Scenes from Serbia

Cam was in London visiting Lilly, so Kate and I did what we do when we suddenly have a clear calendar and no one to answer to: we picked a country we’d never seen and booked it. Serbia had been sitting on the list for a while. This was the trip that finally moved it off.

We started in Belgrade. Our family friend Pete grew up there and handed over a list of places before we left, and Kate’s hairdresser, who happens to be Serbian, added his own, along with offers to call in favors, which is how we ended up one night at Dva Jelena, deep in the locals’ section rather than the tourist rooms. Red-checked tablecloths, a full band working its way between the tables for hours on end, smoke (so much smoke!) and warm light and the sense of having stepped back a few decades. It was the kind of night you can’t plan, only stumble into with good directions.

Belgrade gave us the rest of its highlights without much arm-twisting. The Nikola Tesla Museum, where a guide demonstrated a coil with the practiced patience of someone who has done it ten thousand times and still enjoys the part where everyone flinches. St. Sava, modeled after the Hagia Sophia and roughly as humbling to stand inside. And a speakeasy whose entrance I won’t spoil, mostly because I’m not certain I could find it again.

Then north to Novi Sad, where our guide turned out to be the former director of military history, who had lived through a good deal of it himself. We slept in a hotel that used to be army barracks and now does a convincing impression of the Overlook, all long corridors and a silence that felt like it was waiting for something. I slept fine. Kate kept an ear open.

Out in the Fruška Gora hills we found the rest of it: the architecture of small towns, a frescoed monastery church where we stood looking up at the ceiling for a long while, then on to brick cellars lined with dark bottles, and an amazing vineyard-side lunch.

We have now been to every country that was once Yugoslavia except North Macedonia. We’ve loved all of them, each in a different way. One left. We’ll get there.