Belgrade Travel Guide

Zemun is the one place in Belgrade worth half a day, and for a single reason: it barely looks like the same city as old Belgrade. From the eighteenth century to 1918 this was the southern border town of the Habsburg Empire, facing Ottoman Belgrade across the river for centuries, and it was only incorporated into Belgrade in 1934. Its deeper origin is the Celtic settlement of Taurunum, a Roman military post on the Danube limes. Because it developed independently, its street widths, facade colours and building heights kept a Central European small-town character rather than the socialist-period look of Belgrade. Gardoš hill is the high point of the district. The Millennium Tower, opened on 20 August 1896, stands 36 metres tall on a hill about 66 metres above the Danube. It was the southernmost of seven monuments raised for the thousandth anniversary of Hungarian settlement in the Carpathian Basin, and its style is eclectic, mostly Romanesque. Below it the medieval fortress survives only as angular towers and wall stubs; in the 1521 siege of Belgrade it was the last stand, and the Sajkasi garrison stationed there was killed to a man. From the top you get the most complete single frame of the Belgrade metropolitan area: the confluence of the Danube and Sava, the slab blocks of New Belgrade to the south, and the red roofs of Zemun directly below. It is also the clearest way to read the structure of the city. Zemunski Kej, the 1.5-kilometre quay along the Danube, is the most active public space here and the centre of the freshwater fish restaurants. The confluence yields carp, catfish, pike and zander (smudj), cooked as whole spit-roasted carp, thick Serbian fish chorba, and grilled freshwater fish with roasted peppers, a cuisine specific to confluence towns and quite different from inland Serbia. A half-day loop works like this: start at the Zemun open market in the morning, where the Matica fish stalls sell live and smoked catch that supplies the quay restaurants; then follow the cobbled lanes up into the Gardoš quarter, where ochre and terracotta facades and the towers of both the Orthodox and Catholic churches sit above the roofline; climb the tower for the panorama; and come back down to the quay for dinner. The cobbled lanes are hostile to modern vehicles, so walking is simply the best way through.

Kalemegdan is the reason Belgrade exists. The headland commands the point where the Sava flows into the Danube, and whoever holds the crossing holds the trade, so no army could afford to give it up. It was destroyed and rebuilt more than forty times, each conqueror building on the wreckage of the last. One stretch of wall in the Upper Town is the whole fortress in miniature: Roman, medieval Serbian, Ottoman and Austrian stonework biting into each other. The earliest readable layer is Roman. The Celtic Scordisci fortified the ridge in the third century BCE, Rome annexed it in 75 BCE, and the Fourth Flavian Legion arrived in 86 CE and built a square castrum over the Upper Town, guarding the settlement called Singidunum. The rectangular foundation and the remains of a four-angled tower are still visible below the northwest wall. In 1403 Despot Stefan Lazarevic made Belgrade the capital of medieval Serbia and rebuilt it at scale; his chronicler Constantine the Philosopher left a firsthand account of the city as ruined before that reconstruction. The Ottomans then held it from 1521 to 1867, and the Austrians reshaped the defences into modern bastioned form between 1718 and 1739. The name itself is Ottoman Turkish: kale for fortress, meydan for the field where troops drilled and fought. The one thing to see is Ruzica Church, which turned weapons into light. It began as an Austrian gunpowder magazine and was consecrated as a church in 1925, with its chandeliers, candelabra and metal icons cast at the Military Technical Institute in Kragujevac from melted rifle and pistol bullets, spent shell casings and sabres. A city that made erasure its building method ended up turning weapons into light. In the Lower Town, Nebojsa Tower was built around 1460 by the Hungarians as an artillery platform, became an Ottoman prison after 1739, and was restored into a four-floor multimedia museum in 2010. Its most remembered prisoner belongs to the whole region: Rigas Feraios, Greek writer and revolutionary, was strangled here in 1798 for imagining a freer Balkans. On the highest plateau stands the Victor, Pobednik, raised in 1928 to a design by Ivan Mestrovic, holding a sword and a falcon and serving as the city's symbol. After sunset the lawns fill with people out for a walk and the rivers turn copper, a ritual this city repeats every day.

Knez Mihailova is Belgrade's main street, about a kilometre long, running from Terazije northwest through Republic Square to Kalemegdan Park and the fortress. The street was not grown but planned. Emilijan Josimovic's 1867 regulation scheme pulled a string of alleys into a single proper street, with work beginning in spring 1869; in 1870, two years after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenovic III, the city officially named it after him, replacing the Ottoman-era name Delijska, the only street name in Belgrade surviving from that period. It follows the central grid of Roman Singidunum and corresponds to one of the settlement's main access roads, the cardo. The black granite paving slabs came from Jablanica and were laid when the street became a pedestrian zone on 20 October 1987; the same works planted an oak avenue down the middle, installed vintage-style candelabra, and set a white Venac marble drinking fountain sculpted by Aleksandar Deroko in memory of the old Delijska fountain that stood elsewhere, described as a monument to the old fountain. When the old pavement was lifted, a plaque to the youth work brigades who rebuilt the street in 1949 was found, and the two plaques now stand side by side. The buildings cluster between the late 1870s and the 1920s. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, built 1923-24 in Academism with Secession elements to a 1912 scheme, fronts a pyramidal sculpture marking Belgrade's geographic coordinates and altitude, which has also attracted Freemason speculation. The Srpska Kruna hotel of 1869, Romanticism and then the most modern hotel in the city, is now the Belgrade City Library. The Grcka Kraljica coffee shop of 1835, originally the Despotov Han inn, is among the oldest preserved buildings on the street. The Hajduk Veljko tavern is worth a mention: in 1896 this was where Belgraders first heard a phonograph, and in 1906 it became the city's first cinema. The Instituto Cervantes, the Goethe-Institut and the Institut francais also sit here. In 1964 the street became the first protected spatial cultural-historical unit in Belgrade, and in 1979 it was raised to a national Spatial Cultural-Historical Unit of Exceptional Importance. Come in the evening. Belgrade's korzo tradition is precisely to walk the street, be seen, exchange news and watch the fashions. Rather than ticking off individual facades, walk it once in the raking light of dusk and then turn into Kalemegdan for the sunset. One mistranslation worth correcting: the western end of the street is Republic Square, Trg Republike, not 'Terazije Square' as some sources render it.