Category: Serbia

This was a rather attractive building and it’s located opposite my hotel (more of which later on during the week, but I’m very much liking it) and it is known as locally as Stari Dvor, meaning Old Palace. It’s currently used as the City Hall for Belgrade, but it was also used as the Royal residence of the Serbian royal family between 1884 and 1922. The history of this city is brutal, Wikipedia notes (and I have no reason to disbelieve it) that “the city was battled over in 115 wars and razed to the ground 44 times”. That’s sub-optimal for the residents of Belgrade if I’m being honest.

And that brutality was evident on the night of 10 June 1903, when a group of military officers entered the building next to this palace and assassinated King Aleksandar Obrenović. and Queen Draga. They then disembowelled the royal couple, mutilated their bodies and threw them out of the window into piles of manure. That building was demolished soon after and it’s now a park next to Stari Dvor. I can see the park from my hotel room and it’s a little odd to think all of this went on relatively recently in the city’s history. The current structure has been much amended since it was first built between 1882 and 1884, not least as it was damaged in the First World War and the Second World War. It was used briefly as the city’s Ethnographic Museum, but has served as the City Hall since 1961.

Also of interest (well, to me anyway), in 1919 and 1920, several meetings of the Provisional National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes were held here. This was the formal name at the time for the new country known as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that was established in 1918. The building feels like something of a microcosm of the wider city, it has certainly been through a lot.

Last week, I stayed up late one night pondering on how to get to the city centre of Belgrade from the airport. It’s the sort of thing that I like to get sorted out in my mind in advance (and these things usually concern me at night, which is the worse time in practical terms to have to think about such things), then I know I can sort everything else out when I’m there. The public transport system is chaotic, the city has switched to a new provider and it seems to have confused a lot of people. A new system was brought in where locals could text a number and that gave them a receipt for their journey and charged them accordingly. But, they rather forgot about visitors who didn’t have a Serbian SIM in their phone. They introduced an app instead which numerous people seem to hate judging from the on-line reviews, but it seemed to work OK for me when I downloaded it last week.

Well, I say seemed to work OK, but I was reliant on wi-fi (I have a lot of countries included in my roaming package, including the United States, but Serbia isn’t one of them) at the airport and so I bought a 90-minute Zone A ticket. This cost me 32p, which I thought was suitably cheap. After some faffing, I found where my ticket was stored on my phone and then went outside to look for the 600 bus. I had just missed one, but the next one was in 23 minutes and that was meant to take around 40 minutes to get to the city centre.

I then had around eight taxi drivers come and try and get to take me to the city centre. I think I have a generally confused look, but I tried to have an annoyed look to put anyone else coming over and that seemed to work nicely. It didn’t help I had to keep moving around to get the wi-fi connection from the airport terminal, so these eight or so taxi drivers probably thought I was desperately lost. I have a theory that you can tell about the development of a country by whether rogue taxi drivers are allowed at airports to try and get people into their vehicles at what are usually exorbitant prices. I have a lot of theories actually, but that’s besides the point here.

At this moment (and I must have forgotten to look generally annoyed), I seemed to become the new customer service point for the bus company with four people coming over to ask for help. It mystifies me why the airport hasn’t put any support, whether staff or signage, out here on how to buy tickets. Anyway, all I managed to do was pre-worry everyone because I was the only one with an app that had a ticket.

What happened next is that around 30 people boarded the bus and tried to buy a ticket using a combination of cash, card and phone, but the driver just waved them all on. None of them had a ticket to travel, so the bus company must be throwing some money away here. I had a front row seat to watch all this excitement. Then the bus drove off and the public transport app promptly crashed. I re-opened the app, which had my ticket on, but it now required an Internet signal and wouldn’t show the ticket off-line. Completely sub-optimal…. I had been pro-active here by trying to screenshot the ticket in advance, but the app prohibits that. So I was in the position of having a valid ticket but no easy way of displaying it. I had a plan, if a ticket inspector got on, although they would likely be distracted by the other passengers, but I had been able to screenshot the e-mail confirming the ticket order to show them. Fortunately (for nearly every passenger) there were no ticket inspectors.

We had to stop every three minutes for the driver to wipe down the condensation from the front window. Sometimes we didn’t stop whilst this was taking place which added a little jeopardy to the journey.

Then a little crisis happened. I had saved the maps of Belgrade to my phone and GPX works without roaming and I realised that the bus was hurtling off in the wrong direction. I thought my pre-planning had failed and the 600 bus might have two routes. The blue line is the route of the 600 bus service and the blue dot is where the bus was, which was not on the route. With only a small quiet sigh, I decided it might be useful to get my phone charger out as this might be a long night, but I was delighted to see that the bus reached the junction and then returned back the way it came. It was likely that there were just road works or the like, but it meant that soon enough we were back on track. I was relieved if I’m being honest, there’s a limit to how much adventure that I need in my life.

We arrived into Belgrade at pretty much what time I had hoped for. My 90 minute ticket meant that I could in theory get a connecting bus to the hotel, but there was no way I could access the ticket and since it was just a 30 minute walk I thought it’d be nice to see some of the city at night. In safe and sound, all rather lovely.