What I Like About Belgrade by Andreas Pfister

At a radio interview, I was asked what I liked about Belgrade. I’m still thinking about the question. Here, I’ll try to answer it as honestly as I can.

My first impression when I arrived 20 years ago: the brutalist blocks. Their sheer size. The scale. Jurija Gagarina.

The roughness of the city. There is something honest about it. Reminds me, absurdly enough, of where I come from, the countryside. What I like about Belgrade, I sometimes say, is that it isn’t nice.

The ambivalence: The ugliness is exhausting, the brutalism brutal. The shapelessness, the gruffness in communication. Nema. This carelessness is rude, provincial. What I miss: Belgrade is not very international. At least not visibly so.

Practical reasons: The apartment here. I use it as a writing room. Luxury: Changing residence, like the nobility. A change of scenery: summer doesn’t dissolve into sameness. Marking holidays. Coming into a ready-made nest, everything already there. The size, the floor, the view. Belgrade, the white city. The sun. The west.

King of the hill. My Swiss budget. Suddenly being rich. Maybe I think I’m attractive. There are people richer than a Swiss teacher. Overestimating myself. Having no clue. Being that Swiss guy.

The everyday, the distance, the poetry. Colonialism: White man goes into the bush, comes back with photographs.

“I like the country, I like the people,” a colleague says. I don’t know if that’s true. The contacts don’t go any further. I’m not interesting, have nothing to offer. My stumbling Serbian.

The disappearing. Here I am out of this world. New Belgrade in winter. The only Swiss, the only foreigner. Running along the Sava, shopping in the prodavnica surrounded by Serbs. The loneliness, the melancholy. Having something quite special. Not Berlin and Paris and New York. Something unique. Being an expert in something. Others say: I don’t want to go there. Being different. Better.

The bond with the place. With the leaves on the ground, the bare branches, the unfriendly wind. With the heat. Ah, a Belgrade summer. Concrete at night. The memories. The photographs, the images. The cemetery.

The familiar. Feeling at home in the hardware shop where I buy cables, light bulbs. Living here, moving through everyday life. Being there, not tourism, not sightseeing. A thousand times through the stairwell, and again. No longer seeing the city.

At the edge, on the periphery. The empty Block 44, the pale parking lot. Faded façade, dusty leaves, grey air. Silence at the bus stop. The suffering, the forgetting. The complicity of belonging: We are lost together.

The foreignness of the city, the Byzantine aesthetic: spoon, table, glass door. Eastern Rome. The interesting. The incomprehensible. The planes on their final approach, Turkish Airways. The metropolis in Southeast Europe.

A real city with real problems. Not brushing them aside. Not holding them against them. Rubbing myself against the city. One that doesn’t simply please. Not Prague, not Budapest.

Being pulled out of certainty. There are the United Arab Emirates, there is China. Experiencing yourself as relative. Eating at Markiz’. Moving through these things as if they were ordinary. Showing this off to guests. No longer seeing the rubbish, using the desire paths. Not being afraid.

Displaying it: I speak this language. This is my green façade, stained, the one that disgusts you. Being cool.

The Sava, the position on the river. The place, the unknown beauty. Kusturica films. Missing the world by the swans, the geese, the ducks. By the cargo ships, by “India,” the little houses there.

The city dissolving. It’s New Belgrade, not Belgrade. A frowned-upon area in the old town. Unknown in Dorćol.

Modernism as a metaphor against the parental home, against religion, obstinacy, the narrow Swiss perspective. Being in the minority. Not knowing everything and everyone. Making common cause with the blocks. Fascinated by the big city, like in the film Moulin Rouge.

Truth, objectivity. Rubbing myself against the opinions here, the attitudes. Skepticism, insisting on doubt, wanting to hesitate. Laziness, cowardice.

Burned by fundamentalism. Being right and everyone else goes to hell. Later, truth in the plural. The importance of perspective. Foucault. Later, the critique of hyper-relativism. Holding on to truth. Beware of Putin apologists, conspiracy muttering, the political right. Graffiti, NATO, Pride. Married a Serbian woman. Old thoughts. Enduring questions.

My wife’s kindergarten. She says: brutality of the culture. The brutality of letting things decay. Her suffering as a child. The wild boys, recess, charging against the door, classes of forty. The memories burned in.

Lunchtime. The waiter at Markiz’. His careful setting down the glasses. His opening the bottle. The hiss of the carbonation. His pouring the water. Our thank you. His Prijatno. His teeth. His smile.

08.10.2026.

Andreas Pfister