Belgrade
Writing

Belgrade has been destroyed seventeen times. It stopped counting.

Concrete & roses · Balkan resilience · The Sava and Danube meeting

Belgrade sits at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers and has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that resilience is not an attitude here but a geological fact, something embedded in the city's structure. The Brutalist architecture of the socialist period sits beside Ottoman remnants beside Austro-Hungarian grandeur beside the ruins of buildings bombed in 1999. Belgrade contains all of its own history simultaneously, without synthesis.

"In Belgrade the rakija arrives before the menu. This is not hospitality in the tourist-board sense. It is an announcement: this city will not apologise for itself. You can take it as it is or you can leave."

Tumbleweed Words — Belgrade

The Belgrade writing refuses pathos. The city itself refuses pathos. What it offers instead is a directness — an unsentimental engagement with difficulty — that is the closest European equivalent to the American dirty realism tradition that runs through Tumbleweed Words. People in Belgrade stories mean what they say. They have learned not to waste time on indirection.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and The Dundee Anthology. Pushcart-nominated. Five years on Substack.