Belgrade Unpacked: The city that refuses to be finished

Mila Orlic grew up in a New Belgrade apartment block on the west bank of the Sava, in one of the brutalist concrete towers that Yugoslavian architects built from 1948 onward on what had been marshland. Her grandmother lived across the river in Dorcol, the old Ottoman neighborhood, in a building that was partly rubble when her family moved in after 1945. Her office, where she works as an architect, is two blocks from the bombed-out Yugoslav General Staff headquarters, which has had no windows since 1999.

Three generations. Three versions of Belgrade. All of them are still standing, within walking distance of each other.

“Most cities have layers,” she says. “Belgrade has collisions. Nothing here was resolved. Everything is just — present.”

WHY THIS CITY IS IMPOSSIBLE TO FINISH

The reason is geography. Belgrade sits at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, on a limestone ridge that commands the surrounding plains in every direction. You cannot move between Western Europe and the Balkans without passing through it. You cannot move from Central Europe toward the Aegean without crossing one of its rivers. The Romans understood this and fortified the ridge as the legionary base of Singidunum in the first century AD. Every subsequent empire understood it the same way.

The result: 115 wars, 44 destructions, and rebuildings across recorded history. Half the city’s buildings were destroyed in World War II alone — during the German invasion of April 1941, in Allied bombing during the occupation, in the Nazi scorched-earth retreat of 1944. The city has a Serbian nickname, the White Phoenix, that captures the dynamic precisely. It does not mean the city emerges clean from the ashes. It means it comes back on the same ground, carrying the damage with it.

Kalemegdan fortress, above the confluence, is the physical record of this. Roman stones sit below Byzantine walls, which sit below Ottoman masonry, which carries Habsburg modifications, which bear Serbian restoration work done after 1867, when the Ottomans finally withdrew. The Habsburgs occupied Belgrade three times in the 18th century and were expelled each time; the 1739 Treaty of Belgrade required the Ottomans to demolish everything the Habsburgs had built, which is why almost nothing of those 22 years survives above ground. The ghost of it is still visible in the routing of certain streets in Dorcol. The city absorbed the erasure and kept going.

HOW BELGRADE LEARNED TO LIVE WITH ITS RUINS

Cross the Sava from Kalemegdan, and you are in New Belgrade, Novi Beograd — the socialist city Tito’s government built from nothing starting in 1948, on the flat terrain directly opposite the old city. Volunteers came from across Yugoslavia to lay the foundations; the first residents moved into the blokovi, the residential blocks, in the 1950s. Today, those blocks house more than 200,000 people, and their inhabitants have a fierce, sometimes defensive affection for them. The concrete is crumbling in places. The dream that produced them — Yugoslavia itself — went out of business in 1991. The buildings remain.

What New Belgrade teaches, if you walk it slowly, is that Belgrade does not manage its ruins by removing them. It manages them by living alongside them. The socialist blocks that a Western eye reads as bleak are, to the people inside them, home. The Genex Tower — completed in 1977, two asymmetric towers connected by a sky bridge, with a rotating restaurant at the top — is a cult object for architecture enthusiasts internationally. Locally, it is the place where people’s parents live.

The kafanas of Skadarlija operate on the same principle. Skadarlija is a 400-meter cobblestone street in Dorcol that has been Belgrade’s bohemian quarter since the late 19th century, when writers, actors, and painters began gathering in its taverns after the more fashionable establishments closer to the center closed or moved. Tri Sesira, Three Hats, has been serving food and live music since 1864. The kafana is the forerunner of the internet, a Belgrade saying goes—they were the center of social, cultural, and political life before any of those categories had separate institutions. They still are. At 11 pm on a Tuesday, the accordion player moves between tables, and nobody is performing nostalgia. They are just having dinner.

The city’s architecture reflects the same layering. Walk from Skadarlija to the Republic Square, and you pass Ottoman traces, Habsburg baroque, Serbian neoclassical, early-20th-century art nouveau, socialist modernism, and post-1990s glass towers, sometimes within a single block. Nothing was cleared to make way for the next thing. The new was inserted into the existing. The result is a streetscape that looks unresolved because it is—but that unresolvedness is not a failure of urban planning. It is the city’s actual history, legible in three dimensions.

THE VOID THE ARCHITECT BUILT, AND THE VOID THE BOMBS MADE

There is one structure in Belgrade where this logic becomes most concentrated and most contested.

The Yugoslav General Staff headquarters — the Generalstab — was designed by Nikola Dobrovic, the most celebrated Serbian modernist architect of the 20th century, and completed in 1963 on the corner of Nemanjina and Kneza Milosa, directly opposite the main government building. Dobrovic built a deliberate philosophical void into its design: between the two symmetrical wings, a gap opens toward the street climbing up from the railway station toward the city center. The void was intentional, drawn from Henri Bergson’s philosophy of dynamism, the productive emptiness between two masses.

On April 29, 1999, NATO bombed the Generalstab twice in fifteen minutes. The complex was bombed again nine days later. It was empty each time. The bombing was, in NATO’s own framing, symbolic rather than tactical. It created a second void in the building — unplanned, ragged, the facade torn open, staircases ending in open air.

Which void do you commemorate? That question, posed by architectural critic Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss and repeated by architects in Belgrade ever since, is not really about architecture. It is about memory. The two voids now occupy the same building. You cannot restore one without deciding what to do with the other.

In 2025, the Serbian government agreed to lease the site to Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s investment fund, for a 30-floor luxury hotel and residential complex branded Trump Tower Belgrade. Serbian MPs voted 130 to 40 in favor, overriding the building’s protected heritage status. Architects, veterans, students, and right-wing nationalists — a coalition united by almost nothing else — marched in protest. Europa Nostra and three other international heritage organizations issued a joint statement opposing the demolition. In December 2025, Serbian prosecutors charged four senior government officials with corruption related to the deal. Hours later, Kushner’s firm withdrew.

The Generalstab still stands. Its future is undecided. Mila Orlic walks past it every morning.

“It looks like it should have been resolved twenty-five years ago,” she says. “But Belgrade does not resolve things. It accumulates them. That building is the most honest thing in the city.”

WHAT THE CITY ASKS OF YOU

Stand at Kalemegdan at dusk, when the tour groups have thinned, and the locals come to walk the walls above the confluence. Look north across the Pannonian Plain — the same view that made this ridge worth fighting over since the Neolithic. Then walk down into the city.

Find Skadarlija in the evening. Sit in Tri Sesira or Dva Jelena and let the accordion player come to your table. Order rakija. Do not leave when the music starts.

Cross the Sava in the morning and walk the blokovi of New Belgrade. Look at what a socialist state believed a city should look like — the communal green spaces, the kindergartens built into the blocks, the wide boulevards designed for a future that did not arrive in the form anyone expected. The concrete is weathered. The people inside are real.

Then find the Generalstab on Kneza Milosa. Stand in front of it. The wire fence has rusted into the streetscape. The weeds on the upper ledges have been there for twenty-five years. Commuters pass it twice a day without looking up.

Belgrade does not manage its history by making it comfortable. It leaves it where it fell and builds around it. Every city has layers. This one has collisions—and the collisions are the point. Understanding that is the prerequisite for understanding what you are walking through.