No summer is complete without a jaunt south to the Balkan lands! After a few months at home in Budapest's 7th district - the underage tourist drinking capital of Europe - a trip to the Balkans, even just to cross the border, is a tonic, a breath of fresh air. There is an electricity simply to being in the Balkans. Central Europe - as Hungary likes to style itself - combines the dour moralism of Protestant Europe with an East European "how many of us does it take to change a light bulb?" approach to technology. The Balkans - and I am specifically addressing Serbia in the post - is like crossing into a strange mirror world, where light bulbs are a privilege, not a right. The Balkans wear its traditions on its sleeve. Budapest is so modern, so European, so... expensive. So: cross the border, easily marked by a razor wire fence erected in 2015 when Viktor Orban was gleefully making a name as the Troll King protecting white Christian Europe from the brown hordes of refugees from the Middle East.
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| A Warm and Welcoming Hello! Hungarian Serbian Border |
The border has been quiet for the last decade, almost too quiet. Serbia, however, has been rocked by huge street protests against the 11 year rule of Prime Minister Alexander Vucic, a populist who cozies up to Orban and licks Putin's dainty parts and plays the Serb nationalist card close to his chest. Vucic and Orban have been involved in the building of China's
"Belt and Road" railway system, a multi billion dollar Chinese Commie fantasy scam of railways and ports that will provide Chinese car batteries, and Labubus to hungry consumers in the EU. There have been,...
glitches. Long story short: there is no railway service in northern Serbia anymore, and won't be for a while.
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| (This is a pub, actually, not the train to Szeged.) |
The lethal collapse of the Novi Sad railway station on Nov 1 2024 led to
mass protests which have continued to peak this summer, with
mass demonstrations in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and other cities, in which protesters were often met with violence from thugs and hooligans organized by forces close to Vucic. Big infrastructure projects are to political corruption like shit to flies. In the burning summer sun there are Chinese workers squatting around the unopened Subotica railway station chipping at concrete with hammers, and the station itself is closed for safety reasons. The Budapest - Belgrade railway, which has already officially opened three times, is now predicted to run by around 2028. For now there are no trains onward towards Serbia from here, sorry. Luckily, there is a two car tram-train that can get you from Szeged to Subotica twice a day, but beyond that you are on your own.
Subotica (Szabadka in Hungarian) just next to the Hungarian border, is the main city of the Bacska region of the Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia that was a multi-ethnic autonomous region of old Yugoslavia. Although Serbs comprise the majority in the province, in many places the ethnic mix - even after the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s - remains a diverse cultural patchwork of languages and local traditions that seems to have forged a tolerance that evades many other regions of Eastern Europe. Subotica is nearly half Hungarian, with a large minority of Bunyevac, a Catholic Croatian sub group that has native to the region long enough to claim its dialect as a separate language in the municipality
By chance, we arrived during the weekend of the Bunyevac harvest festival, Duzijanca. Every evening crowds would gather near the central square to listen to tamburica bands and marvel at the hay sculptures. Folk dance groups from the villages showed up, and people contentedly traipsed up dawn the streets chatting and visiting, the classic Balkan corso, the evening social stroll.
I can only take so much tamburica music, an aversion dating to my days playing in Balkan bands in the USA (I prefer funkier, less harmonious music, as in gaida!) On Saturday, at least, Serbian Gypsy Brass bands gathered outside the City hall to rent themselves out to wedding parties.
The City Hall itself is worth seeing: tours are given daily by showing up exactly at noon at the main entrance. Subotica was once one of the most important cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, a role that shrank after the region was made part of Serbia after World War One. Just before the first World War Hungary - of which Subotica was then a part - had gulled itself into believing in a glorious, pan-Danubian Hapsburg future, and grand architectural statements like the Budapest Parliament and the Subotica City Hall are testaments to the dashed dreams of that briefly optimistic era.
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| City Hall Square |
During Subotica's glory days local architects built dozens of gob-smackingly beautiful Art Nouveau palaces and city buildings. During the communist era a lot of these were demolished to modernize the city center, but the remaining ones define the look of Subotica.
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| Our Hapsburg Connections! (City Hall) |
Subotica, indeed, the entire Vojvodina, was once home to a large Jewish community, who were apparently doing rather well from trade at the end of the 19th century. The Subotica Synagogue, built in 1908 is without a doubt the most gorgeous shul I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot them.
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| Photo by Fumie Suzuki, taken from the tower of City Hall |
Designed by two local architects, Dezső Jakab and Marcell Komor, who idolized the Budapest Jewish architect Liport Baumhorn. They applied their taste to the City Hall office and many other local buildings as well. And then came the First World War, the Hapsburg defeat, and the Trianon treaty. Little did they realize at the time that the busy mercantile center of Subotica would soon become a dusty border town, albeit with some spectacular buildings.
