Posts under ‘Serbia’

28-year-old Toulouse football supporter Brice Taton died this morning in a Belgrade hospital. Brice was critically injured on 17 September while sitting with other Toulouse fans in a cafe in central Belgrade when a group of some 30 hooligans/cowards attacked them unprovoked. This incident, along with a series of other attacks on foreigners over the [...]

The second attempt to hold a LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered) pride march in Belgrade has failed. It was announced this morning that it has been cancelled due to security fears. The police and the state can’t guarantee the safety of Serbian citizens marching for tolerance, understanding and an end to discrimination.
Far right nationalist [...]

Last weekend I spent 4 days at EXIT – an annual music festival held in the Petrovaradin fortress in Novi Sad, a city 80-odd km north of Belgrade. This year’s EXIT, which began in 2000 as a protest against the Slobodan Milosevic government, was the 10th anniversary. Around 200,000 people visited it this year over [...]

United States Vice President Joe Biden is finishing off his one-day visit to Belgrade and will soon be tucked up in his hotel room before heading down to Kosovo tomorrow. He arrived at Belgrade Airport just before 10am and was met by Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic and was then given the red carpet treatment by [...]

Photo by Andy Mettler
On Wednesday, United States Vice President Joe Biden will visit Belgrade – the most senior US official to do so in 30 years. According to the US, the visit is an opportunity to “reset” US-Serbia relations. Of course, security is going to be extremely tight. Here’s a rundown of some of those [...]

[
Natalia is a Belgrade beach beauty queen surrounded by handsome men, but Milica is always alone and sad, the men don’t realise how much she desires them. But there is a solution! Watch the advert (warning – it’s almost 8 minutes long! It’s also in English and French) and find out how Milica turned her [...]

The BBC has written about the opening of a new SOS Market branch in Belgrade. The first of these social supermarkets, which sell groceries at lower prices, opened around a month ago. They aim to make life that little bit easier for Serbia’s poorer residents who are feeling the pinch of the global economic crisis.
Not [...]

Thanks to @markowe for linking to the survey on Twitter
A new survey [in Serbian] conducted by the Tourist Organisation of Belgrade and the Belgrade Statistical office has shed light on what Belgrade’s 7,000 foreign residents think is good and bad about the city. Here’s a quick rundown of the results:
Likes

Kalemegdan
the Danube and Sava riverbanks
Skadarlija
Ada Ciganlija
Kosutnjak
the [...]

Today marks the 10 year anniversary of the NATO bombing campaign of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The campaign, in response to the conflict in Serbia’s southern province of Kosovo, lasted 78 days and nights between March 24 and June 11, 1999.  It was the first international bombing of a European country since World [...]

Dragan Markovic Palma, the mayor of Jagodina and a member of the Serbian Parliament as leader of the United Serbia party never fails to amuse with the ‘wisdom’ that sprouts from his mouth.
His most recent comment, following a parliamentary debate on the what-has-become-rather-controversial anti-discrimination law, was as follows (my own translation):
In Serbia, there are over [...]

Photo by lilit
As promised in my previous post, here’s a (quick, sorry I’m a bit under the weather today) update on the anti-discrimination law situation.
Well, unsurprisingly, the situation attracted much media interest with it being the topic on a whole host of programmes; both views for and against the withdrawal of the anti-discrimination law were [...]

The separation of the church/religious communities and the state is enshrined in the Constitution of Serbia. However, with today’s news that a draft anti-discrimination law was withdrawn [in Serbian] from adoption procedures in the Serbian Parliament under pressure from the Serbian Orthodox Church, it seems somebody didn’t get the memo.
The Serbian Orthodox Church has taken [...]

This is Katja, a friend of ‘Bibi’ over at A Yankee In Belgrade. She lives on a small piece of land on the outskirts of Belgrade and looks after some 300 stray and abandoned dogs. She looks after them mainly by herself, but she does have some volunteers who help at times.
Stray dogs are a [...]

I went to the post office this morning with the little card the postman left yesterday to pick up a parcel which was waiting for me. It was my copy of the recently published Belgrade Belongs To Me: Photographs By Boogie. It’s an engrossing photo book by one of Serbia’s best photographers, Boogie, who captures [...]

Photo by ARTS
A new survey has shed some light on the daily habits of your average Serbian citizen. Here’s a rundown of some of the published results:

The average Serbian citizen wakes up at 7 a.m.
The average Serbian teenager doesn’t wake up before 9 a.m. on weekdays
42.5 percent of Serbs aged 18-25 sleep until (or after) [...]

