Fruit distilled in spirit: a snapshot of Serbian heritage and hospitality
Silvia Rose indulges in the sights and sounds of Serbia in a homecoming away from her home in Cymru
When we speak about the character of a nation we often do this through the language of traditions – siestas and ceilidhs, say – actions carried out en masse, generalisations that are brushed over intricacies to give us one big definitive impression. For me, understanding Serbia, its customs, its people, its habits and leanings, has stemmed from minutiae: the particular smell of detergent in hot windowless bathrooms, clunky old taxi rides with turbofolk blaring, grilled meat, balconies. Sensations came first, imprinting themselves physically before I could grasp the concept of culture or dual heritage.
Words claimed as a baby – “Šta je to? Ko je to?” – my first framework of understanding, spoken out to steep rain drizzled hills, sheep pens and clear rivers. “What is that? Who is that?” I ask, but the Welsh soil stays silent, and I must draw on memory for answers.
This year, back in March, me and my partner Jack flew out to visit family on my mother’s side. An important trip to do before our wedding later in the summer; an opportunity for Jack to meet my Serbian relatives, this whole other half of my identity and history that he had only a vague sense of through stories. An opportunity for me also to return to a place that is both foreign and familiar, whose essence I carry like an heirloom, an artefact that I’ve made my own.
Serbia is a landlocked country on the northernmost edge of south-east Europe, a mountainous pocket bordered by eight other countries, including Albania through the disputed territory of Kosovo. It was once part of Yugoslavia, which saw six Balkan states united from 1917 until its infamous break-up in the 1990s.
The country has a long history of rising up against its occupiers, oscillating between forming coalitions, intermingling different languages and religions, and protecting itself against encroaching forces – a wild pack animal turned hostile under threat.
To sum up the eternally proud and defiant – sometimes confusing – Serb mentality, one of the biggest national holidays is on 28 June, marking the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. This doesn’t mark a victory, however, but a glorious defeat. The medieval Serbian kingdom was seized and the Ottoman empire ruled for more than five hundred years.
Jack and I arrive in Belgrade with the sunset. The sky is soft and orange as we walk to Uncle Jaki’s car, a huge modern spaceship that was provided by his employer, a Swedish company that spray paints electrical items.
We drive to Novi Sad on the wide stretch of highway. Passing petrol stations, familiar signs for food products, the low murmur of Serbian voices on the radio as we chat, eager and nervous, energised by the cold burst of the AC.
Uncle Jaki lives with his wife Dragana and their three kids in a quiet neighbourhood of the city. Their lifestyle is what we would understand as middle class (though the class system doesn’t really exist there in the same way). He runs the factory with his brother, she’s a lecturer in architecture. They go on regular ski trips to Austria, cruises in the Baltic sea: all perks of his job. Their daughter Jana goes to boarding school in Budapest.
On our first night, the boys – my uncle, cousin and Jack – set up to watch a night of sports; both the basketball and football Partizan teams are playing. Me and Dragana take little Uroš to the shopping mall nearby, a huge, pristine sanctuary which doesn’t feel typical of all public spaces, and clearly signifies the steady embrace of capitalism. We drop Uroš off at a children’s play area which feels like a benign kid's prison – a stroke of genius as it lets parents do more shopping in peace.
As Jack is vegetarian everyone makes a big effort to veer away from the usual meat-centric dishes, going heavy instead on the cheese, yoghurt and kajmak, a thick clotted cream that is served with everything.
We go to my grandma Baba Rosa’s flat for lunch every day, just round the corner. One room with a small balcony. A sofa that turns into a bed. Dining table with fold out plastic chairs. All her cooking done on a tiny oven with a two top stove, like magic. She serves plates of gibanice – an oily filo pastry cheese pie – roast peppers stuffed with grated potato and onion, rice baked with roast vegetables, bean stew, soups, clear broth, fresh hot green pepper on the side, enriched bread, all with Jaki’s homemade rakija to start. This one is quince: amber colour, pure fire water. He makes it in Čortanovci, a small village nearby where they have a summer house.
(A note on rakija, Serbia’s national drink: a potent fruit brandy that is usually made from plum, grape, apricot and pear. Everyone’s grandma teaches them that rakija cures everything – colds, stomach ache, heartbreak, etc. – and it’s not unusual for them to start the day with a shot. In fact, my own Baba Rosa confidently proclaimed that she “has never drunk alcohol” only to then join us in an aperitif before lunch. Rakija isn’t seen as booze, but as medicine.)
Baba’s TV is always on, either sport or a wildlife show. She loves animals, feeds the stray cats outside her apartment block, coos girlishly whenever a baby elephant or tiger comes on screen. Cluttering her shelves and fridge space are photos of her grandchildren. On the walls, my mum and uncles with ‘70s fringes and large collars.
