Belgrade is the World

Serbia and Serb lands have always been a challenge for curious travelers. Attracted by landscape, people and events, conquerors as well as adventurers arrived in Serbia from all over, including the Byzantine and the Roman Empires. Many have left some sort of trace, usually written, filled with memories of their visits that were survived to the present.

By Jovo Simišić
Photo by Zoran Miler

As opposed to previous centuries, when mostly military officials and statesmen, and only rarely artists and writers used to come to Serbia, in the 20^th century the list of visitors expanded significantly. It would be rather difficult to name all those who came to visit Serbia, whose borders had changed quite a few times in the last hundred years or so. Still, the most prominent visitors – not counting military officials and statesmen, and athletes – celebrities from the world of culture and science on official visits to Serbia could be quite easily indentified. This is what Belgrade-based journalist Radovan Popović did in his book titled Serbia’s Famous Guests, recently published by the Republic of Serbia Official Gazette publishers. In the book, he recorded the visits of over two hundred most prominent individuals from the area of science, art, culture, ranging from literature, film, theater, painting, music, opera, ballet... that visited Serbia between the years 1900 and 2000.

Thus, in his book Radovan Popović wrote that the first worldwide famous visitor to come to Serbia in the 20^th century was none other than Albert Einstein, the greatest theoretical physicist of all time. But, it is no wonder that he visited Serbia considering that he was married to Mileva Marić, a Serbian mathematician from the town of Kać, near Novi Sad. The two of them visited Mileva’s birth town in the summer of 1905. In her monograph titled In the Shadow of Albert Einstein, Professor Desanka Djurić-Trbuhović wrote the following about their visit to Serbia:

"They received a grand welcome at the Marić family house and a stream of relatives and acquaintances came to greet Mileva and see her husband and their son. Albert’s conduct was unaffected and easy-going, as he would carry his son on his shoulders on walks around Novi Sad. Conversations were lively, albeit Mileva’s mother could not converse with her son-in-law because she spoke no foreign languages."

The author of the Theory of Relativity stayed in Novi Sad several times on several occasions. He came to Belgrade as well. The above-mentioned monograph, based on a number of testimonies from contemporaries, reveals that Einstein used to frequent Novi Sad’s Erzsebet Kirai coffeehouse, where on one occasion he told his attentive audience something like this:

"I no longer trust doctors, nor medicine or anything other, because they are all against alcohol. Serbs drink from the moment they are born until they die. They start to drink alcohol early on, then continue as they grow up, travel, get married, at funerals and so on and still Serbs are great people. My opinion of them is so high from my knowing my wife..."

The second among numerous famous guests was the then young architect, Charles-Eduard Jeanneret-Gris, later to be better known in the world of art and culture as Le Corbusier. This Swiss-born architect -- who later took French citizenship -- came to Belgrade by boat from Vienna in 1911. He was twenty or so when he traveled to the East, penning compelling travel journals and sketches.

The next year, during the Balkan War, famous Russian revolutionary, politician and journalist Leon Trotsky visited Serbia’s capital as correspondent of the Moscow-based Pravda paper. Wars have brought to Serbia more famous journalists such as Erwin Egon Kisch, who as reporter came to Serbia from Czechoslovakia in 1912. At the beginning of the World War I, in 1914, Kisch returned to Serbia, this time as an Austro-Hungarian soldier and wrote his book titled Write It Down, Kisch in which he admired the courage of Serbian soldiers. In the fall of 1915, famous John Reid reported on the events on the battle fields of Serbia and one year later he published a book called The War in Eastern Europe.

Between the two world wars many famous writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Maxim Gorky, Rebecca West, Jean Genet, Ivan Bunin… came to Serbia, mostly to Belgrade. Celebrated Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova, and one of the 20^th century’s greatest opera singers, Fyodor Shalyapin, performed in Belgrade in 1927.

Writers and artists were the first famed visitors to come to Serbia after World War II and the establishment of the socialist system. Among the first was Ilya Ehrenburg, prominent Russian writer and anti-fascist. He paid another visit to Serbia in 1965. Next to arrive from France were Paul Eluard in 1946 and Louis Aragon in 1947. The greatest sculptor of the 20th century, Henry Moore, had an exhibition in Belgrade in 1955.

