What to see in Belgrade, the anthill city: from the fortress tunnels to a Nazi bunker

Belgrade had to have something so that the Celts, Romans, Slavs, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Germans and Soviets wanted to sometimes conquer it and other times destroy it. To the city and its inhabitants. The Serbian capital is used to combat and fighting. It is an insubordinate and provocative city. This untamed and bellicose character is reflected in chaotic urban planning and heterogeneous architecture. Also in the way they compete and encourage their athletes, their teams; Red Star and Partizan Belgrade.

The old city, east of the Sava River and in the shadow of the Belgrade Fortress, overlooking the Danube, is eclectic. It has a bit of Vienna, Budapest, Berlin and Istanbul. In its streets there are historic and decaying buildings. There is also no shortage of squares dominated by large statues of men on horses where pigeons rest and defecate without remorse. In old Belgrade, wherever you look, you can see the twilight of something. Of a facade, of an idea. For a while. In what is known as New Belgrade, an area of ​​the city with enormous avenues designed for military parades, like those in Moscow and Beijing, concrete is the omnipresent material. It is the material that Marshal Tito used to build post-World War II Yugoslavia and to transmit greatness, power and strength. In a simple way, without fanfare. But forcefully. He also used it to build brutalist residential buildings so that its residents could live communally. For a time it worked, until the Balkan War broke out in 1992, although everything had been murky before. Today, wild grasses grow in those concrete masses in the cracked joints and their rooftops display advertising posters. In Belgrade the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets are used. Knowledge that Veljko Antonijević has, a local guide who writes me the names of the church, the mosque and the synagogue that are in the city and where Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims and Jews come to fulfill their religion.

If there is a place in Belgrade where everyone speaks the same language, it is on a basketball, tennis and soccer court. Sports that are currently championed by Nikola Jokić, Novak Djokovic and Dušan Vlahović, respectively, and that Belgraders practice in and around the fortress moat. That place at 125 meters high that acts as a balcony from which to contemplate the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers and where, long ago, the locals defended themselves from invaders.

mole tourists

If the fortress of the green mound of Kalemegdan is a visible and defensive construction of the city, its underground galleries that run through the limestone subsoil of Belgrade are invisible strategic routes that its inhabitants, sometimes its invaders, used to protect themselves, hide and flee. A human-scale anthill that the Romans excavated and drained, to prevent it from being flooded by the profusion of the Sava and Danube rivers and the underground canals. A city with a basement, but only part of it can be accessed.

Strength in question is baroque and has the shape of a star. It is a mix of Austrian fortification from the 17th century, with Serbian and Ottoman towers from the 14th century and surrounded by a Roman wall. Intramuros today is a placid environment in which there are people walking, skating, sitting on a bench and playing, as well as towers, viewpoints and iron gates that give access to steep stone stairs downwards that lead to an underground world of other time. A network of tunnels, passages and bunkers that reach 14 kilometers, built by the Romans and Tito, who had them built during the Cold War, sure that the USSR would attack socialist Belgrade for its non-alignment stance. Attack that did not occur. Today this bunker, of two heights connected by a spiral staircase, is a construction that can be seen inside and out, as it has emerged from the grass, revealing its own structure and a small hole that the military used to see what was happening outside. At the foot of the fortress there is a warehouse free from it. Construction that was a Roman lapidary and an Austrian powder magazine. Today, instead of gunpowder, there is a collection of sarcophagi, tombstones and Roman altars. For a time it was also a nightclub. Belgrade is not squeamish about its heritage, “we like it to be part of our life,” says Veljko.

Nazi bunker

The stones that the Romans polished to make these pieces of funerary art were extracted from an old quarry on which it is located today. Tašmajdan urban park. A place where the Romans also excavated and laid out a network of underground galleries. Caves that the Austrians used to extract saltpeter to make gunpowder. Some very busy passageways at certain times in the busy history of the Serbian capital. One of its doors is embedded in a rock, rusty, half-hidden by vegetation, painted and closed, except on rare occasions when it is opened for special tours. It is a place that goes unnoticed by people, but not the two Orthodox churches that are nearby, one Serbian, that of San Marcos, and another Russian, that of the Holy Trinity, and what remains of the old Radio building Serbian Television, bombed by the NATO army during the sensitive context of the conflict between Serbs and Kosovar Albanians in 1998-1999.

Once the access door to the bunker is opened, the darkness can be seen and a cool and humid interior can be sensed. It is recommended to go down to the site with some warm clothing and non-slip, closed footwear. During the First World War, some families took refuge in this bunker to protect themselves from the bombings. In World War II, it was the Nazi army that settled in this bunker to direct the occupation of the city (which lasted until October 1944), protected and unseen by either the Yugoslav partisans or the troops of the Soviet Red Army. . To adapt the bunker to their needs, the Nazis used Serbian prisoners as labor. Slaves who murdered them at the end of construction and improvement work. At that time this bunker was equipped with the best technology of the moment, in terms of conditioning, insulation and ventilation. However, the arms industry innovated and developed so much that it made this bunker no longer useful for the following war episodes that Belgrade has experienced. Today what can be seen with the light of a headlamp are long, narrow and low vaulted corridors, in which there are rooms that were the control room, the communications room, the kitchen and another that one suspects would be in the where the soldiers slept, because of the iron bed frames attached to the walls. Back on the surface, in the eyes of the mole tourist, Belgrade takes on another meaning.

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