Belgrade! Look out people, cuz we’re about to get this party started Balkans style!

The rain pissed down.

OK, this is the weather I was expecting in the Balkans in November. After enjoying absurdly glorious weather in Montenegro and North Macedonia, the bill had come due in Serbia. I’m okay with this.

A stern old dude bust informed me that I’d better be okay with it. Damn Serbia, OK.

I wandered in the rain up to the Temple of Saint Sava, a huge Serbian Orthodox church that draws pedestrians from around the city like the drain at the bottom of a pinball machine and which seemed like the thing to do in Belgrade. Built in the 1930s to match the size and design of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, this is one of the largest churches in the world. They were putting a new floor in while I was there, which I imagine they’d intended to have finished before my visit.

I’d taken an early morning flight into Belgrade from Tivat in Montenegro and so I was starving. I made my was across the city and had vegan lasagna served to me by a supermodel-beautiful Serbian woman who owned the cafe. In retrospect I probably should have asked her out, because what the hell, a relationship with a high-maintenance foreigner who is tied to a location-based business sounds hilarious. And after all, if she’d said no in a really embarrassing way that involved breaking a flower pot over my head, I could have just left the country. That’s the beauty of these trips.

What’s next? The Belgrade Fortress! That sounds exciting.

It wasn’t.

My favorite thing there by far was the “Victor Statue.”

Jeez, that guy looks seriously depressed. If he’s the victor I’d hate to see the guy who lost. What’d he win? That vulture? “Gee, thanks guys.”

Wait, it’s an eagle? What the hell is he supposed to do with an eagle? Maybe the guy’s name is just Victor.

“This our statue. His name Victor.”

The other best thing about the fortress were the arms displays. I don’t mean some rusty old cannons. I mean stunningly modern tactical missile arrays that were on display for some reason.

Sign: “Please do not play on this tactical missile array.”

Jesus, is that sign necessary?

OK I lied, the best thing about the fortress was waiting for me just outside. I turned a corner and… what the hell? Suddenly and randomly, there were dinosaurs EVERYWHERE.

Ha ha ha ha. WTF Serbia?

Sign: “Do not climb on the dinosaurs.”

I’m starting to get a sense that most Serbian children do not survive to adulthood.

The main thing I’d wanted to see in Belgrade, however, was the Nikola Tesla museum.

I’d grown up with crazy books about Tesla laying around our house, which fascinated me as a kid. They focused less on his documented invention of boring old alternating current or his rivalry with Thomas Edison (who was a direct current stan) and focused more on wild shit about how he’d built a machine that could project your thoughts and dreams onto a screen and had created devices that could transmit power wirelessly across long distances through the air, and also BTW he’d figured out how to crack the Earth in half in case anybody ever needed to do that. But sadly, his laboratory was burnt to the ground in the late 1800s, either by business rivals, The Illuminati, gremlins, the FBI, asshole aliens, or just that classic mistake of storing your fireworks and oily rags together in the same drawer, and he died in obscurity in a New York City hotel.

Tesla lore gets even weirder than that in New Age circles, as Elon Musk and his partner (the singer Grimes) are thought to be the reincarnations of Thomas Edison and his wife Mina (which I tend to agree with) which makes him naming his company Tesla very interesting in light of Edison and Tesla’s acrimonious relationship. Some spiritual writers have Tesla as the reincarnation of a scientist from Atlantean times who developed the technology that accidentally sank the island, which sounds like something that a guy who casually talked about cracking the Earth in half might do. I told you it was gonna get weird!

Today Tesla is remembered for the Tesla coil, a giant doodad that made lightning (technically a resonant transformer circuit, but come on, that shit made lightning), for developing radio before Marconi, for helping to design the first modern power station at Niagara Falls, and for inventing alternating current, by the six people who can explain the difference between AC and DC without humming Highway to Hell.

The Tesla Museum is in Belgrade because Tesla… well, Tesla was from Croatia but that’s not important right now. This was all also the Austrian Empire back then, but Tesla was ethnically Serbian and that’s a big deal in this part of the world, so the museum is in Belgrade. Don’t make me bring back that stern statue bust.

The Tesla Museum is very small. Like, real small. There are no dream projectors or giant nutcrackers that can split the world in half. The museum focuses entirely on the mainstream Tesla stuff and barely even mentions Atlantis at all, so get your expectations in check before you go.

I showed up half-way through the English tour of the museum and the next one was in Serbian, so I got half the story in English and the other half in a language I don’t speak at all, which was fun. A picture display told Tesla’s life story in truncated fashion, leaving out most of the interesting bits, like how he was crazy in the fun genius sort of way. He would build machines in his mind, let them run for weeks on end, then mentally deconstruct them and inspect the parts for wear. Tesla loved pigeons more than you love anything, he spent thousands of dollars feeding them and built devices to nurse injured pigeons back to health. He believed he could communicate with the birds, which, if you think I’m going to criticize him for that you definitely haven’t read the rest of my blogs!

