Surprises in Belgrade, Serbia

Our plane from Rome to Belgrade, Serbia,, was three hours late. The Serbian government had shut down its airport to rehearse for its upcoming military parade. Despite the ominous delay, I enjoyed the flight. It was a cloudless day. We saw the contours of both Italian coasts and the  Croatian islands.  Over Bosnia and Herzegovina, we were low enough to see tiny ancient bridges over rivers! The plains of Serbia looked as flat as central Iowa, but without the grids and monotone.  In fact, from the air, Serbian farms looked more like an Iowan crazy quilt of green, yellow, brown, and purple stripes and triangles. Serbia is still a land of family farms and rich crop diversity.

When we arrived in Belgrade, Serbia, we had already spent time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Turkey, and Greece. The five-day trip to Serbia came in the middle of a month in central Italy. I had certain expectations. Some of them were met: delicious grilled vegetables, cucumber, and tomato salads. Orthodox Churches. Tall people. Cafes for whiling away days with coffee, cigarettes, and friends. But what I will remember about our time in Serbia is the surprises.

In Belgrade, we stayed a block from the Church of Saint Sava, reputed to be the largest Orthodox Church in the world. Construction on it began in 1935, was halted during the Communist era, and was completed in 2004. Its gold images and soaring ceilings are imposing and impossible to capture in photos. They reminded you that in post-90s Serbia, the Orthodox church and state are interwined.

We did find Belgrade’s one remaining synagogue and the last of Belgrade’s 273 Ottoman-era mosques, near the Jewish Historical Museum.  We had a Halal lunch at a restaurant there, adorned with Palestine solidarity stickers.

 

Jewish Museum of Belgrade, Serbia 

I heard that the Jewish Historical Museum had recently added security measures that included an application questionnaire.   We were not given a questionnaire, but we were questioned. The caretaker asked. “Are you part of the Jewish Community?” Yes. He flipped through the many stamps in our passports. Did you visit Jewish museums in all these countries? Most, yes.

I noticed that leaflets on the bulletin board—announcing community gatherings and a showing of Fiddler on the Roof—had dates as late as September 2023, but none later. The staff, meeting in another room, left us alone to take in the exhibit.  The narrative began with ancient migrations, first settlements in the 17th century, and the establishment of a Jewish community in the 1860s. It documented the predominant role of Jews in labor activism and the communist organizations of the early 20th century. There was a panel celebrating the Serbian Jews who fought Franco in Spain, and the Jewish partisans who were heroic during the Nazi era. As in other European museums, it documented the devastation of the Jewish community under Nazi occupation, including mass deportations, genocide in concentration camps in Yugoslavia and the surrounding region, and the destruction of Jewish neighborhoods and five synagogues in Belgrade. The surviving sixth synagogue, built in 1925, was used as a brothel by the Nazis. It was reconsecrated after the Holocaust. In the 50s and 60s, those Jews who remained or returned were engaged in constructing a socialist society. Belgrade was home to one of Europe’s most famous Jewish artists, Nandor Gild. He survived the Holocaust, but his parents did not. As a youth, he did not do well in school, so his father sent him to learn stone masonry. He became a world-renowned sculptor. His Holocaust memorial sculptures at Dachau and Mauthausen concentration camps are world-renowned. He was involved with the museum, blessing them with small sculptures and replicas of his most famous works. He died in Belgrade in 1997. There was no post-90s revision of the socialist content of the museum,  which makes it an interesting place to visit in itself.

The Jewish museum, with its unreconstructed socialist and internationalist content and post-October 2023 concern for security, was just one of Belgrade’s surprises.

Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade, Serbia  

The complex of buildings that make up the Museum of Yugoslavia area is on a steep hill. As you climb, you pass fountains and face a grand building with an arresting facade depicting three warriors and three workers. There is a sculpture garden of nudes in various vulnerable positions, and a clothed Tito. The permanent exhibit is in a low, unassuming building. At the top of the hill is the “house of flowers” that houses Tito’s tomb.  We arrived shortly after the museum opened and stayed till closing time, pausing for lunch at the only option, the posh Hyde Park restaurant, where we both swore we ate the best mushrooms of our lives.

The Museum of Yugoslavia did not lose its funding source like the analogous museum in Sarajevo.  It was able to preserve the original artifacts put together by Tito. A team of historians and art scholars now presents them in Serbian and English. Their interpretation is not opposing the communist era, like the Museums in Albania, nor absent, like the National Museum in Sarajevo, nor a preservation of the Tito-era narrative like the Jewish Museum of Belgrade. Instead, it is a thoughtful presentation of historical documents that allows visitors to draw their own conclusions. This makes it an excellent exhibit.

