Belgrade: practical tips

The dinar, and the border

Serbia has been an EU candidate for years but isn’t in it, and it isn’t in Schengen either. So there are passport checks going in and coming out, even arriving overland from Hungary or Croatia, and the border queues in summer are genuinely long if you’re driving. By air you notice nothing beyond the stamp.

The currency is the Serbian dinar and euros aren’t accepted in ordinary life: in shops, taxis and restaurants you pay in dinars. There are cash machines everywhere and exchange offices on every corner, with good rates and no visible commission, so don’t change more at the airport than you need for the taxi.

Cards are accepted without trouble in the centre, and in small places and markets they aren’t: carry some cash.

The hospitality, which is serious

Serbian hospitality shows the moment you walk into a house and it isn’t a cliché: they’ll put a rakija and something to eat in front of you before asking why you came, and if you say you aren’t hungry they’ll put it there anyway.

Refusing the rakija is a small but real slight. If you don’t drink, take the glass, wet your lips and leave it, and that counts.

And there’s an expression you’ll hear that’s worth understanding: “samo malo”, just a little, which is what they say while pouring you double. The underlying logic is that the guest obliges: refusing to give is worse than insisting too much.

In a restaurant this translates into portions that frighten you and into nobody ever pushing you off a table. And in the manner: it’s a country where people will walk three streets with you to show you where something is rather than explain it.

The two alphabets

Serbian is written in two alphabets and both are correct: Cyrillic is the official one and Latin is used constantly, often in the same place. You’ll see a street name in Cyrillic on the plaque and in Latin on the sign next to it, and nobody finds it odd. Serbia is one of very few countries in the world with two alphabets in active simultaneous use for the same language.

For you this is easier than it looks: almost everything touristic and commercial is in Latin, and Serbian Cyrillic has thirty letters, each with one sound and always the same one. In a train ride you learn to decipher signage, which is more useful than you think for reading a menu or a bus destination.

And a note: place names in Cyrillic transliterate letter by letter, so Београд is exactly Beograd. There’s no catch.

Mobile data

The practical warning that prevents the most grief is one almost nobody has in mind: Serbia isn’t in the European Union, so the surcharge-free roaming you have inside the EU doesn’t apply here. Your European tariff, the “use your data as at home” one, ends at the border. And since Belgrade is a hop from Budapest or Zagreb, a lot of people cross without noticing and get the bill afterwards.

There’s a regional agreement that has cut roaming between the Western Balkan countries, but that’s between them: it doesn’t cover you coming from Spain. Check your tariff before crossing, or solve it with an eSIM that covers Serbia, activated before you leave home.

And bear in mind that if you do the Danube trip you’ll be close to the Romanian border: watch out for the network hop, because that one does get charged.