We communicate through broken Serbian and English, offering these shards to each other earnestly with lots of hand gestures, our sense of meaning and understanding getting broader and more forgiving. When I was born she came to Wales for three months to help my mum with childcare. Baba Rosa always speaks of this time with a warm kind of pride: I’ve heard the story dozens of times, her taking me for walks in the pram, feeding me blackberries and chunks of banana, going to sleep with our black cat Shoni. Each of us with our palms full of shared memory (“Here, look, the water is from the same source!”) trying not to let it seep through.
Every meal ends with a strong Turkish coffee: the classic Serbian way, the grounds cooked in a džezva – a small jug on the stove – with water until it boils. It is served black with sugar in small cups, complemented perfectly by a cigarette, a pack of which Baba always keeps stashed in the dresser, for her smoker friends when they come to visit.
The smell of cigarettes is synonymous with Serbia. All of my memories are decorated with the low chemical hum of stale smoke: balconies, terraces, restaurants. Almost all my relatives smoked when we were kids. Now a lot of them have quit, but generally it’s still a tobacco loving culture: Serbia has the sixth highest smoking rate in the world per capita. I see it almost as joining in with a local delicacy you might otherwise avoid – like snails in France or guinea pigs in Peru – I don’t think twice about buying a pack of Marlboro Golds a day, when usually I’d be a strict smoker-on-occasion. It comes with the territory.
Novi Sad is the second largest city after the capital, Belgrade. With a modest population of just over 360,000 it’s a manageable size, skirting the edges of the Danube as it runs down from Hungary, its centre full of elegant architecture that calls back to its Austro-Hungarian rule in the 19th century.
We walk into town, passing small kiosks on the way, surprising standalone cottages amongst the tall apartment blocks, edged with grass and rubble. The main square is generous, with the impressive town hall and cathedral standing proud. An old man with a long white moustache and sad, tenacious eyes sits on a stool, wearing the traditional dress: knee-high woollen socks and pointy peasant shoes, playing the gusle, a traditional fiddle whose strings are made with horsehair and whose sound drawls out, lamenting.
My uncle Vanja is a jazz guitarist, so invites us to see him play in the synagogue, a lively music venue as well as a practising place of worship. We meet him round the back where he’s pacing, chain-smoking, wearing a black suit. He wouldn’t seem out of place in The Sopranos, he’s got that tall presence, and an almost Italian lilt (“Ehhh, come on!”). His face lights up when he sees us, the undeniable warmth of family, regardless of distance in miles or years or language. He, like everyone, is visibly excited to meet Jack (pronounced Jek).
We go for a beer together afterwards, to one of the many narrow side streets. Irish bar, busy courtyard. We wear our coats but it feels like summer, with the buzz in the air and the music. He tells us about the difficult transition from full time musician gigging every weekend, travelling on cruise ships, to taking over the factory with his brother. Trying to do both is exhausting.
I ask Vanja why he never came to visit us in Wales like Jaki did. He says the plan was that he would, and he was about to leave but couldn’t get a visa. He must have been a teenager then. That was during the war.
Jaki came to stay in the late ‘90s, during the tail-end of the Yugoslav War; it must have been during a parting of the clouds which permitted travel. He remembers a lot (his family call him ‘the Elephant’ because his memory is so good). It’s funny to hear him say Welsh words and names, the remote mountains of Eryri feeling so incongruent to where we are now: Jaki’s flat, the small kitchen table laid out for breakfast with drinking yoghurt, burek, fresh cheese from the market; a different world, from the smells to the road signs.
He remembers his stay fondly and asks about the people, the pub. Shortly after he returned home to Novi Sad the TV station was bombed. All the floors shook like an earthquake and there were regular blackouts. I ask if he ever got involved in politics at all, seeing as he was so directly implicated. There was once a guy who looked a bit like Jesus, a politician who seemed like a good guy, Jaki says. “But then Milošević turned up to one of his demonstrations with tanks, and I thought, yeah, maybe not for me.”
It’s always been hard for me to understand how we as a family still managed to visit most summers all through the ‘90s. As a child, things were normalised and taken at face value, such as broken bridges, piles of rubble, old women begging with black headscarves, in mourning. I accepted all of this as an integral part of this other land, a natural phenomenon. Once we had to fly into Hungary because there were no flights permitted into Serbia, so we travelled there overnight on a minibus. That was all part of the adventure.
Needless to say, none of my family are outwardly political. Having lived through the recent brutality which saw neighbours and friends in conflict due to mutated beliefs, I can imagine there is a wariness around passion or extremism, and a disillusionment in the government.
