The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘The hedonistic atmosphere of war-ravaged cities like Beirut’
It’s hard to get emotional about steel cables and concrete girders, but talk to Novi Sad-ers about their beloved bridges and they quickly become dewy-eyed.
Shortly after arriving in Serbia’s second city, I paid my respects at a gallery of sepia-toned photographs plastered onto brick walls along the Danube. Victims of Nato’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, many of the structures pictured now rest on the river floor.
Wooden, rusting, utilitarian or futuristic: bridges, I learnt, were sacrosanct. For centuries they served as the only way in and the only way out.
How bad must things be if this city’s greatest attribute was its exit routes?
But bridges are an obvious headline theme for Novi Sad’s Capital of Culture programme. Unlike some of the navalgazing concepts of previous recipients, the structures have relevance for a city that has a fair bit to talk about.
Sitting at a crossroads of Europe, Novi Sad was a trading post, a refuge for migrants and the first line of defence for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The battering and bruising continued through two world wars up until 23 years ago, when Novi Sad bore the brunt of Nato’s campaign against Slobodan Milosevic.
“Novi Sad means ‘new plant’,” tour guide Ljiljana told me as we strolled through Dunavska Street’s jolly, 19thcentury pastel-hued buildings, built after the place was flattened. “If the roots are healthy, it can flourish again.”
Mustering a population of fewer than 300,000, it’s hard to call the place a city. Too small to merit an airport, its international gateway is Belgrade, an hour’s taxi drive away. But tiny means easily navigable; so easy, in fact, you could risk doing it all in less than a day.
Fearing that I would struggle to fill a weekend, I stretched out activities by doing everything on foot. On a stroll to the “drunken” clock – the Novi Sad mascot found on T-shirts, magnets and mugs – Ljiljana explained why the hour hand is longer than the minute: “Here the hours matter more than minutes.”
I wasn’t convinced the architects of the Petrovaradin Fortress would have agreed. It took 88 years to build the 17th-century complex, the only elevated point in an area so naturally flat it could have been levelled with a spirit measure. Now demilitarised,
much of the building is given over to artists’ studios. In July, DJs at the Exit music festival blast their beats through cannon holes.
On the ramparts, I took in the views: parks, cathedral spires and orthodox onion domes competing with high-rises and air-choking factory towers.
They weren’t the only chimneys in town. Smoking has been re-legalised indoors after too many people complained about the ban, and cigarette smoke swirls through almost every bar, café and restaurant. I woke every morning smelling like I’d rolled in an ashtray. Not that it put me off exploring Novi
Sad’s night scene – easily its trump card.
At Crni Ovan (Ilije Ognjanovica 2), I crammed into a tiny room scribbled with graffiti to drink craft beer and chat politics. A dark shadow currently hangs over Serbia and its silence on the Ukraine crisis, taken by many to be a pro-Russian stance. In reality, the country is divided, explained Boka, who, like most of the younger generation, is against the war. But there is a sense some people are still angered by Western intervention in the Balkans war.
Most, though, refuse to be victims. Rather than being mired down by misery, everyone lives for the moment,
giving Novi Sad the same hedonistic atmosphere as war-ravaged cities like Beirut. My visit coincided with the presidential election, but – tellingly – few people could be bothered to visit the polling station. They preferred to order a pint and light up a fag.
Later that night, Boka invited me to watch her friends play a jazz gig in an out-of-hours office block. Up until a few years ago, there were few dedicated music venues, but new spaces have been developed as part of the Capital of Culture programme. That legacy alone makes the whole thing worthwhile.
We ended the evening in Absolut
(absolutclub.rs), a clandestine, velvettrimmed lounge tucked into one of the city’s narrow passageways. There was laughter and a lot of smoke. People enthused about the summer, when bars open along the Danube and parasols spring up at riverside beach Strand.
“You’ll have to come back,” said Boka, extending one of those metaphorical bridges that makes this place so welcoming. And I probably will. Because once the smoke had settled and my hair no longer stank, Novi Sad actually left me feeling rather happy.