An Older and More Beautiful Belgrade

Book excerpt: This grand illustrated essay depicts the devolution of Serbia’s capital during the exceptionally difficult years of Slobodan Milošević’s rule. An interwoven fabric of facts, reflections, insights, and photographs presents Belgrade in a portrait as imaginative and unique as this city’s culture and life are. Integrating cultural anthropology, the history of art and architecture, urban studies and political commentary, Prodanović analyses changes to the city’s visual environment during the 1990s which reveal the impact of deeper social forces. Many aspects of life are covered, some with great ingenuity: the transition from socialism to shopping centers, unregulated construction and modifications of buildings, the redesign of banknotes during hyperinflation, political campaigns and organized campaigns of defacement, beer labels, religious icons in shop windows, graffiti, kitsch, “celebrity charlatans” on TV, gangsters’ tombstones, boondoggles such as an international art center, and much more. All this information is presented with astute analysis from a local perspective and not a little humor.