Currently, Aleksandar Vučić is the president, a figure who has been criticised for undermining democracy and has roots in the far-right. On the other hand, many people are fans; he is seen to have united the country and provided economic growth, as well as securing EU candidate status despite committing to Serbia’s historic support of Russia.
We go for a drink one evening, find a courtyard off the main pedestrian stretch. Graffitied walls, pasted-on posters, loud music coming from the bar. Inside it’s all spit and sawdust, Berlin-style tattered furnishings, a flag of Botswana, just because. Drinking different shades of Zaječarsko beer and chain-smoking outside, we meet a young guy with perfect English (which always puts me to shame with my limited Serbian).
He tells us more about people’s politics here. That really it’s only the two big cities that have any progressive views, everywhere else is pretty backwards. For example, in the countryside they only have one channel which is pure propaganda. (“It’s embarrassing, they’re not even trying to hide it.”) When his grandma went to hospital recently, she met an old woman who was scared to use the toilet. Apparently she’d never seen one before and would usually “shit in the woods”.
His attitude seems pragmatic yet resigned. There doesn’t seem to be that many opportunities for young people, no real prospect of earning much money. Like one of my older cousins, he speaks of studying abroad. Interestingly, he’s proudly religious, regularly attending the Orthodox church. He likes the sense of tradition and morals. This feels contradictory somehow: this politically switched-on, cultured young guy who also goes to church with his dad? It’s hard to imagine such an overlap at home.
Back to Belgrade, by train this time. We’re in the real city now: sprawling and loud, 1.6 million people, every street lined with casinos and cosmetic clinics, kiosks and dirty pavements. The smell of commotion and old smoke. High-rises and history and imposing government buildings.
My auntie Sandra meets us outside the station, waiting for us outside her red Skoda. Tall, blonde, like an AI version of a Slavic Barbie, she runs up to us to greet us, crying. We squeeze our bags into the boot and I sit in the front with her as we crawl through the late afternoon traffic. On her mirror hangs an assortment of air fresheners and decorations (glitz, beads, fur). Her voice is so low it’s almost a growl, years of diligent smoking, although now – she says, puffing a vape – she has given up. “I want to smoke from my eyes, my nose, my ears. I do everything with passion.” Her loud, manic cackle. Quick to laugh – and to cry.
She lives on the outskirts of the city, in Medaković, a neighbourhood largely made up of identical tower blocks with orange-tiled Alpine roofs. Stray dogs sun-bathe belly-up next to the market, aggressive hooligan graffiti everywhere, the shopping centre strangely derelict, with flickering fluorescent striplights and boutiques selling cheap Chinese clothes. This isn’t middle-class Novi Sad. There is an air of not so much danger but of distinct hardship: our coddled Cymraeg sensitivities are piqued, survival instinct on alert due to its otherness, even though I have been here throughout my life, that child-like acceptance has given way to an adult wariness (and admittedly, judgement).
We stay in an Airbnb a five minute walk away from Sandra’s in one of the identical apartment blocks. We’ve almost certainly been charged too much but it’s clean and modern, and we have a balcony which I always enjoy. We go over to Sandra’s for dinner, she lives with her mother Dika (Mama’s stepmum), her son Nikola, his partner Kaja and their three-year-old son Gale. The flat is small, technically two-bedroom, but they’ve all managed to squeeze in by commandeering the living room. Nikola is away a lot working, meaning it’s very much a matriarchal household. Three generations of women looking after this small child and the cat, Srce (Heart), a white-furred savage who is known to attack.
Mirroring our lunches with Baba Rosa in Novi Sad, we come here for dinner every evening. Dika cooks her version of gibanice, Serbian-style musaka made with potatoes, roast peppers stuffed with rice, šopska salad made with feta cheese. Floating islands and chocolate pudding. Cans of Zaječarsko beer. The TV turned up full volume and Dika’s Winston cigarettes the ever-burning incense. On the walls, framed portraits of Sveti Nikola, their family saint.
Sandra works hard as a nurse in the maternity ward of a local hospital. Even as she approaches her mid-fifties, she’s still the most striking woman I know, her and her twin sister Irena, who lives on Cyprus, were always the exotic glamorous counterparts to what I was used to at home: Mama’s natural, hippie, sugar-free minimalism, a rejection of flashy femininity. Sandra’s beauty is unapologetic. Botox, fillers, tattooed eyebrows. Long legs and high heels. She shows us her TikTok account which has gained an impressive following, mostly selfie videos, heavily filtered.