Basically, Tesla is exactly the kind of guy David Bowie would play in a movie.

The best part of the museum, however, were the practical demonstrations. I was handed a long fluorescent light bulb, while the rest of the crowd was clearly warned about something important in Serbian. The cute tour guide noticed the dumb look on my face at the last second and thought to warn me in English that the huge coil we were standing in front of was about to make a very loud noise, and then lightning would follow. So don’t shit your pants or run headfirst into the coil, that would make a great video for everyone else but might not end well for you.

“Lightning will follow” is possibly my favorite warning I have ever received in my entire life.

I knew the fluorescent bulbs were going to light up in our hands, but I thought the ominous lightning warning meant that visible lightning was going to arc all the way from the coil to the ends of the bulbs we were holding, which sounded dangerous as shit. So I was ready for anything. I hoped the little kids were too.

But there weren’t piles of charred dead bodies anywhere in the museum that I could see, so this all must be safe somehow.

And bzzzzzzztPOP it turns out the lightning just arced up off the top of the coil while the bulbs we were holding lit up with a ghostly pale glow, the transmission of electricity invisible.

Another experiment had us waving the bulbs in front of a strange machine. They lit up brighter the closer we held them to the machine. In another spot, we took turns holding our hands over a small coil, where a small visible arc of electricity tickled our hands. This felt quite odd.

The last demonstration showed off Tesla’s invention of a remote controlled submarine, which is definitely the toy your rich asshole friends got their kids for Christmas in 1890.

The museum is also the final resting place of Tesla’s ashes, and his shoes.

Also, minor detail, but Tesla was the Invisible Man. So there’s that.

Sadly, the Tesla fun was all over far too soon, but I consoled myself by wandering into a pretty little church on my rainy meander back across town.

The view from my little rented apartment showed off Belgrade’s interesting blend of grit and charm.

On my way to the bus station in the morning, I stopped and checked the time on Belgrade’s Fitbit.

Stepping off the bus in the nice city of Niš, I felt like I’d suddenly stepped backwards in time, after coming from the modern city of Belgrade. Suddenly people were hauling shit around in horse carts.

The apartment I had booked in Niš was cancelled while I was on the bus rolling into town, because the previous renter had a fever and refused to leave. Yeah, that’s okay, you keep that den of covid, thanks. I decided to splurge on a high-rise hotel overlooking the town square. What a great view! I feel like Howard Hughes.

How do you pronounce this town, anyway? Nish? Niche? Niiiice like Borat?

Oh. It’s like “niece.” That’s easy to remember.

My favorite pastime while touring through the former Yugoslavia was taking photos of Yugos. I had hoped some of these Yugoslavia-produced cars might still be around, even though the last one was made in 1992. And I was in luck! Somehow, several had survived 30 years of the cruel passage of time, in spite of the Yugo being, famously, the worst car ever made.

The parts for the Yugo were made all over Yugoslavia, but the final production was done in Serbia. And thus I’d hit the Yugo goldmine.

During the 1980s, Yugoslavia signed a trade agreement with the US to get their hands on some oil. But to make the deal work, Yugoslavia needed to send something back. Anything, really. An-y-thing. They decided to market cars built by their former arms manufacturer Zastava to the United States and other Western markets as the Yugo.

The main appeal of the Yugo was that it was cheap as shit. The base model Yugo GV (“Great Value!”) sold for $3,990. It sold like hotcakes, in spite of being an obvious pile of shit. The 40 horsepower Yugo GV went from zero to sixty in about 16 seconds, which is hilarious. The interior featured visible wires, and the exterior only had a side-view mirror on one side. The car’s absolute top speed was 86 mph, going downhill, so sadly it couldn’t even travel through time. Sales of the Yugo cratered in the early 90s after the Yugoslav civil war broke out and supply chains broke down. But by then the Yugo had become the punchline of more jokes than Arby’s.

One of the movies that was on near-constant rotation in my childhood home during my 20s was 2000’s Drowning Mona, in which a major plot point revolves around everybody in one small town getting a free Yugo. So all movie long everyone is constantly driving these little shitty Yugos around. I found myself humming songs from this movie as I was walking around Niš.

I even got to see a Yugo fire up and “drive” away! It sounded like somebody starting a leaf blower.

Ha ha, look at that- Wait, that's not a Yugo. What the fuck IS that? Somebody hold me.

I got some weird looks as I was wandering around, taking pictures of people’s cars. Note to self: I need to learn the Serbian for “Don’t mind me, I’m just taking a picture of how shitty your car is.”