During the 1960s, Yugoslavia became more and more open to the world, especially to the West. Famous artists and writers started to come to Serbia and its capital Belgrade. Between 1950 and 1990, the most renowned writers at the time came on visits, including Jean-Paul Sartre, William Saroyan, Samuel Beckett, Saul Bellow, Irving Stone, Leonid Leonov, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Claude Simon, Alberto Moravia, Guenter Grass, Peter Handke, Lajos Zilahy, Robert Graves, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Eugčne Ionesco, Andre Malraux, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, John Updike, Graham Greene, Allen Ginsberg, Andrei Voznesensky, Czeslaw Milosz, Ismail Kadare, Joseph Brodsky, Edgar Morin, Patrick Besson, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gyorgy Konrad, Adam Michnik, Vladimir Vojnovich… Most of them came at the invitation of the Union of Yugoslav Writers, i.e. the Association of Serbian Writers, and many of them were invited to participate in the October Writers’ Meetings.

Audiences in Belgrade had the opportunity to see and hear the most distinguished musicians, opera singers and ballet dancers. One of the greatest musicians of the 20^th century, Igor Stravinsky, was among the first to came to Belgrade, followed by Luciano Pavarotti, on his first appearance outside Italy, Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, unrivalled pianist Arthur Rubinstein, virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin, one of the world’s greatest ballerinas of all time Margot Fontaine, great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, another famous cellist André Navarra, renowned conductor Zubin Mehta, one of the most famous opera singers Mario del Monaco, Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis, famous opera singer Giuseppe di Stefano, incomparable pianist Sviatoslav Richter, conductor Herbert von Karajan, one of the world’s greatest violinists Isaac Stern, prominent Mexican violinist of Polish descent Henrik Schering, one of the world’s most popular tenors Plácido Domingo, one the world’s greatest operatic sopranos Montserrat Caballé, etc.

Jazz artists and ‘entertainers’ used to come to Belgrade quite often, some of them more than once. Among them were legendary jazz musician Louis Armstrong, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, French chanson singer Juliette Greco, pianist and jazz music composer Duke Ellington, one of the greatest musical stars of all time Josephine Baker, famous jazz and pop singer Ray Charles, Sarah Vaughan, BB King, jazz musician Miles Davis, brilliant classical guitarist Andre Segovia, French singer Charles Aznavour, Tina Turner...

Yugoslavia, Serbia and Belgrade were destinations frequently visited by the most famous movie stars too. Those who stayed in Belgrade included Danny Kaye, Sir Laurence Olivier and his wife Vivien Leigh, Elizabeth Taylor, first with her husband and producer Michael Todd, and later with another husband Richard Burton. Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Liv Ullmann, Maria Schell, Peter Ustinov, Michel Piccoli, Sophia Loren, Vanessa Redgrave… also stayed in Belgrade.

Visitors to Belgrade were also the big film and theatre directors such as Andrzej Vajda, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Sidney Pollack, Rene Clair, Francis Ford Coppola, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jirí Menzel, Akira Kurosawa, Miloš Forman, Nikita Milhalkov…

Many celebrities who visited Serbia after World War II, had arrived to Belgrade with the Yugoslav national air carrier.

Among many photos collected by Jat’s longstanding photographer and photo-reporter Zoran Miler were also the photos of famous travelers standing by Jat aircraft or inside of one.

Zoran’s opulent collection also contains photos of Louis Armstrong, Brigitte Bardot, Pele, Josephine Baker, Kirk Douglas, Shirley Temple, Lajos Zilahy, Mikis Theodorakis, etc.

The largest number of moviemakers visiting Belgrade came as guests of the Belgrade International Film Festival – FEST, which in the first ten or so years of its existence was considered one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world and as such had attracted authors of the best film productions each year. Celebrities such as Peter Fonda, Daniel Olbrychski, Andrzej Vajda, Dennis Hopper and others attended Kozara movie theater screening that marked the first movie shown in Belgrade on June 17, 1896. The festival’s guests were also Vittorio De Sica, Kirk Douglas, Peter Ustinov, Robert De Niro, Monica Vitti, Juliette Greco, Miloš Forman, Peter Bogdanovich, Andrzej Vajda, Sergei Bondarchuk, Liv Ullmann, Sarah Miles, Michel Piccoli, Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci. The most famous guests at the third FEST were Gina Lollobrigida, Jack Nicholson, Miklos Jancso, the stars at the fourth FEST were Costa Gavras, Sam Peckinpah, Peter Peter Bacso, Jacques Charrier; at the fifth, Francis Ford Coppola and Michel Piccoli; at the sixth, Michelangelo Antonioni, Franco Nero, Robert De Niro, Erland Jozefson; at the seventh, Bernardo Bertolucci; at the eighth, Robert De Niro, Peter Ustinov, Marcello Mastroianni and Claudia Cardinale; at the tenth, Bernardo Bertolucci and Roman Polanski…