It begins with artifacts from the early 20th-century international labor and communist movements. A 1936 woodcut by renowned social realist artist Djordje Andrejevic-Kun, told the story of workers at the Bor copper mine in Serbia in the early 20th century. The regime banned the art, but Andrejevic-Kun’s work was embraced under Tito. It sent me down a rabbit hole to learn about the mine in other eras. During the Nazi occupation, it was a work camp, and during the Tito era, a state-owned economic engine of the regime. Privatized again in the 1990s, it is a source of worker exploitation and pollution today, implicating the Chinese company that runs it, the Europeans eager to expand the exploitation, and the Serbian government unwilling to regulate it.

 

Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement 

The bulk of the archive, however, consists of gifts given to Tito by world leaders. The Yugoslav leader broke with Stalin in 1948 and became a leader of the non-aligned movement.  The Soviet bloc and the United States continued to court Tito, and gifts from all over the planet reflect Tito’s ability to play the world. Nixon, for example, gave Tito a piece of the moon.  There are hundreds of items, from Global South leaders and organizations, including this ancient harp replica, given to Tito in 1979, by the Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of the Arab Socialist  Ba’ath Party of Iraq.

The museum is misnamed. We still need one that tells the diverse story of Yugoslavia, bringing together oral interviews of those old enough to remember  I’d love to see the evolution/devolution of Tito policies, with interviews highlighting what came to be known as Titoism — a specific economic and political system that did not exist elsewhere. Its problems and progress, crimes and innovations have much to teach us. The temporary exhibit was about Veliko Vlahovic, a key ideologue in the 1950s of the workers’ self-management principles that came to be known as Titoism. It would have been great to learn more about this system and how it changed over time.

Non-Aligned Movement 

Veliko Vlahovic’s exhibit described his work in the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s. He organized the 1961 meeting in Belgrade of leaders of non-aligned nations. The exhibit includes photos of that gathering.

We also learned about the Non-Aligned Movement at Belgrade’s Museum of African Art, which may be the only African Art museum in Europe that began as an anti-colonial project rather than a showcase of government and/or private looting. The museum was a collaborative project of Yugoslav diplomats and African leaders of the non-aligned movement to expand appreciation in Yugoslavia of the arts from Ghana, Mali, Zambia, and Kenya. A current curator, Ana Sladojeviċ, has updated the museum’s narrative, pointing out that the Yugoslav founders had a kind of “color blind” attitude toward their work, believing that because the Slavic region did not participate in the Atlantic Slave Trade or the carving up of Africa in the 19th century, their collecting and curating was without a race lens. They did not understand how Yugoslavia benefited from whiteness in the global system and how they personally had absorbed European racist ideas. Still, tit felt different from places like the Latin American art museum in Cádiz, Spain, we visited, and the African Art Museum in Zurich, Switzerland, which we skipped. It was a breath of freer air.

Veliko Vlahovic and student-led Liberation Movements of the 1930s and 60s in Belgrade 

Back at the Museum of Yugoslavia, we learned about Veliko Vlahovic’s involvement in two generations of student movements.  Born in Montenegro, Vlahovic came to Belgrade to study engineering at the University in 1933. He joined the student movement fighting for the University’s autonomy.  From January to March 1935, there was a concentration camp in Visegrad for the students who had been convicted for their political activity at the University of Belgrade, where dozens of students were kept, including Vlahovic. A student strike began on April 3, 1936, at the Universities of Belgrade, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, and ended on April 28, when the students’ demands were met.

Thirty years later, in 1968, students again demanded autonomy and protested police brutality.  Their chant was,  “Down with the red bourgeoisie.” They asked Vlahovic to address them.  [He]… “was greeted with applause, and slogans such as “Veljko, lead us.” However, there was a major clash in which Viahovic was injured, as well as over 20 police officers and 130 students…

The museum narrative notes that the story of Vlahovic’s student activism has implications today, a reference to the current student-led anti-corruption movement.

2025 Student Movement in Belgrade, Serbia 

On the day we arrived in Belgrade, students carried out a huge mobilization. There was also a government-sponsored counter-protest. If our plane had not been three hours late, we would have encountered them. I’m not sure if that might have been part of why we were late.

