Belgrade’s secret bars

It is so dark that I can’t see more than a couple of inches ahead of me. My hand strokes its way along a cold, iron bannister and I shuffle slowly up the narrow stone staircase, feeling for each new step with my toes. “I think it might be on the next floor,” my friend, a Belgrade native, says from somewhere above me. “I’m not sure though. I’ve only been here once.”

We are halfway up a private apartment block on Sremska Street, on our way to a bar called Tijuana, one of the Serbian capital’s many secret drinking dens.

The city has plenty of bars in which tourists can sit beneath branded Tuborg umbrellas and pick hearty Slavic stews from laminated picture menus. The locals, however, like to drink somewhere a little more exclusive. So exclusive, in fact, that most of the bars they frequent don’t have anything as obvious as a sign – or, in many cases, even a name.

When we reach the landing, I manage to find a light switch and turn it on. Other than the metal grille of the building’s communal lift shaft, there’s nothing to see but a couple of doors that, you would assume, led to people’s private apartments. “I think this is it,” says my friend, knocking tentatively on one of them.

The door opens and a face peers round. A short conversation in Serbian follows and we’re ushered into a dimly lit space that would look exactly like someone’s sitting room – were it not for the fact that it is filled with young Serbs, drinking and chatting at mismatched tables and chairs. Decor is minimal. Light comes from two chandeliers and some glowing red stars that hang from the ceiling, giving everything beneath a warm, orangey-red tinge. A couple of mirrors and a few portrait photographs are the only adornments. There’s a bustling bar counter in the room where the kitchen should be, and in the hallway that leads to the bathroom a young couple break off from kissing to dance to New Order on the parquet floor. It feels as though I’ve gatecrashed a cool neighbour’s housewarming party.

Opinions vary as to why Belgrade is home to so many speakeasy-like bars – located in apartment blocks, behind shops and even, in the case of Andergraund on Pariska, in churches. One girl I chat to thinks they’re a way for entrepreneurial types in what’s still a very poor country to make extra money without necessarily paying taxes; another man puts it down to a Belgradian thirst for newness and exclusivity. Many say they have their origins in the anti-Milosevic movement of the early 1990s, when dissidents needed to meet somewhere secret to discuss their opposition to the Serbian dictator.

This is disputed by Gordana Plamenac, chief executive of the National Tourism Organisation of Serbia, who remembers what it was like going out in the city during the years of dictatorship. “The opposition to Milosevic may have been ineffective but it was open and widespread. People didn’t need to hide away to express their views,” she tells me. “Milosevic’s cronies, though, were well known for visiting certain bars and restaurants in the city, so my friends and I – along with a lot of other young people in Belgrade – actively sought out new places so that we wouldn’t have to have anything to do with them.”

They’d have no doubt been quite safe in Kafana Pavle Korcagin, up an alleyway close to the city’s main theatre. It’s unlikely that hardline Serbian nationalists would have wanted to drink in a bar that celebrates, albeit in a gloriously kitsch way, Tito-era Yugoslavia. There are plenty in Belgrade that do, though. When I walk in, the atmospheric three-room tavern is absolutely packed. People of all ages squeeze around rough wooden tables covered with red-and-white checked cloths. The walls and low ceilings are covered with Yugoslav flags, faded propaganda posters and hammer-and-sickle motifs, and portraits of Tito, Lenin and Che Guevara look down sternly at those knocking back bottles of beer and glasses of fiery rakija.

In the middle, somewhere amid the drinkers, a guitarist, bassist, accordion player and fiddler are making the crowd bounce by belting out traditional Serbian folk songs. Everyone is bellowing out the words. Men whirl past me with their arms held aloft and a girl climbs up on a chair and bobs in time to the music while clinking glasses with everyone who passes. It’s genuinely stirring. Several times, strangers’ arms are draped around my shoulders as I’m included in another swaying singalong to some fiddle-fuelled ballad about love, loss and suffering at the hands of the Turks. “It’s great drinking music,” I remark to my friend, as a moustachioed man hugs me tightly and rattles my eardrums. “All Serbian music is drinking music,” she replies pithily.

