My guided tour of Edge city continues…

My photographer for this assignment, and a man of indefatigable charm and dark humour, was a chap named Igor Salinger. The day after my night out with the Serbian Mafiosa we decided to take a walk, and later a drive around Belgrade – you know, like regular tourists. On the street in front of my hotel, a group of middle-aged men were gathered around what I expected to be a game of ‘Find the Lady’. The dealer was flicking Deutsche Mark on a low table; the other men were all making calculations on identical pocket calculators. “What’s the…” I murmured in English before engaging brain. “Casino”, replied one toothless, smiling customer. The others turned and scowled, so we decided to split. We passed by a shop selling Swiss Quartz watches and the like. On the street directly in front was a stall selling crap imitations of the timepieces inside. Two teenage girls in identical Madras-patterned trousers stopped to look at both. A few minutes later, and a black crow hovered above my head, too close for comfort and entirely too symbolic for something, I’m not sure what.

We kept on walking. On another street corner stood a pretty girl, with both bombed-out building and 100 year-old townhouses behind her. An MP armoured car pulled up at the lights. “Look, photo opportunity”, I enthused. “Opportunity to get questioned by Military Police for a few hours”, said Igor. Later I asked him what he thought was the principal export of Yugoslavia: “Alarming statistics”, he had replied, “or political thoughts”. Igor had his own problems to deal with. He was making daily hospital visits to his sick grandmother. With each visit, the hospital staff asked him to bring something new. One day it was aspirin, the next common-household batteries.

In Belgrade, the poor aren’t going anywhere, and the rich are tooling around in BMW Z3s and Mercedes 600SLs, parking them in the hills of Dedinja, the ‘Belgrade 90210′, as someone had spray-painted on a wall.

Dedinja is indeed a hodge-podge Beverley Hills, where Gatsby style mansions (that were built last year) stand beside 19th century originals, crumbling to bits. What looked like a dozen camouflaged horse-floats sat by the roadside. I am not making this up. We drove on, until we came to the former residence of Slobodan Milosevic. The television footage around the time of the siege didn’t do justice to the massive scale of this walled compound. Still, Dedinja is unlikely to inspire envy in the average tourist. Even at this height, the Belgrade smog is peaty and stings the eyes. Also, the …ambience. Up here in the hills, in the Košutnjak forest, is where Ivan Stambolic, former Serbian president and ‘kingmaker’ some said, of Slobodan Milosevic, had been abducted while out jogging on a similarly balmy Autumn day a little over a year before. I checked my watch. It was 11.10 on a tranquil Thursday morning, and as we stood around in an outdoor café, taking in the panorama of Belgrade and the river Danube, five gunshots rang out in the late morning air.

Later that day we passed by the premises of a place called the Felix Security agency. ‘Premises’ makes it sound a little grand. Junkyard dogs and a huge, bearded freak-show wrestler type wandering around an old lot on a Belgrade back street. Hiring these guys as security for your home or business would be like hiring the fox to guard the hen house, or so it strikes me.

And speaking of guarding the coop, NATO is still unpopular with many Belgraders, who reflect with what I can only describe as morbid nostalgia on the 1999 bombing campaign that lasted twenty-eight days longer than the Luftwaffe’s 1940 Blitz on London. There’s an ambassadorial boulevard in the centre of Belgrade named Kneza Miloša. On one side, stand some rather pretty Liberty style mansions, on the other side, the massive, crumbling and burned-out-shells of concrete monstrosities that were once Ministry of Defence headquarters.

The NATO bombing looks like it had an aesthetic motivation in this context. “Don’t hit the Art Nouveau!” Not that one should be too flip about an aerial campaign that killed around a 1000 civilians. Then again, Serbians themselves are able to manage a grim joke of it. I saw a postcard at a souvenir store which read ‘the year is 1999 A.D. Europe is entirely occupied by the Americans. Well, not entirely. One small country of indomitable Serbs still holds out against the invaders’. Asterix and Obelix have been redrawn wearing Serbian headgear.

We decided to visit some gun shops, of which there was no shortage in Belgrade: ‘Snajper’ and ‘Arsenal’ being but two. In Arsenal I put on a flak jacket, binoculars and Ray-Bans, and tried different assault rifles and pistols on for size. The shop assistant, Igor and myself were laughing childishly all the while. A kid about the age of five wandered in from the street, and the shop assistant insisted we take a photo of him with a rifle too. I felt a deep, sudden, burning sense of shame. This boy had been indoctrinated into violence, probably heard the bombs falling on his city when he was just barely old enough to talk. Now here’s this big English speaking geek making it seem as if war was an adventure, or a joke. We left the arcade and walked to the Serbian Orthodox Church of St Mark up the hill in Tašmajdan. The vastness and the austerity of the place was all of a sudden soothing, as was the solemn nature of the worshippers filing in individually in the late afternoon.

These are tough people. You just need to watch the way they all hungrily wolf down their cancer sticks to get wise to that. My journalist/camera operator friend Vineta (a real life James Bond girl if ever there was one) thinks it will only be another twenty years or so before the cauldron boils over again into another major war or series of wars in the Balkans.

It may not surprise the reader that there isn’t a great deal of tourism in Belgrade. But the few thousand tourists that went there last year went there for thousands of different reasons. To play on the high stakes poker end of the business world perhaps. To feel politicised. To glimpse hope, but with reservations, always complicated. She is a last chance to see an Eastern Europe that’s still in the buff. The only thing missing from my first trip is that I wasn’t followed anywhere by guys in overcoats. Thrillingly, people do regard foreign visitors with atmospheric suspicion. I did not see ONE running shoe, baseball cap, slogan t-shirt, camcorder tourist the entire time I was there. Things feel dodgy, even when they’re not. Yet with 1.3 billion dollars of investment beginning the snowball of investment into what is arguably Eastern Europe’s most skilled English speaking workforce (!), Belgrade is certain to experience the one condition so pre-eminent around these parts: Change. Come back in a few years, and what is there now, with all its ambiguities, may be gone, or at least subdued. The first wave of the Nike and digital camera brigades will have shown up. There will be more signs in English, so you won’t have the opportunity of just getting lost somewhere in the city. The bombed buildings will be demolished and replaced with shopping malls – which will soon fall apart too. There will be at least one TGI Fridays, a pocket guidebook available around town, plus awkward business drinks with the chamber of commerce: the whole weary expats-in-Eastern Europe routine. So come now – if Prague and Budapest are too tame for you, and you want a real taste of the Balkans. For be sure, Belgrade in the coming years will not be for the timid.