After just a brief two night stopover in Budapest, we continue our journey southeast towards Belgrade. The border crossing is painful! Hungary of course is both in the EU and the Schengen zone. Serbia is in neither!! It takes almost an hour in the line at the border crossing to leave Hungary (why??) and then just as long to cross into Serbia a couple of hundred metres further on across a heavily fortified no-man’s land (Hungary has erected barbed wire fences to prevent refugees from conflict zones entering. We see long lines of sad looking people trudging along the side of the highway on the Serbian side of the border having been refused entry into Hungary). 

In many ways, Serbia still feels a bit like a step back in time - back to the days of Soviet dominated Eastern Europe. To be fair, the country has an awful recent history beginning in 1980 with the death of (Marshal) Joseph Broz “Tito”, the Yugoslav Communist dictator who defied Stalin, was a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Group of Nations and who held the disparate country of Yugoslavia together.

Within a few years of Tito’s death, the country disintegrated and descended into a brutal civil war with ethnic cleansing and genocide. While no group was blameless in the carnage of the ‘90’s, Serbian nationalists were likely the worst as they tried to create an ethnically pure Greater Serbia from the ruins of Yugoslavia. ("Only Unity Will Save The Serbs" - the translation of the Cyrillic lettering at the heart of the Serbian flag). It was all brought to an end by the NATO bombing of Belgrade in 1999 and the prosecution of Serbian nationalist and military leaders as war criminals, including the Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic.

In the intervening 20 or so years, Serbia has moved on but we still see reminders of what happened.

Bombed out buildings in the centre of Belgrade left as a memorial, what had been the Chinese embassy, destroyed by a NATO bomb now a cultural centre, the site of what had been the US embassy in central Belgrade destroyed by an angry mob. And to show that Serbian nationalism isn’t dead, a large banner in central Belgrade declaring that “Serbia without Kosovo would be like a human without heart”.

And Serbia continues to have a strong affinity with Russia despite the invasion of Ukraine. The government has recently declared the Cyrillic alphabet to be the only official alphabet although most signs are still in both Cyrillic and Latin. Most telling for us though was a brief visit we paid to the historic town of Sremski Karlovici where we came across a ceremony unveiling a statue of the Russian tsar Peter the Great. A speech was being given by the mayor of the nearby city of Novi Sad to a large crowd of people waving Serbian and Russian flags. The Russian ambassador to Serbia was in attendance as the mayor extolled the lasting friendship between Serbs and Russians.

So politically, Serbia is very much in Russia’s camp. Yet most of Serbia’s trade is with Western Europe and the Balkans. Hence the remark made to us by our guide Zoran (himself a native of North Macedonia, another former Yugoslav republic) that Serbia “sits on two stools” but if it wants to thrive, it will eventually have to chose (“ducking and weaving” was the description in a recent Economist article about Serbia trying to remain friends with Russia and the West at the same time). And it can’t wait too much longer. The country’s birth rate is very low, the average age is increasing and there is a massive exodus to Western Europe of educated young people seeking better opportunities and a future that they don’t see in Serbia.

With the traumas of the 90’s now fading, Belgrade at least is reinventing itself as a dynamic European city. There’s a lot of new construction mostly funded by Middle Eastern and Chinese money and a vibrant nightlife.

Serbia’s second city, Novi Sad at first glance seems to live up to its name “sad”. A drab, Soviet-era looking place of run-down apartment blocks and few not very inviting shops. But it turns out, that is mostly just the city outskirts and when we hit the historic city centre, Novi Sad looks far more like the 2022 European City of Culture that it actually is! Lively streets full of crowded outdoor cafes and restaurants, some impressive buildings and people looking as if they’re enjoying themselves rather than just “surviving”. 

So Serbia just needs to decide which stool it wants to sit on and above all convince its youth that this is a country with a future and not just hang-ups about the past.