Yugo diary Summer 2008 III - The improvement of Novi Sad

Several people in Serbia have asked me how Novi Sad looks today. And I have to say, that for the record, it is looking a lot better on just about every level than how I first remember it in 2002. The first things I noticed in Novi Sad, the first time I visited, are those things that most residents don't notice, and moreover don't see any different from, say, Vienna or Frankfurt or Marseilles. The dirt, for starters. In 2002, the roads in Novi Sad sat like swamps of mud, peppered with rubbish. Today, the city is looking after these things a lot better, and where there had been muck, there is now grass, and even when there isn't grass, at least there is less rubbish.


Another big change is the number of kiosks. On Dunavska (the main street) in 2002, kiosks were everywhere, selling the usual odds and ends that kiosks sell, and this gave the impression more of a Turkish bazaar than a Western city. I don't know why, but now they are no more, and the high street looks more like a pedestrian zone in any European city. I have mixed feelings about this - kiosks were kind of local culture - but I must admit it is better without them. I wonder what happened to remove them. I think it was in the space of a few months, as suddenly, one summer, they weren't there anymore.

The same goes for the park in the center of the city. In 2002, this was a depressing or even scary place, rubbish, needles, dog-shit, that kind of thing. Bins sat overflowing with all manner of muck and people generally seemed to hurry through the place. Today, though I did see a rogue needle (at least it was a new one), the park is otherwise very nice.




Other things remain more typically Eastern than Western European. I'm still reminded more of central Athens on a hot day than Hyde Park. As a Polish colleague told me when he visited Novi Sad himself, the smell of the air is typical of a country where people have too little money to meet emissions standards for cars (which I think don't exist yet in Serbia, but would be happy to be corrected). I once walked home - eyes watering - from the city center during rush hour and was honestly shocked at the air quality. I guess it will get better as cars get better.

Many buildings also remain shabby. The office where G's company works is fairly nicely done up inside, but the interior of the building looks pretty terrible, and the outside of this building is visibly eroding. Again, the issue is money, and I'm encouraged that many buildings are getting facelifts. All in good time.


Graffiti is also everywhere. Even in relatively well-to-do neighborhoods it is really omnipresent. We were walking in the city the other day, heading to a relative's flat, and I started to get that feeling of walking in a rough council estate in, say, White City in London. G. was pointing out that the area was actually quite up-market, and that engineers and doctors and lawyers lived in these rough looking tower blocks. Again, all understandable when people have little money, but I do wonder about the graffiti.

And now that we have a dog, I notice the animals. Dogs and cats are everywhere in Serbia, running wild, pooping in children's playgrounds, etc. In Germany, perhaps rules and attitudes are perhaps extreme in a different direction: one never sees dogs running through the street. Any rogue animal is quickly taken off the street to avoid it pooping in places where children might be, but anyway, German dog-owners would never allow their precious Jagthund (or whatever) to run as freely as many dogs do in Serbia. Interestingly, however, both Croatia and Serbia have issued edicts that all dogs must be registered (in fact, the only post we received in our house on Krk was about registering our dog), so I'm told that, in principle, all of these street-wise, often mangy rogue dogs have a chip in them. All these little things, I'm told, are part of the large list of things that one must do to qualify for EU membership. Hopefully car emissions are another.