Belgrade - Day Three

November 4^th, 2026 

It was another cloudy and at times rainy day in Belgrade, so what does that translate to?  A perfect museum day.

 

I started my day with the Museum of Science & Technology that I had hoped to visit yesterday, but they closed earlier than usual.  Let’s say it was more like the “Museum of Old Technology”.  I arrived about half and hour after it opened, and I was the only person in the place.  Soon there were a few others, but I think the maximum occupancy was under ten people while I was there.

 

Starting on the second floor, the museum had an open layout with a variety of items starting with old TVs, movie cameras, projectors and mixers, followed by some telephones, ice chests and other household gadgets and then a real jump around from musical related items, diving gear, robotics and computers.   It was a strange collection, but there were some interesting “technological artefacts” for sure.

The Museum of Science & Technology.

Not only did they have the "Tapematic 2002", but look at the "Tapematic 3000" beside it!  They were used in music and tape duplication facilities to wind and splice magnetic tape into empty cassette shells.

Some sweet ol' TVs.

There didn't seem to be too much rhyme or reason in the order of the items in the exhibit.

Some old film projectors.

A four-track and three-track audio mixer for films.

A typewriter with both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets...this would have been tough to learn how to type on without looking at the keys.

Some "modern" iceboxes on the top row.

Now that's a funky looking hair dryer.

And how about this radio and eight-track player...pretty futuristic looking.

Modern looking phones...for the late 1970s.

I would have called this vacuum cleaner the "Suck-O-Matic".

This old school dentist setup reminded me of one I visited in India around 2012!

They has a few musical automatons (I never knew the proper name for them).  They are impressive but what work to put the little nails in the rotating drum to make the music.

Diving in this suit would have been terrifying.  

Air was pumped in from an umbilical cord from the surface which could cause the diver to float up to the surface if it wasn't for these 10 kg lead boots.

An electron microscope from the 60s.

An old school transistor computer.

Some robotic legs intended to help a paraplegic person.

Imagine trying to figure out how to operate this computer!

Boy, this really aged me...along with the old computers from the 60s and 70s, there was an Apple IIe, a computer that my dad purchased in 1981 and I loved it as a kid.  In fact, I still have it...and it still works!

I recall using 5 1/4" floppy disks in the Apple IIe computer, but this is a monster 8" floppy.

The ground floor was a bit of a bust.  It was supposed to have a lot of “interactive exhibits” but half of them weren’t working, plus they were intended for kids.  It was also a strange collection of items.

A cool double-bike setup that's ready for any kind of weather.

A cute looking car.

Okay, how often do you see a farming tractor with Saturn and Jupiter in the same area of a museum?!?

Some car-prams.

An interesting way to model the periodic table.

It had only cost the equivalent of $4 CAD to enter the museum, and I thought that was a fair price for what the museum was.  But there were a few interesting items in the place, so I was glad that I visited it.

I jumped on a bus for my next stop, the Church of Saint Sava.  This place hadn’t been on my radar until it came up at the end of the walking tour yesterday, when Zubair showed me a few pictures of the inside.  The church is dedicated to Saint Sava, the first Serbian archbishop and the nation's patron saint.  It was symbolically built on the site where his relics are believed to have been burned on a pyre by the Ottomans in 1594 following a Serb uprising.  Construction of the church began in 1935 and was completed only in 2004, when the exterior was finished, and in 2020.

 

Coming through the entrance.

Now that's a beard!

There were about 6-8 little stands with a picture of various saints and other religious figures.  I witnessed a number of worshippers step up to a pedestal, make the sign of the cross with their hand and then bow down and kiss the picture.  Hmm...I wonder how often they cleaned the glass of the frame!

This is what they were kissing.

Trump would approve of the use of the gold plating..,

This is known as the panikadilo, the big chandelier in the middle of an orthodox church.

Looking up at the main dome.

Yup, there was a gift shop by the entrance.

My final stop for the day was the Museum of Yugoslavia.  With 120,000 visitors annually, it is the most visited museum in Serbia, and it wasn’t until I was there that I realized why.  There are three different buildings, the Old Museum, the House of Flowers and finally the 25 May Museum.  I’ll leave you hanging for now as to why there are so many visitors to this museum…

Approaching the museum, I thought it was just this building, but this was the last of three, the 25 May Museum.

Guns on the left, but I'm not sure what the three individuals on the right are doing.

Looking back towards the city, you can see the Church of Saint Sava on the horizon on the right.

The ticket office.