Dika tells us of the love she had for my late grandad, Deda Milan. Even though they divorced and he was engaged for the sixth time when he died, she has always been devoted to him and never got close to another man. She speaks of him like a godly figure, a watery reverence coming over her as she recalls visiting him in hospital, when he confessed that “she was always his favourite.” When they first got together, she remembers, he was arrested for taking down a portrait of Tito off the wall in his rented apartment and spent months in prison. She proudly recalls how hard she worked as a mother of newborn twins whilst living with elderly in-laws, cooking for everyone, snatching time for housework whilst the babies slept.
Jack being a football obsessive, we visit the Partizan stadium, the Serbian team which he decides to adopt. It’s closed, so it has a deserted air, the outside walls all covered in black and white murals, the team’s colours, skulls, gothic, anarchic fonts, living up to their nickname, ‘The Gravediggers’. Black and grey hooded crows peck at leftover plastic wrappers. There is some questionable Russian and Viking adjacent imagery that reminds you how tied up it all is with violence and extremism.
The Partizan-Red Star rivalry is infamous, the derbies being particularly chaotic, often descending into full on riots. Hooligans – or ‘ultras’ – are heavily linked to organised crime and paramilitary groups, with many games being host to volatile slogans such as “Kosovo is Serbia”, breeding grounds for nationalist fever.
During our trip we hear tales of grotesque violence, told casually as gossip, such as criminal ultras grinding bodies into sausage-meat in the underbelly of the Red Star stadium. German police were recently on high alert before the England–Serbia game in the Euros, as there was considerable threat of unrest. Speaking to my cousin Nikola, violent crime is very much a day to day reality, and being part of these two factions is a sad inevitability for most young men. Famous ultras such as ‘Ivan the Terrible’ hold mythic levels of respect; being arrested is almost seen as a sign of success, recognition that you’re causing enough havoc.
Right in the centre of Stari Grad – Old Town – on the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, is the Kalemegdan Fortress and surrounding park. Site of Belgrade’s origins, as once the entire city lay within these walls. Belgrade is one of the oldest cities in Europe, known as Singidunum, originally a settlement belonging to the Celts in the 3rd century BC before the great migration of the tribe to the western edges of Europe – a surprising link to our own Celtic connections back home.
On the fortress grounds we come across the Chapel of Sveta Petka: small, modest-looking, covered in vines, dedicated to the mediaeval Serbian female saint, protector of all things woman (whose feast day happens to be on my birthday). Sacred stillness in its cold walls, decorated with murals and relics. We light skinny amber coloured candles next to the burning collection outside, and make a wish.
We go for coffee in Hotel Moskva, a gorgeous, grand, old-time building sprawling generously across the intersection of three busy streets. Its beige and green tiles look like it could be from a Wes Anderson set; it has the same sense of kitschy class, the waiters dressed in pristine waistcoats, live music from the grand piano in the foyer, lone older women wearing fur coats and sunglasses, taking their time. Established in the early 1900s, the establishment was built with Russian investment and was originally known as Rossiya Palace. Having existed for over a century, the site has been a backdrop for all kinds of historical moments, housing a group of modernist writers and the Gestapo in World War II. Past guests include weighty names such as Tesla, Einstein, Hepburn, Sartre.
With the wind blowing, the clinking bright music swimming through the terrace speakers, we watch crowds pass, tourists and workers heading into the grey fumed city. We eat the hotel’s trademark dessert, the Moskva šnit, a layered cream cake made with almonds, sour cherries, pineapple, and Petit-Beurre (unbeknownst to us, soon to be the first layer of our wedding cake).
We ride back to our apartment on the hour-long tram, stood up and packed in, feet heavy and tired, mind crackling with the exhaustion of sight-seeing. I observe the passengers, these strangers to whom, by the fact of DNA, I am loosely tethered. All along one branch of my ancestral history our experiences would have aligned, yet now I’m a weird hybrid, one half taking it all in, the other half simply belonging.
All through this trip details resonate, like objects dropped into a pool. Ripples: slow circles spreading to the edges of memory, language, time.
The temperature of the air, the long rakija-soaked lunches, the smell of popcorn as you walk down a street at night, the lack of embarrassment, the warmth. That Serbian self-assurance, the pig-headedness and big heartedness, the suffering, the violence simmering underneath and next door. Everyday superstitions, saints, cups of coffee spread out on white tablecloths, embroidered with lace and cherries.
This is my home. Cymru is my home. My family is here. My family is there.
I feel an expanse of emotion that I have been able to come back and re-enter this world.
These objects, picked like fruit and savoured. I bring back the stone to plant on Welsh soil: I pour out the spirit in clear glasses to share.
Silvia Rose is a published writer, tutor and freelancer born and raised in Eryri. Spanning poetry, short stories and nonfiction, her writing is largely inspired by her Welsh and Serbian roots.