The Synagogue alone is worth the trip to Subotica, even if you are not Jewish. The motifs reflect the Hungarian Neolog Jewish sentiment of the late 1800s: an embrace of Hungarian cultural identity al0ngside Jewish religion following the German Reform model. The stained glass work alone is astounding. Motifs from Hungarian folk design adorn the ceilings (alongside some decidedly Bunyevac designs as well, probably not by licit intention of the artists) The real reason we went to Subotica is to eat. On Fumie's birthday we were thinking of going to one of the few places in Budapest still serving cevapcici... and we realized that we could take a train to Subotica, stay over night, and eat cevapi for about the same price as dining out in Budapest. So we did.If you like meat, you will like Serbia. Cevapi, cevapcici, meatwads, call them what you will, they are good down in Serbia. They are even better in Bosnia, but the Vojvodina became home to thousands of Bosnian Serb refugess after the Bosnian War in the 1990s (replacing about 60,000 local Croats, but not the Bunyevac... its complicated....) and bringing the Bosnian obsession with little tubes of grilled meat with them. |
| A Master at Work: Ilijanska cevapi |
Perhaps the best cevapi we found was at the Ilijanska Cevap House, a tiny place across the street from the synagogue. Ilijia is the western bit of Sarajevo, now in Republika Srpska territory, and I have eaten cevap in Ilidja itself, and the customers at this hole in the wall all assured me these were the best in Subotica. These cevapi are the reason we will be returning to Subotica in the near future.
They were spot on. The somon bread are baked in a pizza oven just as the cevapai are tossed on the grill, and the whole things is slathered in butter as it comes out of the oven. At one point a customer ordered a pleskavica: the Serbian analog of a hamburger. It was constructed from a slab of ground meat and onions literally the size of a pizza.
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| Burek near the Flea Market |
Burek is the breakfast of choice in the Balkans, and Subotica, again, has several burek bakeries that make theirs using the old fashioned Bosnian sac method - a retro baked-in-the-coals technique that was inherited directly from the Turks. The Sac Burek place on the road just before you get to the flea market is the best in town (we tried all of them.) They were out of meat burek when we arrived so we went with spinach and potato burek. As we were finishing our breakfast the owner arrived and plopped down a hige slice of fresh meat burek straight out of the oven.
The Flea Market is the main draw for visitors to Subotica. Buses loaded with Hungarians cross the border every weekend to load up on canned tuna fish, laundry soap, toilet paper, and tool sets, all at prices well below what they would pay in Hungary. Most of the market sellers are, or at least can speak Hungarian, and accept Hungarian Forints in payment.
There is the usual cheap Chinese clothing section, a food section, an area selling tools, farm implements, and bicycles, a classic shit-for-sale junk and antique market, and also a fresh vegetable market. Of course, we were there ion the second hottest day of the summer, so I couldn't fully appreciate the garbage laid out for my perusal in comfort. I didn't even have the appetite to sample the pleskavica stands that are scattered throughout the market. Pleskavica is Serbia's answer to the hamburger. Basically, it is cevap meat in a burger shape, but better, and you get to choose the toppings, which is also better. Just before we began our trip back to Budapest, we visited the main vegetable and food market in downtown Subotica, which is open on Sunday until noon (the train leaves at 1pm) We stocked up on natural garlic, prunes, almonds and some vegetables at prices about one quarter what we pay in Budapest. We bought four ear of sweet corn for about a 80 US cents: in Budapest corn goes for over a dollar an ear these days. Boiled up that night at home, it was absolutely the sweetest corn I have ever tasted. Walking past the fish seller Fumie noticed they were selling fully roasted red scorpion fish, the Adriatic scarpina that goes for top prices in Dalmatian restaurants. For the equivalent of four euros she got a whole roasted fish, stashed it in the freezer bag she carries with her everywhere, and we set out for home, which should have been a three hour train journey. |
| Scarpina that came home with us |
We boarded our train back to Budapest on the hottest day of the summer, having invested the exorbitant amount of $14 in order to get a first class seat that would guarantee air conditioning. Now, as much as I have impugned the reputation of the Serbian rail system, that is nothing compared to the Hungarian State Railway MAV this year. See, we actually had a working railway system. In theory, at least. But since 2022 the Minister for Transportation has been János Lázár, a long time political fixture who exemplifies the "fixing lightbulbs theory" of running state railways. Hungarian trains no longer run on time, and refunds are sketchy and often not forthcoming., Austria no longer lists the arrival times of Hungarian trains on its schedule, because... why would you?  |
| Farewell Serbia! |
Needless to say our trip home was an endless mess of breakdowns and transfers. We were offloaded from our comfy fist class seats onto buses and taken to a countryside station where we sat in the sun with a few hundred other disgruntled Hungarians until MAV could figure what to do with a few hundred irate Magyars standing in the blazing heat. At one point they had us enter an already full train before ordering us off it again.
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| Visit beautiful Szatymaz! thanks MAV! |
Finally, an old local train was pressed into duty to get us back to Budapest, on which we were grateful to have even found seats. With the heat around 100 Fahrenheit, only open windows provided moving, if hot, air. I am glad we got back to our flat with any sanity (thanks goes to my sister, who got us an air conditioner for the flat this year!) And the most surprising bit of the story: the fish survived the journey'
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| Don't ask how the cevapi is made... |
