With more than its fair share of troubles in its past, Belgrade might be one of Europe’s gruffer cities, but it’s also a place of striking beauty.
A Frenchman, an Italian and a Serb all end up in hell. The Frenchman begs to make one last call home to see how his family is coping. The devil says fine, it’ll cost you an extra thousand years in the flames. The Frenchman agrees, and tearfully listens to his wife shagging his brother. The Italian begs to call home to see how his daughters are doing. That’ll be an extra thousand years in the flaming pit, says the devil. So be it, says the Italian, and weeps as he listens to his children selling the farm. Now I want to call home, says the Serb, and grabs the receiver. He hears his neighbours robbing his house. How much is that, he asks the devil, who replies that it costs nothing. How dare you, shouts the Serb, you took a thousand agonising years off the frog and the eye-tie, what’s wrong? My pain not good enough for you? No, no, says the devil, local calls are free.
I don’t really do jokes, and neither do the Serbs. This one, which I suspect is an international pizza-topping joke, was told to me by a Serb with not so much a straight face as a rigidly palsied one. He told it to me in a monotone without embellishment to prove that Serbs had a sense of humour, that they could be as ticklish and ribald, as warmly hilarious and avuncularly clubbable as any other damn nation in the world. And not only that, but it also proved that Serbs were secure and sophisticated enough to tell jokes at their own expense. Though, he added, the sentiment that Serbia was semidetached from hell was only to be used in a ribald setting and under no circumstances should be exercised as an assertion in a non-humorous context, as that would be likely to get your kidneys removed the secret way.
And that’s quite enough about Serbian jokes. Let’s just leave it at the inarguable fact that Serbs have a fine, sharp, well-honed, pointy sense of humour, but they choose not to use it unless provoked. And if they do, you’ll most likely be laughing on the other side of your face. So if I suggested you spend your next European holiday in Serbia you’d probably say that I was joking. Pull the other one, you’d say. Shall we go there after the health spas of Moldova and the restaurants of Kyrgyzstan or before the beaches of Cardiff and the bracing fresh air of Athens?
There’s no getting around the fact that Serbia has a bad reputation. It’s always had a bad reputation. Obviously it’s been brushing it up in recent years just in case we forgot why we were avoiding it in the first place. I’ve just been, and admittedly I went because it was on the way to somewhere else. I was travelling up the Danube trying to get to Budapest and there was Serbia in the way. But, I have to tell you, it’s a pretty fabulous place. A surprisingly fabulous place. Mostly what I mean is Belgrade. It’s beautiful. Impressively grand. A 19th-century place built out of vanity and pride, which are two of the best emotions to build on. Modesty and self-deprecation may be admirable in people, but they’re an anticlimax in urban planning.
To begin with, it’s on a river, and as anyone who’s been to more than three cities will tell you, the propinquity of large bodies of water is a prerequisite for a really first-rate burg. Belgrade is on the confluence of two of them. It also has a castle. A very impressive castle from multiple centuries with many impressive walls, keeps, turrets, et cetera. A river and a castle are the makings of a flush in the city department. Belgrade is also a city that likes to do its living outside. There are cobbled streets packed with cafés whose tables join up into long, winding promenades of flirtation and vicious argument. With Serbs, it’s often difficult to tell the difference.
There’s one street of cool bars that’s known as Silicone Valley because of the quality of the breasts on display. When I say ‘cool’ it is in a particularly Slavic way. It is a particularly Slavic cool – that is to say cool in the way a Chinese Elvis look-alike contest is cool. Serbs don’t really do Western cool. What they do is posing in a manner that implies there might be some cool going around. This is the only place in the world where I’ve seen an adultish man wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Amateur Porn Star’, and if you think that’s a total absence of cool, then I have to tell you that he had his girlfriend with him. How chic do you think she felt?
I see you’ve been staring at our women, my joke-telling guide said. No, no, go ahead, Serbian women are famous for being the most beautiful women in the whole world. A discussion on which nation has the most beautiful women in the whole world could collapse the United Nations. All I can say is that Serbia would be unlucky not to find itself in the quarter-finals. Serbian women are very striking: lanky and heavy-chested, long straight hair, generally of some kitchen blondeness, high cheeks, wide eyes, strong features set in expressions of man-killing disdain. I never saw a Serbian woman smile. Not once.
I mentioned this to my hilarious guide. No, they don’t have a sense of humour, he said. Oh, so your sense of humour is solely a male, masculine thing? Yes, he said, it’s not nice for women to laugh. Would you like your woman to laugh? Maybe she’d laugh at you. Yes, I can see that would be difficult.
I really did love Belgrade, and I wanted to love the Serbs. They are a nation on probation, and have been for a hundred years. They suffer from being squeezed between larger, gaudier, richer neighbours, the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. Serbs dreamt of a greater Serbia, and they got Yugoslavia instead. They desperately want to be relaxed and laid-back and turn up at the party correctly dressed. But they can’t leave the history thing alone.
There is some fantastic food here. I ate brilliant slowcooked buried lamb, one of the best dishes of mixed offal I’ve had for years and marvellous Serbian coffee with doughnuts and a sort of yoghurt cheese sour-cream thing. (Serbian coffee is really Turkish coffee, but without the punch in the throat for calling it Turkish.)
Really, you should go to Belgrade. You know, my guide told me, we are the only city in Europe that’s been bombed four times in the 20th century. Oh yes. Once in the First World War by Austrians, twice in the Second World War by Germans, and then Russians, and last and not least by NATO. Well, fancy that.