No. 42 was once an elegant house. Its crumbling façade exuded an air or mystery and romance. As I stood on its cracked marble doorstep I felt I had arrived home.
For sixty years, No. 42 was the home of my Serbian great grandmother, Granny Spasa. Like today’s Belgrade, Granny Spasa was original, colourful, beautiful and never, ever dull.
A visit to modern Belgrade is full of surprises, beginning with the drive from the airport. My guide was Milo, a handsome young charmer with hedgehog hair who wore a bright blue leather jacket.
Milo drove his 1960’s Mercedes as if he were practicing for an F1 race, speeding to the heart of a city along tree-lined boulevards. Here, many buildings are scarred by bomb damage, and some have been reduced entirely to rubble. These sights are sad reminders of Serbia’s recent war troubles. To make matters worse, many ancient Ladas and Skodas still dominate Belgrade’s streets, making the air harder to breathe.
And yet, such problems are quickly forgotten when one encounters the joyful vitality of the new generation of Belgradians. Serbs, I would discover, party hard. One guy told me: “Darling, if you have any trouble with men, you tell me and I deal with them” - “Deal with them?” - “Never you mind, this is Serbia, it’s the jungle.” I had the chance to reflect on that statement later.
I wasn’t thinking about men as I went up to my great grandmother’s wonderful apartment. The next-door neighbor told me that Granny Spasa loved fish so much that she used one bath as a fish tank, dipping in when she was ready to cook and eat a particular specimen. She kept the other as a bathroom as her washroom, thank God. The hot water came from a small boiler tank, sometimes leaving one with a lukewarm bath; fine for fish, but not so good for humans. Luckily, five star hotels like the Hyatt and Hotel Yugoslavia don’t have this problem.
In the town restaurants, gypsies play romantic music on accordions and you are treated to delicious Serbian specialties such as Cevapcici with Ajvar (Serbian meatballs with red pepper sauce) or Pasulj (Serbian bean soup), Gibanitiza (Cheese pie) and so on. After getting through such a menu, I had to dance it off.
This is how I found Black Panther, a nightclub located on a barge in a district called Splav. I was told that guns are sometimes fired in the air there, but assuaged by assurances that this sort of thing is done only for show.
Nightclub barges in Splav have different atmospheres, but male exhibitionism is the dominant theme. Read More »
