President Milosevic and other high-ranking Serbs were indicted for war crimes making the country as a whole something of an international pariah. To this day one can see anti-NATO graffiti around Belgrade, though I didn’t sense any particular anti-American sense.

Today, then, war recovery seems further behind in Belgrade than it did in Dubrovnik, Mostar, or Sarajevo. It was only on our third day there that we were walking through an attractive pedestrian area in the city center when Mark observed that it was the first time he didn’t think the city was just ugly.

They’re trying, though. On one afternoon I went for a long walk along the Sava River and encountered what appeared to be an absolutely massive development project. I was right; the Belgrade Waterfront, started in 2014, is a controversial $3 billion project jointly funded by the Serbian government and investors from the Arab Emirates. The controversy, it seems, is the investment of such massive government funds to build luxury residences and five-star hotels with limited transparency or public input.

The beautiful blue Danube is all but ignored by Belgrade. I enjoyed walking along it and then stopping to read at some length but apparently no one else realizes such a great river is right there.

And speaking of the Sava River, on which the project is being built, one of the strange things about Belgrade is that while it is built at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, the city takes essentially no advantage of the Danube at all. I walked down there the first afternoon we were in Belgrade expecting to see major waterfront development and found essentially nothing, just a run-down walkway and low- or at best moderate-income apartment buildings. What river development there is in Belgrade is along the Sava. I’m sure there are historic reasons for it but as someone who loves river walkways it sure seems like a lost opportunity.

Ultimately there wasn’t a lot to see in Belgrade. There were a couple of nice churches – St. Mark’s was near our hotel while the Church of St. Sava was a bit further afield. St. Mark’s dates only from the early 20th century and while the exterior is beautiful the interior is largely unfinished. I had assumed that perhaps it had been damaged during the NATO bombings and that they were just now repair it but it appears as though the interior was just never finished; WW II got in the way first, then there were those Communist years when they weren’t investing a lot in religion.

St. Mark’s Church

St. Sava is even less finished, though perhaps more interesting. Dedicated to the founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, it is built on the spot where his remains were burned by the Ottomans in 1595. If you’re Serbian, it seems, you never pass up a chance to remind people of how badly you’ve been treated by others and ultimately how evil those others are. At any rate, the Serbs started talking about building a church there but these things take a while and they didn’t actually get started until 1935. They had started putting up the walls when the Germans invaded and then, again, the Communists came to power. Both the Nazis and the Communists used the very unfinished church as a parking lot; in later years it was used as a storage shed. As the walls deteriorated, local kids allegedly believed they were playing in the ruins of an old castle.

Finally in the 1980s the Orthodox church got permission to restart the project and today – after another hiatus during and after the NATO bombing – the structure is completed. From the outside it looks like a normal church, though unusually large. It is, you see, the largest Serbian Orthodox church and one of the biggest churches in the world. Inside, though, it is initially pretty underwhelming as it is almost completely unfinished. Until you go downstairs, that is, where they have indeed finished that area in stunning style. I think of great church-building as a thing of the past and find it pretty impressive that people are still able to dream such big dreams. We’ll have to come back in 10 or 15 years to see how much they’ve managed to finish.

St. Sava Church is one of the largest churches in the world. The 4,000-ton central dome was built on the ground and, over forty days, lifted by custom-built hydraulic machines onto the walls. I’m impressed.

Mark in the extremely unfinished interior of St. Sava

And here is the extremely finished and beautiful basement of the church

As for the rest of Belgrade, there was a beautiful park near the hotel that I enjoyed and I – though apparently no one else in Belgrade – enjoyed sitting by the Danube in the afternoon reading. We’re loving the Balkan cuisine with wonderful local produce (especially the various tomato salads) and great grilled food. We managed to take in former Yugoslav dictator Tito’s mausoleum and were intrigued by the way he is still treated as a national hero here in Belgrade. Other museums, though, didn’t work so well. Both the National Museum of Serbia and the Museum of Contemporary Art are well-respected art museums and both are closed for renovation.

From here, then, we get in a car and head south. We’ll make one stop in southern Serbia before moving into Macedonia. From there the plan is to circle the Balkan peninsula counterclockwise into Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania over the next four weeks. That will add up to more time in a car than we’ve spent in many years. Who knows, maybe we’ll discover that we like cars, though to be honest that’s not likely.

The exterior of St. Mark’s again

Part of St. Marks is finished inside

But most of it is not. It seems as though they have a long way to go….

Here I am taking my place with the brilliantly colored saints in St. Sava. I think of this kind of religious art as typically being aged and worn but here it is vibrant almost beyond description.