We encountered the Bloody Hand movement when we took a wrong turn looking for the statue of Gavrilo Princip and ended up in Princip Park and the economics building of Belgrade University. The door to the university building was covered in 9 by 5 sheet of paper with red handprints. We found an explanatory leaflet

A  railroad station canopy collapsed in Novi Sad in November 2024, killing 16 people. The canopy, built in 1964, was being refurbished with the assistance of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. Students uncovered speed-ups and shortcuts in the construction of the trestle. They did not see it as an accident or as the only incident of government corruption. The movement has expanded its reach to include farmers, teachers, and high school students. They want Investments in education and other social services.

College students in Belgrade, struck like their counterparts in the 1930s, won an increase in funds for the university. And, once again, their vision was/is greater than the university, and their alliances reach across many sectors of society.  Since last September, there have been general strikes, farm tractor protests, a student march from Belgrade to Novi Sad, and much more.

The Belgrade, Serbia, government, the students, and the Legacy of Gavrilo Princip   

Nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo on June 28 1914, and went down in popular history as the one who catapulted World War I. Princip has been admired, reviled, ignored, and embraced in the former Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo, the Yugoslav monarchy erected a statue, embracing him as a liberator. The Nazi’s took it down. The Titoists put up a plaque lauding him as an anti-imperialist. In the 1990s, the Bosniaks replaced the plaque with one that just said: This happened here.

In 2014, Serbian East Sarajevo erected a new statue of Princip in a children’s park to mark the 100th anniversary, and in Visegrad, the Srpska government is currently glorifying him as a Serb nationalist. In Belgrade, an identical statue went up in 2015, but ten years later, the official embrace is subdued. Perhaps that is because on June 28, 2025, 111 years to the day of the Archduke assassination, the student movement held one of its biggest anti-government protests with 140,000 people participating—an action met with police repression.

 The Museum of the 1990s in Belgrade, Serbia 

I was eager to visit the Museum of the 1990s, but also trepidatious. I expected something like the narratives in Visegrad, where the massacres of Bosnians are denied and the Serbians are only remembered as valiant. But instead, the museum was clear-eyed and strong on context, with a superb section on the economic forces that led to the wars. It did not deny massacres or the word genocide. It was clear in its numbers: While Serbs died and experienced human rights abuses, the Bosnian suffering was exponentially more devastating, implicating Serbian nationalism. But we also learned that in 1992, 20,000 Serbs gathered in the square to protest the siege of Sarajevo: They created a gigantic black armband from reams of black construction paper. Women in Black in Belgrade also lay down in the streets to protest Serbian war crimes. I visited six 1990s museums in Sarajevo, but heard nothing about these protests.

The Museum of the 1990s considered what was lost for everyone when Yugoslavia broke up. It put Yugoslav events into a global context.  The museum has international funding from NGOs in other parts of Europe. It does not include the personal testimonies that make the museums in Sarajevo and Mostar so moving. You should visit those, too. Together, they tell a full story,

Outside the museum, we found an empty hand memorial sculpture with two opposing explanatory plaques, one to remember all those lost in the 1990s, and the other for the defenders of the homeland.

 

Flotillas and Empty Chairs

On our last day, we encountered two more surprising things that encapsulate the divisions and reality of Belgrade.  We wanted to see the river. We didn’t have much time, so we raced down the hill, weaving between all the massive private buildings to find the public way along the Danube. On our way, we passed a row of empty chairs on the sidewalk. People were setting up a sound system. Time was tight, so we didn’t wait to see what it was.

We arrived at the river just in time to see an armed flotilla of Russian and Chinese-built warships, practicing for the military parade. (The September 20 parade would not just be a show of strength, but also a display of Serbia’s military alliances: Russian, Chinese, Israeli, and French). On our way back up the hill, I heard a sonic boom. I crouched to the ground with my eyes closed.  Dave looked up and watched the MiG-29 military jet fly low above the downtown buildings

We got back to the sidewalk with the empty chairs. There was now a crowd of people. A young child was speaking, holding a homemade sign. Everyone looked solemn. They were gathered to protest the lack of emergency services, which had led to deaths, symbolized by empty chairs. We watched as they sang a song and released live doves.

The warship flotilla, military plane, and empty chairs protest showcased the upside-down reality of the Serbian regime, which, like the US, prioritizes militarism at the expense of human needs. But the Serbian people are organized, and they have a recent history—1914, 1936, 1968, 1992, and now 2025—of people’s movements from which to draw inspiration.

In Serbia, the tactics and symbols of people’s movements change, but the desire for freedom and justice is constant.

 

 

This essay about a visit to Belgrade, Serbia, in September 2025 is part of a series. In October 2023, my spouse David and I sold our house in Minneapolis, MN. USA. Since then, we have been traveling the world. I write a blog about each place, with a historian’s eye and an internationalist lens, wondering how memory can liberate the present.