The Old Museum was a long building, one-storey building that slowly worked its way up a hillside so every 30 metres there were a few steps up to the next section.  It started with many gifts that the Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia from 1943 to 1980, received from various leaders from throughout the world.  There was quite the variety of items, that’s for sure.

I believe this was a gift from the USSR.

This was a gift from Ghana, a tusk with a female bust, but it was not from the Ghanian government but from the Yugoslavian embassy there.

Mohatma Gandhi...obviously a gift from India.

A massively long rifle from Morocco.

Busts of Lenin and Marx.

Tito was given many guns.

Who would think "Boy, that would look great in my living room"!

There were many relay batons...they seemed popular at the time as part of the "Relay of Youth" that were presented to him during mass birthday celebrations for Tito starting from 1945.  There were probably about 30-50 on display, but supposedly there are 22,000 of them preserved in the museum!

Some "happy" drawings by kids.

That's one serious overcoat.

The Genex Tower that I visited a couple of days ago, back in its glory days shortly after it was completed.

Next was the House of Flowers.  It was also a one-storey building and true to its name.  It had the feeling of a small botanical garden with an atrium sandwiched by a couple of rooms on either side.  Looking at the pictures on the wall and reading what was on the boards beside them, it was obvious that the focus was on Tito, and specifically about his death.  There were many photos of the crowds of mourners after he died.

Yugoslavia's leader for most of the country's existence, Josip Broz Tito.

It was then, confirming it with a quick search on my phone, that I clued in that the white marble sarcophagus in the centre of the atrium, which I hadn’t really noticed thanks to all of the foliage, was the tomb of Tito.  This is why this is such a visited museum…people come here still to pay their respects to the former leader of Yugoslavia.  In a smaller tomb off to the side of Tito’s was that of his wife, Jovanka Broz.  

That's Tito's tomb behind the rope.

You got a better view, closer up, from the side.

Fidel Castro paying his respects.  Tito's funeral was a massive state funeral with probably more than 90% of all countries sending a delegation to pay their respects.

And now Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran.

Until the break up of Yugoslavia, every year at 3:05 pm on May 4th, the time when Tito died, every citizen had to stop what they were doing and stand up to pay their respects while air raid sirens wailed.

A relay baton was run through many cities and town throughout the nation before it arrived for the funeral in Belgrade.  Tito seemed to have something for relay batons!

The outside of the House of Flowers building...a very plain jane for the resting spot of such a national hero.

The final building was the 25 May Museum, which is named after Tito’s official birth date (although there is discrepancy over the actual date).  This building didn’t have much to do with Tito, and it seemed like it had temporary exhibitions in either of the two main sections on the upper floor (the main floor seemed to be for the curators of the museum).

The entrance to the 25 May Museum.

The current exhibit in one section was about the imprisonment, suffering and resistance in concentration camps for Serbs during WWII and it was called “Freedom is Just a Dream for Us”.  It had some slightly odd and obtuse artwork that was mostly not up my alley but some of it was interesting.

A slightly disturbing painting.

An interesting use of dolls and plastic figures.

Note the armband with the Star of David on it.

The other wing was not as enthralling, and I spent maybe all of 5-7 minutes walking around in that section.  It was called “Read and Pass It On: The War Leaflet in the Yugoslav Region in the 20^th Century”.

A bunch of leaflets strung from the ceiling down to the floor.

Once again, I had skipped or at least postponed lunch so after the museum, I hopped on a bus to head back to Knez Mihailova Street, where I had briefly walked by yesterday, to find a place for some food. 

I've been trying to capture a photo of this cool looking building, the 42-storey Belgrade Tower, while I have seen it from a bus ride...hopefully I'll get better than this.

Here's a photo of it that I grabbed from online...it has a cool shape to it.

I found a nice spot and enjoyed a late lunch, but something that is hard to endure is the fact that Serbians are still allowed to smoke in restaurants.  Crazy!  We banned that in Canada 30 years ago.  I remember after a night out at the bars in university, your clothes would stink from the cigarette smoke.  Well, this brought back those memories.  My eyes felt dry, you can taste it a bit in your food and I got a slight headache.  When I returned to my room in the late afternoon, I had to change my shirt as it reeked of smoke…yuck.

The cafe before many smoking patrons showed up.

Tomorrow, I head off to the third largest city in Serbia, Niš, on an early morning bus so I had a quiet last evening in Belgrade.  It was an interesting place to visit, especially the Brutalist architecture from the Communist years, but I don’t think I’ll be compelled to revisit this city in the future. 

 

Hvala Beograd. (Thanks Belgrade)