And then there was a Tito, a brutal dictator treated by Serbs as a hero though he was born to a Slovenian mother and Croatian father. Breaking from Stalin he became a leader of the non-aligned movement of the 1950s and 1960s. While he championed the anti-colonial movement he wasn’t so fond of independence for the various Yugoslav Republics and wasn’t so nice to their leaders.

Included in the little museum dedicated to Tito was his desk, seen in the background, and this desk set inscribed to him from President Kennedy. Given his break from the Soviet Union the U.S. was overtly friendly with Tito, ignoring his many human rights abuses in the interest of poking a finger in the Soviet eyes.

And finally, our visit to the Serbian dentist. Every six months we find someone to clean our teeth and it came due here in Belgrade. We were a bit intimidated by letting some Serb dentist into our mouths – the U.S. did, after all, lead a bombing campaign against Serbia less than 20 years ago – and this grim entrance didn’t inspire confidence. The experience was a bit odd – he used some chalky stain remover that felt like a throw-back to the Communist era – but otherwise it was uneventful.

Bosnia: Mostar & Sarajevo

Posted by Jim St. George on September 5, 2017

Posted in: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Europe, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Leave a Comment

Here we are on the Stari Most, the Old Bridge that gives Mostar its name

This was our first stop ever in Bosnia and indeed, the first new country we’ve been to all year. Technically we were in Bosnia once before, four years ago when a bus we were taking to Dubrovnik stopped ever-so-briefly for coffee in a tiny stretch of Bosnia that runs to the coast and separates a piece of Croatia (including Dubrovnik) from the rest of the country, but we don’t count a tiny experience like that as having been to a country. Four nights though – one in Mostar and three in Sarajevo – definitely counts. Oh, and technically we were in Bosnia and Herzegovina but I am just too lazy to use the whole name. So Bosnia it is.

To most of us, of course, the name Bosnia evokes the terrible and complex Bosnian War that raged from 1992 to 1995. Yugoslavia was breaking up, with Croatia and Slovenia having declared independence, and Bosnia followed. It was more complicated there, though, because Bosnia was more ethnically diverse than other Yugoslav republics; at the time of independence the population was slightly less than half Bosniak Muslims, a third Roman Catholic Croats, and a little under a fifth Orthodox Serbs. The three groups had hated each other for centuries and this was the time to fight it out.

Dubrovnik was such a cosmopolitan and touristy city that we didn’t really get to experience Balkan cuisine. Once we got to Mostar, though, we started to get a taste of it and we loved it.

The Serbs in particular rejected the notion of independence and, allied with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, they went to war. Initially the Bosnian Croats aligned with the Bosniaks but by late 1992 they split off and started what was essentially a war-within-a-war. And an ugly war it was.

From the comfort of our Stateside homes we watched war crimes like ethnic cleansing, as Serbians attempted to eradicate Bosniak Moslems from land they held, and mass rape; it is estimated that anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 Bosniaks were raped by Serbian soldiers. The Siege of Sarajevo lasted nearly four years, nearly a year longer than the Siege of Leningrad in World War II. In Srebrenica Serbians captured the town, which was supposed to be under the protection of Dutch UN troops. The troops stood aside as the Serbians rounded up all the men and boys they could find and executed them, some 8,000 in all.

When we first arrived in Mostar I thought of this as just a nice fixer-upper. Only on reflection did I recognize it as one of several buildings that had undoubtedly been destroyed during the war.

That’s what I vaguely recalled from 20-plus years ago. Today the signs of war are all around – mass gravestones, shelled buildings – but it’s obvious that Bosnia is recovering. Many of the Serbian leaders, both those in Serbia proper and Bosnian Serbs, were convicted of war crimes, though sadly Slobodan Milosevic died of natural causes before he could be convicted and punished. Both Serbia and Croatia have formally apologized to Bosnia and, from our tiny experience, it seems as though today Bosnia is a peaceful and increasingly prosperous place.

Traveling for a few days with our friends Marc & David, we journeyed by bus northwest from Dubrovnik along the coast quite a ways before turning north for Mostar. We found a beautiful town of about 100,000 people, the most important town in Herzegovina, the southern region that makes up about a fifth of the Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was built by the Ottomans in the 15th century and named for the “Stari Most”, the Old Bridge, today a UNESCO World Heritage Site that spans the Neretva River and is the iconic symbol of the town. The bridge stood for over 400 years until Croat forces intentionally destroyed it, hitting it with perhaps 60 shells before it collapsed into the river. After the war, though, an international effort the rebuild the bridge was successful, using not just the same materials but even the same technology that would have been available 400 years earlier.

