Serbia

I arrived in Belgrade on an overnight bus from Budapest, disheveled and half-asleep, and within three hours I understood that this city operated on entirely different rules. The taxi driver wanted to know what I thought of Macron. The café I walked into was already full at 9am — not with tourists, but with people reading newspapers and nursing espressos with the unhurried gravity of people who have nowhere else to be. By noon I had eaten a burek the size of my forearm from a bakery on Knez Mihailova and was standing at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, looking up at the walls of Kalemegdan fortress while a man with a German shepherd and a thermos of coffee held court next to a Roman-era cannon. That first day set the tone for everything.

Belgrade is not polished. It is not trying to be. The contrast is the point — Socialist-era tower blocks loom over 19th-century Habsburg promenades, Orthodox church domes rise above the flat rooftops, and somewhere in the tangle of Skadarlija, the bohemian quarter, a brass band starts up in the early afternoon whether you want it to or not. The food is a direct extension of this refusal to aestheticize everything: grilled meats, slow-cooked beans, chevapi with fresh onion and kajmak — the clotted cream that appears at every meal — and a plum brandy culture that treats rakija the way Mexicans treat mezcal. Ceremonial, generous, never optional. Beyond Belgrade, Novi Sad is quieter and more elegant, the Uvac River Canyon is one of the most startling natural landscapes I have encountered in Europe, and Niš carries a darkness — the Skull Tower, the Roman ruins — that no amount of coffee-and-sun terrace life entirely offsets.

I went back a second time. That does not happen often.

When to go: May to June or September to October. Summers in Belgrade are brutal — the city sits in a basin and the heat bounces off the concrete. The EXIT music festival in Novi Sad runs in July if that is your thing, but otherwise spring and early autumn give you the city at street level, outdoor cafés humming, without the punishing temperatures.

What most guides get wrong: They present Serbia as a budget destination and leave it there. Yes, it is cheap by European standards — a meal, a beer, a bed — but that framing flattens what makes it interesting. The food culture is more sophisticated than the prices suggest. The nightlife is legendary not because it is cheap but because Serbs genuinely know how to build an evening that lasts until sunrise. And the country’s historical complexity — four empires, two world wars, a recent conflict that ended within living memory — gives every conversation a weight and a candor you rarely find in places that have been smoothed down by decades of tourism. People will tell you exactly what they think. That is more valuable than most things on any travel itinerary.