One of the Belgrade walking tours offered as part of the festival. Flickr/European Alternatives. Some rights reserved.The best and the worst thing about the Transeuropa festival 2015 was that it was in Belgrade. The best because it's a hard place not to adore. Each era of its history has left it with some impressive if crumbling architecture and some bombed-out holes in the skyline. Together they've imprinted on it the party-hard reputation of a post-traumatic city drinking to forget its past. Built on the confluence of the Danube and the Sava and shattered by the conflicts of peoples and nations, the importance of this place to the geography and history to the rest of Europe is hard to ignore.
As a child of the nineties, it was through news about the Western Balkans that I first discovered that there was such a thing as an outside world; that not every kid was as safe as me and my friends. And so the simple fact of peace was fairly striking. For locals, of course, the last bombs fell 16 years ago. But I wasn't watching in the intervening years.
But this isn't meant to be an article about Belgrade, and that's what is most debilitating about staging any event there. It's supposed to be a piece about the Transeuropa conference, which took place last week in the Serbian capital. But I've already got distracted, allowed my mind to wander once more out of the conference venue and around the only city I've ever visited that's as coffee addicted as I am. Fortunately for many of us, the organisers took advantage of being in the former Yugoslav capital, and threaded a series of walking tours through the event, giving attendees the chance to explore.
