Day 10 - Sunday, August 31 - Belgrade, Serbia

August 31, 2025

Cooler and cloudy this morning with the temperature around 70.

A bus took us up to a main plaza where we walked through the Belgrade Fortress which is now a very large and green park with the main fortress buildings in the center although there are ruins of the old walls extending quite a way around.

This Belgrade region changed so many times, I won't even try to recount it all but it included the Romans, Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians and at times an independent kingdom.

It has been destroyed many times. During the second world war, Serbia was on the Allied side and was bombed heavily by the Germans who eventually occupied it. It was then bombed to defeat the Germans. Much of the city was damaged in the civil war of the 1990s after the breakup of Yugoslavia. We passed buildings which were still largely destroyed - several of which have been purchased by Jared Kushner to build new Trump facilities - very depressing.

We then went to the Saint Sava church which is very new, construction starting in the 1930s. (When Putin visited here it was designated a cathedral but there is actually an older and official cathedral in a different part of the town. The brick construction of the church was suspended during the war and then terminated in 1948 by the communist government and at one point was used as a car garage. In 1985 after the death of Marshal Tito, construction was resumed using concrete but it couldn't be continued above the old brick structure but had to surround it. It was largely completed in 2004 but finally the last mosaics were installed 4 years ago.

The church is spectacular beyond words with all the gold and beautiful mosaics. Fresco could not be used over the fresh concrete so mosaics had to be used. There are over a billion tiles in the mosaics. Many of the mosaics are replicas of frescos in other Orthodox churches. While they are impressive in other churches, over time they become covered with a layer of grime while these were exceptionally bright and clear. The photos below can't really do justice. While there were many tourists, there were also many devout believers who came to kiss the many icons.

After lunch we went to the Nikola Tesla museum. Tesla is most famous for the invention of the AC electric motor and electric generators. Of the 13 patents listed for the first generation facility at Niagara Falls, 9 belonged to Tesla. He had many ideas for wireless communication and energy transmission but they weren't accomplished in his lifetime and he died poor. JP Morgan started to fund his wireless energy transmission but suddenly pulled his funding for reasons that were never disclosed.

There was an interesting demonstration of a 500,000 volt Tesla electric generator that could throw a large spark and a demonstration of a wireless remote-control boat from the early 20th century. We got to feel the spark from a 125,000 volt generator - a bit tingling!

In the afternoon there was an interesting talk by a historian that described long historic complicated relations of the region between the Serbs, Croats and Muslims. This region was also a buffer between the USSR / Russia and the west. He addressed the terrible conflict of the 1990s which killed tens of thousands of people but in the end, I'm not sure I understood much more. While things are going well for Serbia right now, it doesn't seem that the various ethnic groups and countries are any happier with each other than they were before.

We just signed up for a Viking cruise up the Rhine River from Basil, Switzerland to Amsterdam in August, 2027.