Dangling festive lights marking Christmas and the New Year fail to hide scars on the buildings of Belgrade, which has endured more than 40 battles throughout its troubled 7,000-year history.
Once communist leader Josip Broz Tito’s stately center of power, Beograd — “White City” in Serbian — has slowly been undergoing a face-lift after neglect since the 1990s, when NATO targeted the old Yugoslav capital over Kosovo.
Besides bombed-out towers that still stand in ruins, most buildings emerged from the 1990s with sooty frontages whose crumbling balconies and stonework pose a threat to pedestrians.
PHOTO: AFP
But the city government is beautifying Serbia’s capital in the hope tourists no longer make one of their first photo stops Kneza Milosa, the avenue lined by massive buildings that NATO’s Tomahawk cruise missiles precisely struck in 1999.
“The city is great, especially for partying, but some of the buildings need to be fixed,” said Marcus, a Swedish tourist in his 30s visiting for the first time.
Thanks to a government policy to help residents foot the bill, many streets are lined with scaffolding and workers busy sand-blasting and plastering on new facades.
“We have passed a law for the regeneration of facades — the city pays 70 percent [of the cost] and residents 30 percent. It should embellish the city in the long term,” Deputy Mayor Milan Krkobabic said.
After more than a decade of isolation under a trade blockade up until Slobodan Milosevic’s ouster in 2000, Belgrade has flourished as the engine of a country whose economy has posted growth of up to 8 percent in recent years.
Already struggling to house war refugees, Belgrade, which accounts for nearly 40 percent of Serbia’s industrial output, is bursting at its seams with an additional 30,000 job seekers each year, Krkobabic said.
Its population stood at 1.5 million in a 2001 census, but it has swelled by estimates of up to 1 million because of the influx of refugees, putting pressure notably on its residential property market and transport networks.
At least another 10,000 buildings representing 44 percent of residences were awaiting work on their facades and roofs, according to figures obtained by the state-run daily Politika.
“In the past several months, we have restored around 60 structures,” Politika quoted Boris Micanovic of the city housing authority as saying early this month.
Strategically located at the confluence of two internationally navigable rivers, Old Belgrade’s architecture reflects its turbulent past.
“As one famous architect once said: ‘There’s no more beautiful place for a city that isn’t that beautiful,’” Krkobabic said.
In the downtown area, neo-Byzantine, Ottoman Turkish and Vienna Secessionist styles are interspersed with communist-era monoliths constructed in place of historic buildings that the Nazi Luftwaffe destroyed in World War II.
“Belgrade’s face is marked with scars from past wars. The city was completely destroyed many times,” expatriate columnist Pat Andjelkovic wrote recently.
“But if you take the time to look around, you can find some striking houses that have miraculously managed to avoid fire, bombs and man’s folly,” she wrote in the newsweekly Belgrade Insight.
Many facades have since been restored with the help of old postcards, which have often helped architects to reconstruct the “ornate but often neglected ... window to the city’s soul,” Andjelkovic wrote.
“The fabulous figures, caryatids, stone heads, tile work that adorn them reflect ... the city’s soul and identity,” she said.
As well as constantly being plugged by authorities for winning the 2006 Financial Times “City of the Future” award for southeastern Europe, Belgrade has a growing reputation for its youth culture.
Around 10 percent of foreigners say they visit for fun, taking advantage of rock and Roma music festivals and New Year celebrations, the Tourist Organization of Belgrade (TOB) says.
“There are restaurants, cafes and kafanas [bistros] open all night and tourists are surprised at how relaxed they feel [despite] media obviously giving them different prejudices about Belgrade,” TOB director Jasna Dimitrijevic said.
OPTIMISTIC: A Philippine Air Force spokeswoman said the military believed the crew were safe and were hopeful that they and the jet would be recovered A Philippine Air Force FA-50 jet and its two-person crew are missing after flying in support of ground forces fighting communist rebels in the southern Mindanao region, a military official said yesterday. Philippine Air Force spokeswoman Colonel Consuelo Castillo said the jet was flying “over land” on the way to its target area when it went missing during a “tactical night operation in support of our ground troops.” While she declined to provide mission specifics, Philippine Army spokesman Colonel Louie Dema-ala confirmed that the missing FA-50 was part of a squadron sent “to provide air support” to troops fighting communist rebels in
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
ECONOMIC DISTORTION? The US commerce secretary’s remarks echoed Elon Musk’s arguments that spending by the government does not create value for the economy US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Sunday said that government spending could be separated from GDP reports, in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn. “You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s Sunday Morning Futures. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.” Doing so could potentially complicate or distort a fundamental measure of the US economy’s health. Government spending is traditionally included in the GDP because
Two daughters of an Argentine mountaineer who died on an icy peak 40 years ago have retrieved his backpack from the spot — finding camera film inside that allowed them a glimpse of some of his final experiences. Guillermo Vieiro was 44 when he died in 1985 — as did his climbing partner — while descending Argentina’s Tupungato lava dome, one of the highest peaks in the Americas. Last year, his backpack was spotted on a slope by mountaineer Gabriela Cavallaro, who examined it and contacted Vieiro’s daughters Guadalupe, 40, and Azul, 44. Last month, the three set out with four other guides
RSS