Belgrade: The Y's Don't Have It (2/5/2007)

Belgrade, "the white city," should either consider renaming itself or investing in sandblasters. The streets are a pallet of gray: government buildings, private industries, stores, even Western chains like Nike and Benneton are all covered in a layer of petrified smoke. The Danube - the calm, blue maiden I left in Passau - waltzes through in brown and gray, soiled after three major capitals have had their way with her. The socialist smell of burnt diesel and cigarettes permeates everything - a hearty mix of Central European charm and repressive socialism. Picture, if you will, Vienna wrought by IngSoc.

Not without reason - the city has been wrecked 40 times since its founding, and constant political turnover has done little to repair it. Serbian nationalism, should you recall, sparked the powderkeg that ignited World War I. (Gavrilo Prinzip still has his a boulevard here, by the way.) More recently, that same nationalism labeled the Serbs Europe's boogeyman for much of the past two decades: While the world "expressed concern" but "did nothing," Serbia shelled my beloved Dubrovnik and pasted Bosnia for much of the early '90s. When it finished, they turned their wrath to the internal Kosovar Albanians, an ethnic cleansing that resulted in permanent UN presence, divorce of two provinces, and loss of the last name "and Montenegro." (It also, incidentally, marked the only time that countries with McDonald's have attacked another country with McDonald's.)

The Balkan tango is the most complex in Europe, and perhaps the world. The details are a delight: the Serbo-Croatian language is known as such by everyone save the Serbs and Croats. Croatian is written in Latin letters, Serbian in Cyrillic (except when it's in Latin). The Republika Srbija is not the Republika Srpska, and you best not call Herzegovina Bosnia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Greece won't recognize its northern neighbor as Macedonia. Serbs pride themselves on 12-hour days at the office, Montenegrins make excuses if you see them working. Kosovar Albanians hate the Serbs but want nothing to do with Albania. To top it off, Croatia and Bosnia are the only countries that, on a map, look like Pac-Man eating Inky.

While distrust remains, it's hard to find it on Belgrade today. Calls for a protest against the UN's Kosovo decision went largely unheeded. (I expected riots. Boring!) The shells and pockmarks that litter Bosnia are largely non-existent; the only bombed out buildings are Milosevic's military and police headquarters (a reminder?). Twentysomethings stroll the pedestrian zone with designer clothes and bleach blonde jobs. The food is pristine (I live for cevapi), and who's to argue when the city's best restaurant is named "?". And if that weren't enough, you gents will quickly discover that Belgrade is where God perfected genetics.

Belgrade bears its scars, though, but they matter increasingly less. Milosevic, exiled to become a museum piece in The Hague, is gone. The radical nationalists lose more power with every election. Tito's mausoleum continues to rot. Politics, anyway, are too much a nuisance – there's too much to do, too many laws to rewrite, too many improvements to push through. The majority of Serbs I met this week are light and bubbly, excited to get the country back to the continental mainstream. And this time, it won't take a world war to turn some heads.