About Belgrade

Apparently, Corbusier’s ugliest city in the most beautiful place, throughout history has very often been the most beautiful city in the most terrible place in the world. In conclusion, we could paraphrase the ‘New York Times’ from the distant year 1876. If Serbia and Belgrade (which was razed to the ground at the time) had not stood in the way of the Turkish invasion of Europe, today Germany and France, Vienna, Munich and Marseille would certainly look like him.

Milorad Pavić

I was in Belgrade for the first time (1973). I came also because I have never been in this environment, in the east of Europe. In a short time I established two things, very important for me: the food is excellent, and the approach to films is much more intellectual than in America.

Jack Nicholson

How long did you have to build when it is known that both the Germans and the Allies bombed. It’s easy for other big cities in Europe to brag about their beauty… You have a nice little zoo… They told me that at the time of the bombing, the zoo was also destroyed and that the animals had escaped into the streets, but they came back on their own… Really nice story – I don’t know if it’s true

Alfred Hitchcock

I am particularly impressed by the bright and warm atmosphere of Belgrade.

Samuel Beckett

Then I needed meetings with people who wouldn’t treat me superficially like it happened to me here, with people who sit for hours at the table and socialize, sing some songs, and always have an awful lot to say. That Belgrade period simply healed my soul…

Erskine Caldwell

Today, the city is overflowing with contrasts and culture: on the one hand, gravelly, gray, and raw, and on the other, serene, cobbled and quiet. At the same time, it is a place for coolness and thrills.

New York Times

Belgrade has many tunnels and hiding places beneath its surface, a legacy dating back a thousand years, during which everyone from the Byzantines to the Turks wanted to dominate the city.

The Star

Recovering from the Balkan unrest, Belgrade has become a thoroughly modern city with many fantastic features that set it apart from other European cities.

The Sun

Belgrade is a low-budget New York.

Momo Kapor

​Where is the heart of Belgrade?
Everywhere and nowhere.

 

It is hidden in the elegant casualness of the shoe shiner who will say: “Give what you can!”, in the philosophically harmonious relaxation of his old men who have passed so many wars over their heads, in the morning joke that will transform a gloomy office morning in the trolleybus with its cheerful burst, in friendship a waiter who does not shy away from sitting down with a guest under the “Lipa” and drinking a beer, in the street crowd where you will rarely feel like a stranger, no matter where you come from, in the beauty of the scratched walls that no one whitewashes, and on which a touching fresco is painted street fates, love, curses, insults, wit, football results, names – all this on the plaster, under which warnings still peek out: Checked – min njet! Everyone to the elections! We give life, we don’t give Trieste! – and above all the license plate of the long-lost insurance institute “Sava”, which failed to insure anything, least of all itself, and the faint traces of changed street name plates.

The spirit of Belgrade is hidden in the unique chaos of its green markets, and above all in the supple gait of Belgrade women. Belgrade women on the street – for me it’s a fantastic modern ballet, with no other sound than the tapping of the heels on their shoes! Pale, suddenly grown city girls, grown up on the asphalt, brought up by the longing gazes of passers-by, independent, impudent and polite at the same time, with the innate elegance of witty fashionistas and cunningly hidden poverty – they are the most beautiful and luxurious spectacle that Belgrade offers to foreigners, as long as they do not disappear somewhere, as if at someone’s secret beckoning, and the streets remain disconsolately empty and bare.

The spirit of Belgrade is, after all, also in the feeling that you are at home, that you cannot fail because you are among your own, that you can always and at any time borrow something small, love, a roof over your head and a little necessary complicity before dawn…

That spirit gives birth to bold verticals, new neighborhoods spring up from it, and old ones fall into disrepair, it bridges rivers and clears tangles of rusted tracks between whose thresholds grass grows, in order to provide itself with the widest possible view of the rivers and the sky. He plays with architecture and urban laws.

Photographed from the air, that city will never attract the curious beauty collector, no matter how skilfully painted.

Simply, he is not photogenic! But it will do something completely different: it will awaken an almost physical pain of longing, to those who have spent even just a few days on its streets, just as a photo of a former love can torture us to death.

The plan of its streets becomes something like a topographical map of our heart. That city will bewitch us with its charm, and it will never reveal the secret code of that strange love, for which we do not know the reason. We will forever remain his voluntary prisoners, who chose Belgrade among the countless cities of masterpieces to live out the only life that was given to them.

Momo Kapor