Belgrade Noir

Introduction The Dark Side of the White City

It was summer 1997, two years after the wars in Bosnia and Croatia, and two years before the war in Kosovo and NATO’s bombardment of Belgrade. Serbia was under sanctions and life was difficult. I had been working as a journalist for two short months when my editor sent me to cover the suicide of a famous Serbian painter. The crime scene was terrifying — in front of the elevator lay the body of the artist covered in blood. In one hand, he held a plastic bag containing the bread and milk he had purchased just a few minutes before in a nearby supermarket, and in the other he gripped a pistol that was still pressed against his forehead. Neighbors told us that just a few moments before he had sat in a kafana, drinking šljivovica. As I continued documenting the scene, a brand-new red Mazda pulled up and parked in front of the building. Two neat, clean-shaven, dangerous-looking men in very expensive suits exited the car, approached the policemen conducting the investigation, and showed their Serbian secret service IDs.

“Keep doing your job, we’re here on other business,” they said. The police officers stepped aside, allowing the men to enter the building. A few minutes later the agents reemerged accompanied by one of, at the time, the biggest stars of turbo-folk music. Dressed in a luxurious coat, and caked in makeup, her high heels elegantly stepped through the blood pooled in front of the elevator. She paid no attention to the macabre scene accented by the fresh dead body lying in front of her as she entered the red Mazda.

If you read the previous paragraph, and you fully comprehended it — recognized turbo-folk, reminisced about your favorite kafana, recalled the sort of sanctions Serbia lived under, and remembered why one European capital was bombed in 1999 — then you will find it easy to understand the fourteen short noir stories in this anthology. If you did not, this will be a great opportunity to learn about and understand the city that Momo Kapor, one of the most famous Serbian authors, described as “a low-budget New York.”

Short stories best describe the time in which they are set. John Selden, an English lawyer and scholar, said, “[T]ake a straw and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complexion of the times so well as ballads and libels.” The historical facts of a time period fail to properly encapsulate the human experience when compared to the fictional works of the same era.

Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier said, “Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.” Belgraders would likely object. His ugliest city in the most beautiful place, throughout history, was usually the most beautiful city in the most terrifying part of the world, as Serbian writer Milorad Pavić often noted.

Belgrade, meaning “White City,” is located in Southeast Europe at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, at the crossroads of different civilizations. Belgrade was conquered by Celts, Romans, Slavs, the Ottoman Empire, and Austro-Hungarians. Since its construction, the city has been battled over in 115 wars, razed forty-four times, and changed its name fourteen times. Just in the last hundred years, Belgrade has been the capital of four states: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia under the leadership of Marshal Tito, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and finally the Republic of Serbia, which was reborn as a result of the disintegration of the previous state in a series of bloody ethnic wars.

Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav Nobel laureate, once noted that this grand city seems to always be torn and split, as if it never exists but is perpetually being created, built upon, and recovered. While Belgrade was destroyed in both world wars, the city ultimately emerged as a winner, on the side of the Allies.

Four authors in this collection set their stories in that Belgrade — the Belgrade we are proud of, a city of heroism, an ally in the fight for justice and freedom. In these stories, key characters travel through time and different decades of Belgrade’s history, as the authors show the world that our glorious past cannot be ruined by the dark cloud hanging over the city during the nineties and its bloody conflicts. It should be no surprise that vampire is the only Serbian word in the English language.

The wars during the breakup of Yugoslavia are a leitmotif in four stories. In them, the authors bravely speak about bloodshed, and no stone goes unturned.

During this period, Serbia was completely isolated from the rest of the planet. And as isolated turtles on the Galapagos Islands evolved differently from their fellow turtles on the mainland, the culture in Serbia developed in ways that didn’t exist anywhere else. The mobs were killing each other, dead bodies were buried in concrete, eventually becoming embedded in the foundations of buildings and bridges. Still, there were no random killings and the streets of the Serbian capital were among the safest in Europe. It should be no surprise that Belgrade is known as a city of absurdity.

Citizens found pleasure in “embargo cakes” — delicacies made from only flour, water, sugar, and any fruit you could scrounge up — and listened to turbo-folk, a synthetic mesh of techno and folk.

But this book is about a lot more than war. Alfred Hitchcock once said that certain creepy parts of Belgrade unnerved him and would be ideal settings for thrillers. Thieves, traitors, spies, corrupt doctors, psychiatric patients, former policemen, mafia clans — they all appear in the pages of this book.

Even in the worst periods of its history, Belgrade was always a multicultural, multireligious, and multinational city. This anthology illustrates that. Alongside our Serbian authors, there are stories written by Croatian, Bosnian, British, and Finnish writers. The same is true for our great team of translators, which includes Americans, Serbians, Bosnians, and an Albanian.

Herbert Vivian, a British journalist, author, and newspaper proprietor who visited Belgrade in the late nineteenth century, wrote that more often than not when a traveler visits a famous place expecting a lot, he or she leaves disappointed. “This happens with Athens, Rhine, St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But then again, I went to Belgrade not expecting anything — the decorations, the sights, not even the joy or anything interesting — and now I am a victim of its seductive charm, and I have to leave it with utmost pain. This is a new feeling: to fall in love with a city.”

Right now, you likely believe there are a number of cities throughout the world that would make better settings for good noir stories. But I am quite certain that after reading this book, you will find yourself seduced by the dark charm of the White City.

Milorad Ivanović

Belgrade, Serbia

September 2020