Belgrade is not a city much visited by tourists, but I would recommend it. The food is good, it is pleasantly uncrowded, it is historically interesting, and it contains lots of good twentieth century art and architecture, some of the latter in bad repair, but still worth seeing. It occupies a fine position on the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers, where the fortifications now enclose a gracious park. Belgrade, in short, is lovely, and my week there was very profitable.
It is thirty years ago now since the traumatic break-up of Yugoslavia, something I was old enough to watch on the television news, and the aftermath of that conflict in which the Serbs’ attempted to create a Greater Serbia, with very mixed results, are still in evidence. Driving from the airport, painted on one of the motorway bridges, in English, is the legend ‘Kosovo is Serbia’. Outside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a large poster, in Cyrillic, which I manage to decipher, saying: ‘Kosovo and Metohija belong to Serbia and not to Albania.’ On the other side of the road two large modernist buildings are still in ruins, bombed by NATO, a perpetual memorial of a conflict in which Serbia, or a part of it, is not admitting defeat. Serbian self-confidence or defiance? There are flags everywhere in Belgrade and the modern Serbian flag has the royal coat of arms on it, though the Karageorgevitch dynasty has been defunct since 1945.
The street in the Old City where I found lots of lovely restaurants was named after King Peter, who led the Serbs in the First World War. The Karageorgevitch dynasty was pretty dodgy, but the road I was staying in, fronting the Sava, bore their name. These are the ones who twice profited by political murder, first in the May coup of 1903, when King Alexander Obrenovic and his wife Queen Draga were assassinated in their bedroom, their bodies disembowelled and thrown out of the window, and secondly in the notorious shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in June 1914. Both of these grisly murders were masterminded by a man known as Apis and the terrorist group the Black Hand. Apis has a bust in Belgrade to this day; the man who pulled the trigger in Sarajevo has a street named after him. As for Queen Draga and King Alexander, their grave is in a little visited crypt under Saint Mark’s Church, which the custode kindly opened up for me, remarking that the assassinated King and Queen got very few visitors. The palace where the royal couple were murdered has been pulled down. The monument to Sophie and Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, put up by the Hapsburgs on the anniversary of their death in 1917, survived a mere two years.
The political murder is something of a constant in Serbian history. Let us not forget the fate of the Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić who was murdered in 2003.
When it comes to the sorts of people who were involved in the various wars in the former-Yugoslavia, here things become even more murky, as many of the militia leaders started out as leaders of criminal gangs. The most notorious of them was Arkan, who was regularly beaten as a boy by his father, and who started his criminal career as a pretty thief in his early teens. He soon became a gang leader and bank robber, and he had crucial backing from within the Yugoslav state; often sentenced to prison, he was a champion escaper. When the war came, he organised one of the most brutal private armies. He fathered nine children by five different women, and was, in certain circles, a popular hero. He was assassinated in Belgrade in 2000.
His career sounds like fiction but is not. It bears some resemblance to my anti-hero Calogero di Rienzi, but when I invented him I did not know much about Arkan. I know more now. The video below, in which Arkan is confronted by Roger Cook, is revelatory.
But please, don’t let all this put you off going to Serbia and Belgrade in particular. The present government is trying to build bridges with its neighbours and seek reconciliation after the horrors of the past, something we should all support. And Belgrade is lovely, as I have said. Its history, however, does provide one with plenty of inspiration when one thinks of organised crime.