Those listening to the electro-tinged DJs at former riverside warehouse KC Grad, tucked beneath Belgrade’s Brankov Most bridge, might disagree. As, no doubt, would the hands-in-the-air revellers at Povetarac, a club in an old ship on the River Sava, where dancing takes priority over hanging around the bar.

We arrive by taxi and are dropped off on a dark, tree-draped stretch of road beside which heaps of industrial piping lie piled up behind rusting mesh fences. Povetarac is not the only club down here and music of all kinds – from British punk to Teutonic techno – seeps out into the crisp night air. On our way down to the river, we pass groups of girls in smart black dresses adjusting their make-up in the back of dilapidated Yugos. “They’re on their way to the fancy clubs,” my friend tells me. “They’re hoping to meet a rich tourist – or a gangster.”

On our second night in Belgrade, my friend and I team up with Milan, a 23-year-old student who works for the Belgrade Greeters, a voluntary organisation dedicated to guiding clueless visitors – such as me – around places only the locals know about. This is a godsend in a city where street signs (in Cyrillic) bear absolutely no relation to the Latin-alphabet names given on maps, and signs outside the best bars simply don’t exist.

He takes us first to the Federal Association of Globetrotters (also known as the World Traveller’s Club), in the basement of an upmarket apartment building on Bulevar Despota Stefan. I’d never have found it myself. We ring the bell, walk in past the residents’ letterboxes and descend the stairs to a gorgeously eclectic and laid-back bohemian bar. Here, sitting around an old sewing-machine table and beneath gilt-framed family portraits, we drink cocktails to a soundtrack of 1930s American jazz.

Then, after quick plates of salty cevapcici, small rolls of mixed mincemeat served with onions and warm bread, in a Bosnian fast-food restaurant, we head to the city’s central Republic Square.

Here, Milan leads us through an unmarked doorway alongside a clothes shop, through a chipboard tunnel and into the soupy blackness of an unlit courtyard. The rectangle of light that eventually appears at one end leads into a tiny, wood-clad bar; the warm interior of which feels like the hidden chamber of a rosewood treasure chest. Islamic art-inspired decor – ceramic wall mounts, copper jars and brass trays on the tables – glitters under buttery lights and seems strangely at odds with several dusty Soviet-era televisions and radios on shelves above the noisy drinkers’ heads. I ask Milan what this Maghreb-meets-eastern bloc shebeen is called. “Queen’s Park,” he tells me.

It’s these extreme, often jarring, contrasts that make Belgrade such a fascinating place to spend a weekend. Everything from its architecture, with baroque finery and communist brutalism (often in the same row of buildings), to its eclectic nightlife speaks of a city that is comfortable with its position on Europe’s cultural faultline. In parts sophisticatedly western, in others proudly eastern European, Belgrade is poised to become, in the next few years, the confirmed capital of an EU nation.

The investment and opportunities this will create will certainly add to a city that already has a boutique hotel worthy of the name in Townhouse 27, and high-end gourmet restaurants such as Iguana, Kristal and Chez Tristan.

But increased legislation and rising prices may well squeeze out the fiercely independent, quasi-legal drinking dens that make Belgrade such a fabulous alternative to Europe’s other major cities. Go soon, or they’ll be even harder to find.

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Details

Even if you have the address, it can be extremely hard to find Belgrade’s best bars, so it makes sense to use a free volunteer guide from Belgrade Greeters (www.belgradegreeters.rs)

If you would like to follow a similar itinerary to the above, ask them to take you to:

Tijuana (Second floor, Sremska 9)

Andergraund (Pariska 1a)

Kafana Pavle Korcagin (Cirila i Metodija 2a)

KC Grad (Bbelra e Krsmanovi 4 www.gradbeograd.eu)

Povetarac (on the River Sava; www.povetarac.com)

Federal Association of Globetrotters (Bulevar Despota Stefan 7; www.usp-aur.rs)

Queen’s Park (off Trg Republike)

JAT Airways (www.jat.com) flies direct to Belgrade from several major European cities. Townhouse 27 (www.townhouse27.com) has doubles from €190. For more general information go to www.serbia.travel/