Stari Most, Mostar’s iconic symbol, rebuilt in the early 21st century after the Croats intentionally destroyed it in the Croat-Bosnian war-within-a-war

We had just a brief, one-night stop in Mostar, but we enjoyed the town and had a nice introduction to Balkan cuisine. The signs of war were unmistakable in the remaining bombed out buildings, but the signs of recovery were just as obvious. The next day it was back on a bus, this time through some stunning mountains en route to Sarajevo, Bosnia’s capital. Though subjected to the longest siege in modern warfare, the city is again today thriving. Apparently Moslems from Emirates and Saudi Arabia love Sarajevo: they can enjoy Europe here without all the restrictions of their home countries without experiencing any of the anti-Moslem prejudices that they are likely to encounter in Christian-majority countries. So the city is full of restaurants and nightlife and apparently prostitutes catering to those Moslem tourists. It is not at all unusual to see women walking down the street in full burka and in at least one Lebanese restaurant we went to we were unable to get wine (horrors!).

I was reminded once we got to Sarajevo that, besides the Bosnian War, Sarajevo once played a big role in world history: it was here that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, the fuse that started World War I. To my surprise – I have this naive sense that political assassinations are bad – Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb assassin seems to be treated as something of a hero in Sarajevo. The Archduke did, after all, represent the imperial ruling power from whom Bosnia wanted independence.

Sarajevo’s Latin Bridge, the site where Gavrilo Princip mortally wounded Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting the stage for World War I.

And again, reminders of the more recent war were omnipresent, particularly in the cascading cemeteries everywhere. I walked through one large cemetery with probably thousands of graves, every single one of which were dated between 1992 and 1995. It was a horrifying experience. And after that, while walking back to the hotel, I passed the city’s Jewish museum, housed today in an old synagogue that was abandoned after the holocaust. There were some 12,000 Sephardic Jews living in Sarajevo at the start of World War, very few of whom survived. And thus in very short order we have the history of the 20th century: a World War that eliminated the Ottoman, German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires; Germans practicing genocide against Jews, and Orthodox Serbs practicing ethnic cleansing and genocide against Moslems. Nice century there.

David, Mark, and Marc as we entered Bosnia. They traveled with us up into Sarajevo before moving on to Budapest to see other friends.

Another bombed out building in Mostar quite near our hotel

Mostar’s bridge at night

Sarajevo’s city hall was so beautiful and bright and new we thought it must have been new construction. In fact, it was built in the late 19th century, so what we saw – there was a nice art exhibit inside – was presumably the result of a substantial restoration project.

There was a small but haunting museum in Sarajevo memorializing the massacre of Srebrenica. This is a collage put together by a mother who cut-and-pasted pictures of her five sons – all of whom were executed there – into a photo surrounding her. And from Sarajevo we’re moving on to Serbia which felt just wrong as we toured the museum.

One of several large cemeteries in Sarajevo that date from the war. Every single tombstone here dates from the four-year war.

And, as if that wasn’t grim enough, here is a book hanging in the Jewish museum listing the 12,000 Sarajevo Jews killed in the Holocaust.

A small museum right near the spot where Franz Ferdinand was assassinated holds the weapons that were used

Fortunately, not all was grim in Sarajevo. There was this lovely, relaxed cat, for instance, the very picture of our own late Booboo.

And this fun pedestrian bridge, designed by students in the city’s Academy of Fine Arts, seen there on the left

We toured a museum of Bosnian history and were reminded that it was once a part of the Roman Empire

One afternoon I walked way up above the city to some old unidentified castle where I sat for an hour or two reading with this view

Mark in front of the remains of a 16th century caravansary, an Ottoman inn

And here I am sampling some of the Balkans’ fine plum brandy, available everywhere for almost nothing

Dubrovnik

Posted by Jim St. George on August 30, 2017

Posted in: Croatia, Europe, UNESCO World Heritage Site. Leave a Comment

Mark on the glistening streets of Dubrovnik’s old town

After our time around the Mediterranean and up in Sweden, we’re off to Eastern Europe. First stop, Dubrovnik, the capital of Croatia and a city we last visited in 2013 near the start of this adventure. Back then we stayed a bit away from the center of the city so we could stay at a resort on the beach; we would spend the day at the beach then walk into the city for dinner and some night life. This time was completely different. We stayed right in the center of the city, right in the old town … and spent the day at the beach, coming in for lunch and dinner.

