Perusing rival newspapers not long ago, I stumbled across a glowing review of an east European city I happen to know rather intimately. The review, published by a respectable London daily, announced that the city in question was "re-emerging" after years of dismal deprivation and held promise as a "new Prague".
Not only had the city progressed from cold to "hot", l learned, but it even possessed the very hottest "underground" clubbing scene on the continent. The reviewer raved on and on about one night in this exotic metropolis. He described in lurid detail how he fell flagrantly drunk in an unlicensed pub before stumbling, lost, down cobbled alleys until sympathetic locals ferried him back to his western hotel just short of dawn.
To one who lives there, Belgrade in this embarrassing portrait was almost entirely unrecognisable.
Almost. One bit rang a bell: the obvious influence of Serbia's national tourist board, which, in a bid to attract western tourists to Belgrade - an uphill task - has identified clubbers as an important target group. What a distortion and what a pity. Let the clubbers club, but in my experience Belgrade offers more extraordinary sensations than deafness complemented by a late morning hangover.
It should be enough for this wild trading hub on the Danube's bank just to be itself: ancient meeting point of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman worlds, improbable amalgam of Byzantine and Baroque, antique and modern, cosmopolitan capital of the famously stubborn yet contagiously hospitable Serbs.
No nationality needs an image consultant more urgently than the Serbs do and surely this is why their tourism authority wants to promote the capital as a party town. What seems more antithetical to Serbia's black reputation for corruption, assassination and war crimes than a merry invitation to frolic carefree in Belgrade's discotheques?
Moreover it is true that Belgraders have long sought to combat evil with fun, Communist Party piety with individualist decadence, myopic nationalism with free-spirited rock and roll, even Nato bombs with all-night parties on the city's bridges during the Kosovo war.
Overlooking the city from the western end of one of those very bridges - crossing over the Sava river from rationalist, Communist-built "New Belgrade" to the crush of humanity on the old side - I can only reflect on how catastrophically this tactic of combating evil with fun has fallen short.
The panorama is both beautiful and grim. The old city rises impressively on the far bank, an eye-popping maze of ancient stone, gilded towers and modern glass crammed into difficult street networks devised under Turkish rule. But bits of it are smashed, still - by the American bombs that fell six years ago - and no one has lifted a finger to sweep up the mess.
The Sava flows by, a murky ribbon of blue that rounds a bend and feeds into the bigger, murkier Danube. Moored at the river's edge are the splavovi, rafts that serve as floating cafes by day and discotheques by night.
They make a pleasant sight and provide a reminder of Belgrade's cultural buoyancy. But just upstream I also spy a vast and decrepit Roma colony, inhabited by countless dispossessed and undocumented people. Hundreds? Thousands? In the heart of Serbia's centre of wealth, they dwell in a fetid city of their own, constructed entirely of other people's rubbish, spare bits of cardboard, plastic bags and string.
We are only two hours by car from the European Union but the scene suggests what might become of Vienna if it suddenly absorbed a squalid suburb of Kinshasa. The weird proximity of fun and evil, gaiety and suffering, cannot be called distinctively Serbian or even Balkan. But somehow this city intensifies it.
It hides behind a landscape painting hanging in Mamma Mia, one of my favourite Italian restaurants. You may be delighting in your meal but if you reach up and tilt the frame a bit: behold a bullet hole in the wall, a reminder that Belgrade's late police chief was assassinated at your table. One slug through the brain.
It hangs in the air above Monument, a favourite downtown café for the few Belgraders who prefer smooth cappuccino to the ubiquitous Turkish brew. Can one sit here comfortably knowing that in March 2003, on a sunny day like today, a sniper's bullet flew in the air overhead, on the way to striking and killing Zoran Djindjic, the prime minister, half a block away?
It flares at the core of traditional celebrations - weddings and births. On sweltering summer Saturdays, newlyweds tumble every few minutes out the front doors of neighbourhood council buildings throughout the city. As they appear, raucous Gypsy brass bands drown them in untamed music: screaming trumpets, whooping trombones and booming tubas. These swarthy, horn-wielding beggars are not to everyone's liking but they are a standard, unavoidable element of such celebrations. They practice what must be the closest thing to musical mugging known on the planet. They all but accost newlyweds when they appear and they give identical treatment to the newborn babies they serenade upon discharge from the city's maternity wards.
Thus for Belgraders each new rendezvous with the fragile miracle of life is also a sweaty encounter with a band of hungry minstrels blurting madmen's melodies.
Many see something darkly irre -deemable in these paradoxes of Balkan life, citing a link to war. It is difficult to forgive the cruel men who during wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo made sport of murder, and it is true that guilt, unrecognised and misunderstood, still hangs over this vain city like a poison haze. But this is not everyone's guilt, only everyone's tragedy.
Look for light and one finds it best of all in a quiet visit to the chapel of St Andrew the First Called, on the grounds of the Yugoslav royal palace. Surrounded by bright icons and frescos, souls there are helped to pray. Evil seems entirely at bay. But look up at the face of Christ filling the dome above. A bullet hole marks His forehead.
The shot, I am told, was taken by a Communist soldier as the second world war drew to a close. It is at once a shocking desecration and a startling embellishment to the chapel's visual testimony of death and resurrection.
Eric Jansson is a former FT Belgrade correspondent
