Zrenjanin

I spent the weekend in Zrenjanin, an hour and a half north of Belgrade. It's a town that my guidebook says isn't worth visiting, but I enjoyed it. That was because of the company, not the city itself. My friend D, a WiB activist, lives there. We spent a night bar-hopping and a day cafe-hopping and drinking sljivovica - homemade plum brandy - with her uncle and grandmother.

Zrenjanin is in Vojvodina, an autonomous province in northern Serbia. [The much more famous Kosovo is Serbia's other autonomous province - or it was. Now its a UN administered region or some such.] It isn't like Serbia. It isn't linked historically with the region to its south. It was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire while the rest of Serbia was ruled by the Ottomans. When lines were drawn through the Balkans after WWI, The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, & Slovenes (proto-Yugoslavia) got Vojvodina.

And it's religiously & ethnically diverse. Something like 40 ethnic groups live in Vojvodina. I saw Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant churches. There's still a ton of nationalism - "kill Croats" is a phrase I recognize in cyrillic & it was painted thorought the town - but it is better. It was the only part of Serbia my hosts, a half-Serb half-Croat woman and her half-Serb half-Bosniac (that's Bosnian Muslim) husband, felt comfortable moving back to after Sweden denied them permanent residence.

I think it's a bit troubling to have to go to a small town to feel cosmopolitan.