Belgrade

The ancient Serbian capital was a provincial outpost for occupying empires when it wasn’t an independent city. The Kalemegdan Fortress that overlooks the junction of the Danube and the Sava rivers contains elements of architecture from the Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Austrians who built it up. Everywhere, especially in the food and the architecture – Slavic, Orthodox, Austrian, and Ottoman influences blend in a way that makes Belgrade unique.

Serbian culture and history offer a very mixed bag. Along with some negative impressions and difficult history, I met some wonderful people in Belgrade, have some very good Serbian friends. I found the organizers of the astrology conference and other friends to be very friendly, warm, and forward-thinking. Sadly – much like my own homeland, the USA – Serbia also has some very nationalist, reactionary people who have supported foolish actions, violence at home and against their neighbors.

The Versailles treaty following World War I had cobbled together a number of southern Slavic peoples – Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians; along with some smaller Slavic and non-slavic minorities -- into the multinational state of Yugoslavia (Yugo means “southern” and most of the Balkan nations can still be considered as “yugoslav”). The Serbian capital was made the center of the new country. Since the break-up of Yugoslavia into different nation states, Belgrade and the Serbian nation are still trying to find their spiritual and political space in the post-cold war and post-Yugoslav order.

Lots of hostilities and resentments still remain from the various wars of the 20th century. Bosnia and Croatia had briefly been independent states before WWI and Slovenia had been part of the Hapsburg empire up to its last days. Competing ambitions, religious and ethnic differences were exacerbated leading to violence and death squads during WW II. The neo-Stalinist regime of Marshall Tito kept a lid on hostilities without really resolving the underlying causes, and the centrality of Serbia with the capital of the federation in Belgrade, assured a Serbian advantage in federal dealings. As the pressures of the Cold War fell away, the other nations that made up Yugoslavia broke away from the Serbian-dominated federation. The losses of the Balkan wars are tremendous – in lives, money, time and opportunities – and the entire region is slowly catching up to the rest of Europe. While other yugoslav nations are enjoying unprecedented freedom and independence, Serbia is still wrestling with the diminishment of its role in the region and its new place in the world.

My first visit to Belgrade was in 2001, less than a year after Milosevic fell. Branka Stamenkovic had organized the first Yugoslav Astrological Conference – now an annual event. Studying in Italy then, I couldn’t resist hopping over the Adriatic for this historic event. The city was vibrantly chaotic, with a slightly post-apocalyptic feel. Some of the larger buildings had been bombed not too much earlier by American planes and the damage was still quite obvious. Our conference was held at once section of a large sprawling building. From the side we entered we couldn’t tell that the other end of the building had been bombed by the USA!

Just a few months after the fall of Milosevic the economy was still edging out of Stalinism. No ATMs or credit cards. Everything was in cash! They preferred hard western currency of course, but when I first arrived I changed my Italian lire into Yugoslav dinars. As with earlier trips to the Soviet Union everything was cheap and there was lots to buy but the quality was poor, and I ended up having some trouble spending all my dinars before leaving!

But for all that street markets were thriving and produce and goods were plentiful. If one had the money, one could eat well indeed! The trouble is that in Serbia the pay is so dismal that what is plentiful and cheap to Americans is still out of reach for the average Serb. Even three years later, when I returned, the discrepancy is very difficult for Serbs, perhaps even moreso. The Stalinist economy at least assured that people had cheap housing and food, shoddy as housing and products were. Now as Serbia joins the world economy prices for rent and commodities are climbing from the protected levels of the fixed economy to the prices of the free market, but wages are still very low and unemployment is tremendously high.



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