The Purple Culture Guide to Serbia

Chapter 1: First Impressions

Serbia hits you first as a kind of pleasant visual static. There is no single, obvious postcard image that sums it up, and that's exactly the point. If you've come from the orderly grid of a Western European city center, the first thing you'll notice is that everything seems slightly untidy, slightly in progress, slightly held together with good intentions and duct tape. But look closer, and you'll see that the untidiness has a rhythm to it. There's a grand boulevard that hasn't been repainted since the 1980s, but next to it is a gleaming modernist tower that's been up for a few years. An ancient Orthodox church sits in a courtyard behind a bus station, its frescoes glowing, and three streets over a brutalist concrete block is covered in graffiti that ranges from the political to the poetic. Nothing announces itself as "the official sight", and that's the first surprise: Serbia doesn't perform for you, and it doesn't ask for your approval.

The most common wrong assumption people bring with them is that Serbia is a "poor" country. It's not exactly that. The better word is uneven. There's real wealth in parts of Belgrade, but it's flashy and new, sitting uncomfortably next to a pensioner selling handmade lace at a bus stop. There's a deep infrastructure deficit — potholes, rusting buses, buildings that look shell-shocked — but the people in them are often educated, switched-on, and quick to laugh about the absurdity of it