First, though, we had to leave Stockholm. Two things stood out for me. First, it was a rare event when we had to exchange our currency. Usually we use the last of any currency (except euros, since we’re always coming back to Europe) either on the hotel bill or at a Duty Free shop in the airport. Our hotel was pre-paid, but we didn’t think that was a problem: if we’re leaving a country and need to get rid of the local currency we can always buy a bottle of booze at the airport. Not so this time, though. Because Sweden and Croatia are both in the European Union we couldn’t buy duty-free stuff. So we had to pay those outrageous fees – about 20 percent in this case – to get rid of our Swedish Krona. It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened but you’d be surprised how rarely we have to do that.

There it is, the very low-tech approach to indicating a ticket has been used

And then there’s the strange case of the train from downtown Sweden to the airport. It’s surprisingly expensive, even in a country where everything is surprisingly expensive; the round-trip ticket runs about $67, so $134 for the two of us. At the same time it’s wonderfully fast and comfortable; it runs on dedicated tracks so there are no delays. What’s weird though is that for all the cost that went into building the system, the process of validating tickets is amusing: the ticket person comes by, looks at your ticket, and marks a big X on it in ink. If it’s a round-trip ticket, he or she just X’s it out a second time. Just strange. It all worked fine and quickly we were on a Norwegian Airlines flight (great airline!) to Dubrovnik.

This was just a quick stop before we head inland to explore some of the former Yugoslav Republics along with (probably) Romania and perhaps even Moldova, a former Soviet Republic. It was going to be a two-day stop but thankfully we added a third day when our friends Marc & David decided to join us for the start of this Eastern European swing.

A couple things about Dubrovnik stand out. One, it’s expensive. I remember back in the mid-1990s maybe, after the war with Serbia, adventurous friends would go to Croatia and come back just agog at how beautiful and cheap it was. Well, it’s still beautiful but 20 or 25 years of tourist activity sure ended that cheap part.

A quick aside about the war. After the Yugoslavian strong-man Marshal Tito died in 1980, smart observers of the Balkans suspected that Yugoslavia – a federation of Slavic states – was not long for the world. And sure enough in 1991, after a decade of tension and as the Soviet Union was headed toward collapse, Croatia and Slovenia both declared independence. Serbia, the biggest player in what was then still Yugoslavia, attacked.

I won’t detail the whole war here – there’ll be plenty of time for that in Bosnia and Serbia – but one part stands out. Back in the 1970s the old town of Dubrovnik, the pride of all Croatians, was de-militarized so that it would never becoming a casualty of war. How do you think that worked? Yup, Serbia saw an undefended city and attacked it. The new Croatian government quickly sent in troops and Serbia was left with an ultimately failed – though still destructive and deadly – seven-month siege.

The moral of the story here is that unilateral disarmament didn’t, in fact, protect Dubrovnik as many of us naive peace-types in the 1970s might have hoped. Of course, Muammar Gaddafi could tell you how well his decision to give up his nuclear weapons program worked, except he was executed after he did that. Or we could ask the Ukrainians how it worked when they voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons – nearly half of the Soviet nuclear arsenal was in Ukraine – when they became independent. They ceded the weapons to Russia with a guarantee – a guarantee mind you – that the U.K., the U.S., and Russia would defend them if anyone ever attacked. That didn’t work out so well, either, when Russia annexed Crimea and invaded southern Ukraine and we (probably wisely) just stood by. Kind of explains why Kim Jong-un seems unwilling to give up his nuclear weapons in North Korea, huh?

I see people taking pictures from planes all the time and I assume that they never turn out. Mark took this shot of Dubrovnik as we were flying in from Stockholm and it definitely worked.

OK, back to Dubrovnik. Expensive, crowded, and still beautiful. The old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, may be the most amazingly preserved old city in all of Europe. The old walls and some of the stairways are so wonderfully preserved that they are favored filming sites for HBO’s Game of Thrones. Amusingly, when we checked into our hotel the woman at the registration desk was going to highlight for us the most important filming locations. Because we’ve never seen Game of Thrones we told her not to bother. But that got us thinking: everybody else does; maybe we should watch it. So Mark bought a short-term HBO plan and we’ve watched the first two episodes. We’re a few years behind everyone else, but so far we’re enjoying it. Maybe.

I keep getting side tracked. Dubrovnik. What did we do? Pretty much went to the beach, came in for meals, visited with Marc & David. The city is beautiful, but it’s crazy crowded and I just don’t like fighting my way through those crowds. On top of that it was crazy hot, up around 100 degrees by mid-day. The beach was crowded, too, but our hotel either owns or has a licensing agreement with the company that rents out chairs and umbrellas so we got those for free. And since I’m an early bird I’d get to the beach early, stake out some nice chairs, and settle in for the day. Eventually Mark & Marc & David would come down and we’d swim and read and go eat and come back and swim and read. And then get cleaned up for dinner.