This photo was taken from the window of the newly-renovated Beograd department store on Terazije square. Terazije is officially considered to be the very centre of Belgrade. The green and yellow building is the Hotel Moskva (Moscow Hotel). Built in 1906, it is one of Belgrade’s most recognisable landmarks and is famed for its restaurant [...]

It’s official -  Madonna, undoubtedly the queen of pop, is returning to the Balkans following her Budva, Montenegro, concert last year. Gigs in Belgrade, Ljubljana, Bucharest and Sofia have been added to the the second half of her Sticky & Sweet Tour, which will visit 22 European cities this July and August.
Rumours have been circulating [...]

It snowed almost non-stop for several days last week in Belgrade, covering the city in inches upon inches of clean, white snow. Unfortunately, it’s not so pretty when it becomes slushy and dirty.
This is photo was taken on Saturday afternoon at Republic Square (Trg republike). It’s one of the main meeting points for friends before [...]

Photo by Violentz
According to a report (in Serbian) by the Union of Economists of Serbia, Belgrade is the cheapest capital city in the region when it comes to the price of food. The researchers recorded the prices of 28 different food products, such as bananas, yogurt, bread, apple juice, beer, flour, potatoes, chicken and toothpaste, [...]

This rather interesting building is the YU Business Centre (YU Biznis Centar) on Bulevar Mihaila Pupina in New Belgrade (Novi Beograd). New Belgrade is a 15.7 sq miles municipality over the Sava river from Belgrade’s centre on a former swamp and around 240,000 people live there. Its construction started in 1947, which still continues to [...]

SPONSORED LINKS

Djavolja Varos – which literally means ‘Devil’s Town’ – is a natural rock formation, described as earth pyramids, in southern Serbia near the Radan mountains. This Serbian government protected site has made it amongst the top 77 candidates to become one of the Official New 7 Wonders of Nature and is currently number 1 [...]

This is a typical communal entrance to a block of flats in Belgrade with individual post boxes/pigeon holes for each flat in the building. Coming from the UK, I was a bit shocked that your mail was left downstairs and not delivered through your own personal letter box in the door, especially because the boxes [...]

This is Branko’s Bridge (Brankov most) on a hazy Friday night. The bridge, built in 1957, is the second largest in Belgrade and connects the old city centre with New Belgrade (Novi Beograd) across the Sava river. Some 90,000 cars, trucks and buses cross it every day and traffic jams are a frequent annoyance for [...]

A new feature here at BalkanFile.com is a weekly Belgrade photo. I sometimes take my digital camera with me when I go outside, but more often than not it’s left at home. One thing that’s always in my pocket is my mobile phone. So, this new type of regular post, published every Sunday, will feature [...]

From the title of this post, you probably thought I was going to talk about crime, gun warfare or gangs making the streets of Belgrade a dangerous place to be. But no, what I’m referring to is ice. Apart from today, it’s been pretty darn freezing across the Balkans – Belgrade being no exception – [...]

The BBC has posted an article and video highlighting the situation for many Serb refugees living in centres in Serbia.
After fleeing the wars in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s, many Serb refugees are still living in cramped and basic conditions in ‘collective centres’ across Serbia. They can’t afford to move out and rent flats [...]

Viktor over at Belgraded has posted an interesting link to an article about Belgrade and Serbia at Ireland’s Tribune newspaper. It’s not your usual tourist targeted article and delves much deeper under the often shiny surface of the country’s capital into a much ‘darker’ world.
Viktor gives his opinion on the article which is a bit [...]

I went for a short stroll around my local neighbourhood here in Belgrade today – mainly to go to the Speak Easy coffee shop on Sveta gorska ulica and buy some muffins if I’m honest. It was about 3.30pm and it was still relatively sunny but a bit chilly as winter slowly draws in. I [...]

Today, the car which is synonymous with Serbia and the old Yugoslavia, the Yugo, will for the last time roll off the production line. The various models of the Yugo have been produced by Kragujevac-based Zastava since 1981.  Cheap, affordable and reliable (?), they soon took off across the entire Yugoslavia and even broke into [...]

Photo courtesty of JUGpress
Several photos, allegedly depicting Ratko Mladic, were posted to JUGpress’s online service yesterday. The sender claims that the man wearing a vest and sunglasses is the Hague’s most wanted indictee, General Ratko Mladic. No other information is known such as where or when the photographs were taken.
Sure, the guy does have some [...]