After I was done Yugo shopping I stopped at an Idea grocery store on the way back to the hotel. Inside it was PACKED. Oh man. Maybe this was a bad Idea. The store’s loudspeakers were playing a Serbian lounge act performing a very upbeat version of Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. As the woman sang, I couldn’t stop giggling at the bizarreness of the scene as I searched for anything vegan, anything at all.

My entire reason for coming to Niš was to see the SKULL TOWER before I carried on to the more-lovely town of Novi Sad. I set off on foot for the long walk across town to get my tower on.

The Skull Tower was CLOSED. Google and the entire Serbian internet were 100% wrong about when the tower was open. Dammit covid. I sadly made my way back to the hotel as the sun went down, stopping to explore the Niš Fortress along the way.

Hmmm. Okay, sorry Novi Sad, but I can’t leave Serbia without seeing the SKULL TOWER. I decided to skip Novi and stay in Niš an extra day to make this happen.

In the morning I was off across town to the SKULL TOWER. Take 2.

What the fuck, you ask, is the skull tower? Aside from being an awesome name for a heavy metal band, the Skull Tower is a grisly artifact from the Serbian Revolution, when the Serbs rebelled against the Ottoman Empire in the early 1800s and eventually won their independence.

During the first Serbian Uprising in 1809, rebel commander Stevan Sinđelić realized his troops were completely surrounded by the Ottomans and had no hope of victory. The Ottomans took rebellions very seriously, reserving their harshest punishments for rebels to discourage these kinds of shenanigans. The Serbs knew they’d all be impaled ass-to-mouth on long spikes and left to slowly die (sorry, history is gross) if they were captured. The rebels quickly decided “Hell to the nope!” on this, and instead Sinđelić flipped the bird to the Ottomans and detonated the troop’s entire gun powder supply, blowing himself, his troops, and all the Ottomans within a large radius straight to hell.

The Ottoman authorities didn’t like losing 10,000 troops in one dramatically flamboyant F-you gesture at all and were highly pissed off, I guess because they were really bad at putting themselves in another person’s shoes for two seconds. To make an example of the Serbs, the Ottoman governor had the Skull Tower built along the road from Istanbul to Belgrade. The tower was 15 feet high and embedded on all sides with a total of 952 skulls belonging to the blown-up Serbian rebels.

Wow Serbia. This is some dark shit.

So the Ottomans built a tower of skulls as a warning, that... you’d better think twice before you… want freedom? Dislike being subjugated? I’m not sure this was a good strategy. If somebody said don’t rebel or else we’ll build a house out of your bones after you’re dead and not using them any more, I think I’d be more likely to rebel, not less. Since at that point you're clearly either being ruled by the three little pigs or insane people. Either way, not a good situation. Plus I’d be curious to see how they were going to do it. You can’t use my jawbone for the door knocker AND the toilet flusher, so which are you going to choose?

The Serbs apparently felt the same way, since a few years later they rebelled again and won their independence.

In the 1830s a French poet named Alphonse de Lamartine happened upon the tower and documented that bits of hair still attached to the skulls waved in the breeze like lichens or moss, and that the wind blowing through the skulls made an eerie, mournful sound.

In the late 1800s a chapel was built to enclose the tower, which has become a monument to Serbian independence. Only 58 skulls remain, as locals chiseled out the skulls of their loved ones to give them a proper burial. I stood there and puzzled over how they could have possibly known which skulls belonged to their relatives.

“Oh that’s definitely grandpa. I’d know that blockhead anywhere.”

Maybe the Ottomans did a really lazy job of peeling the faces off? Gross, I know. I’m just saying.

And what's the story with the 58 skulls that didn’t get chiseled out of the tower? Man, that’s way worse than my dad forgetting to pick me up after little league practice.

“Whose skull is that? Frank? Fuck Frank, he owed me money.”

I stood inside that weird little chapel, decorated on the outside with odd little ceramic skulls, and repeated an invocation of the violet flame, visualizing the dark, dense energy of this place breaking up and being transmuted into the light. Eventually a group of locals came by and I took my leave, so that their experience wouldn’t be made even stranger by the weird guy chanting at the tower of skulls.

Leaving Niš that afternoon for North Macedonia, I chuckled to myself as the Niš bus station loudspeakers played Hot Butter's Popcorn, an odd little song I first heard in, you guessed it, Drowning Mona. The scene was so sublimely perfect that I realized in that moment that this song had unquestionably been written with a Serbian bus station in mind. The bus station DJ followed this up with a banjo hoedown song that was just… wow. Wow Serbia. The chicken dance was played later.

You are amazing, Serbia. Don’t ever change (your old lady underwear).