White Capital: Belgrade

After only two days that feel both long and short as time spent with great people in a great place usually does I get on the eleven o'clock bus to Belgrade. After crossing the Bosnian-Serbian border here formed by the river Drina at a small check point that doesn't carry any border tension and changing the bus in Ljubovija I am in for truly amazing views of the river we follow in its valley, it's not easy though to take photos as the bus is shaking and trees constantly get into the picture. Then suddenly for the first time since I left Northern Germany the landscape turns flat. The Serbian highway takes me through many sunflower and some melon fields until we reach Belgrade, cross the Sava and finally stop at the big and busy central bus station. My couchsurfing hosts will return from their weekend out of town only in the late afternoon, so I take a first walk through the city center. Belgrade is light, bright (doing its name justice), feels considerably bigger to me than Sarajevo and looks quite impressive with its monumental churches and government buildings, but never the less it feels welcoming to me. Once more I am a good customer of the ice-cream sellers who sit beneath their sunshades virtually everywhere in the city. Later I meet my hosts Goran and Nela at the central station and they take me to their appartment in the outskirts of the city where the hills begin. We spend a relaxing evening with home grown salad and good conversations about language, soccer, music and history.

I spend the following days enjoying the lively atmosphere of Belgrade by just walking around, visiting the fortress of Kalemegdan where the Sava joins the Danube, the huge Orthodox churches of St. Sava and St. Mark and an exhibition on the last royal families of Serbia. Many other museums are unfortunately closed, because of renovations or for unknown reason as the Ivo Andrić museum. I mentioned him before and promised some more information, he is the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature laureate and one of the most important Serbian writers. In his award winning novel "The Bridge on the Drina" he draws an epic picture of Ottoman Bosnian society and the undertaking of building a magnificent bridge, the  Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge in Višegrad. I find the book really capturing though cruel at times and it offers important background knowledge on this region. I buy an English translation in Belgrade - which adds to the weight of my backpack, but I don't want to wait until I return to Germany to read it. Later in the day I meet Nela and Goran and we always have lots to talk and joke about and as as Nela and I both are psychologists we also gain some insights on the structures of our subject in the other country. Apart from that she shows me the memorial for the national broadcasting employees that were killed by NATO bombs in 1999. The war is still present here, too.
It is still quite warm during the days, but the evenings are perfect for sitting outside, especially for having pizza on a swimming restaurant at sunset:

Although they have a lot of work I get to meet Predrag, the national director of YFU Serbia and his current German volunteer Sandra. YFU is the abbreviation of Youth For Understanding, the high school student exchange organisation I joined as a volunteer after spending my exchange year in Latvia. We find a café at the walls of the Kalemegdan and it's one of the times that make me realize ever so clearly why I am still active with YFU - and that I should see to contribute more again than I did since I started med school. For one thing, YFU Germany is huge, old, well-functioning, in a one-man-show (plus volunteers, of course) such as YFU Serbia the connection to the reasons why we do this is somehow easier to grasp. Actually the reason for YFU to come into existence more than 55 years ago was to introduce young Germans to a functioning democracy in order to enable them to help building one in their own country. And reflecting on a recent meeting in Norway and my experiences in Germany and Latvia, we come across quite some similarities between German and Serbian societies after their last war that Central European media usually leaves unmentioned. Both our countries are widely recognized as the bad guys, an attribute that eonly ever so slowly allows for some additional characteristics to be acknowledged besides the guilt. Both Serbia and Germany were faced with considerable numbers of refugees of their own nationality having to leave their homes in territories lost in the war and usually not welcomed by their neighbors in their new towns. In Predrag's words I clearly feel the hurt of being put into one corner, first bombed - with some "collateral damage" of children and other civilians killed by the NATO - and then isolated, the latter in some ways even more suffocating. Why did Germany participate in this, he asks me. I was only 14 back then, but I recall the extremely heated discussions about sending German armed forces abroad for the first time since WWII. And how we needed to be very certain that if we go abroad and bomb someone those have to be the bad guys, how the left wing government that decided to join had to overstretch many of its fundamental beliefs. How they then tried to believe that there is such a thing as a clean war, with surgically precise missiles. "Collateral damage" was elected the Unwort (something like "anti-word", bad public use of language) of the year 1999 in Germany.
Somehow, as my Serbian friend Ivana in Istanbul put it, every story in Bosnia or Serbia begins and ends with the war. I try not to stick too close to this, after all, there is much more to this region, just as there is more than Nazis to my country.

And after finishing my lemonade (fresh lemon juice squeezed into a glass of water, add sugar or honey to your own taste), my standard drink in the Balkans, and continuing the conversation with Predrag and Sandra on the way home I think that I'd really like to come here on exchange. And as I am too old for the YFU program I recommend it to everyone else: If you know some high school student interested in Southern European athmosphere and climate, Eastern European culture, rich history and great food, why not send them here?