Experience Belgrade from your favourite perspective! Choose one of these special tours, and discover the prime cultural value unique to Belgrade.

Fortress Views 2,000 years - Big Picture of Belgrade

• Duration: 1 hour

• Move: walking

• Days and times: Mon - Fri, 10am, 5pm

• Meeting and ending points: In front of Art Pavillion Cvijeta Zuzorić

• Price: 60 EUR, minimum 2 people

You'll experience:

• Panoramic views over the rivers and their confluence
• Iconic Belgrade monuments and landmarks
• Historical and political overview and intrigue, from the Roman Empire to Ottomans and Habsburgs to the Cold War era
• Walk in the park

The Fortress is the #1 attraction of Belgrade. It can get crowded and misunderstood.

Or it can be an exciting story that unfolds in front of you on the perfect background.

What we make you see in one hour, away from the crowds, is the big picture. The key to unlocking the whys and why the hells of the local history and present. The panorama from the 2 millenia old fortification on the geographical and cultural border between the Balkans and Central Europe, at the confluence of the rivers Sava and Danube, grasps the strategic position of Belgrade that brought upon its inevitably epic past.

The view from the Belgrade Fortress is equally telling of more contemporary military and political history: victorious yet mortal WWI and birth of Yugoslavia, WWII with its controversies, the rise of socialist Yugoslavia and its capital New Belgrade laid out across the river, and the ecstasies and anxieties of the post war and Cold War periods.

The possible future is rearing its head as you glimpse to the left - a residential megadevelopment of the scale unseen in any other European city.  A tongue in cheek residential construction that startled the society that for long used to think of itself as classless.

One street time travel

• Duration: 1 hour
• Move: walking
• Days and times: Mon - Fri, 10am, 11am, 4pm, 5pm, 6pm
• Meeting point: In front of the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchy
• Ending point: Vocational School Drvo Art
• Price: 60 EUR, minimum 2 people

You'll experience:

• Real life exhibition of each and every architectural style present in Belgrade
• Insight into evolution of Belgrade from Ottoman kasaba into the capital of Serbia
• Slice of the city’s most coveted quarters

This street is a slideshow of architecture from the last 200 years, hosting various functions of a capital, commercial and religious centre and habitat, telling of its public and private lives.

Still there where the Romans set the decumanus of Singhidunum, Kralja Petra Street is a time travel in just one elegant street. It used to connect civilisations, literally. The street begins above the right bank of Sava river in the West and ends above the right bank of Danube.  The western end is where the Serbs had lived. The eastern end is the area that had been populated by foreign communities, either those of the conquerors like Turks and Germans, or merchants from Dubrovnik who found home here along their trade routes like or seeking safer environments, like Jews.

The central part presents us with the elegant palaces of well to do merchants and investors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, styled as per the tastes of the times and their patrons - from academic neo historical styles to the art nouveau as the precursor to modernism. The ancient palimpsest is sprinkled with several examples of socialist modernist architecture: residential and business buildings from 50ies and 60ies. As we stroll down, towards East and Danube, we witness the legacy of the multicultural Belgrade of the 1600ies and 1700ies: the Jewish community municipality just a corner away from the Mosque.

To complement this vivacious street walk, the quarters stemming right and left are rich with museums, galleries, tasteful shops, bistros and artisanal eateries.

Orthodox Icons

• Duration: 1.5 hour
• Move: walking
• Days and times: Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 10am, 11.30am
• Meeting point:  In front of Serbian Orthodox Church Museum
• Ending point: Collection Sekulić

You'll experience:

• Orthodox icons in three different settings
• Belgrade Cathedral
• Private apartment and dramatic personal history of a collector
• An overview of Eastern Christianity

Icon is a piece of art most ubiquitous in Serbian homes. Whatever their relationship to spiritual, religion, tradition or interior decoration, our families are very likely to have an icon of their patron saint hung on the wall. Besides these personal relationships to the family patrons, the role and the history of the icon in the orthodox christianity and its art is of decisive importance.

The story of icons is the visual story of the most defining and dramatic aspects of the orthodox ideologies and cultures. You’ll unravel the story if you join us for the tour of three treasure coves of the orthodox icons in Belgrade.

We start at the Museum of Serbian Orthodox Church, home to the priceless objects and artefacts that its monasteries, churches and dignitaries commissioned, produced and kept. From the Middle Age to the 16th and 17th centuries. My favourite icon from the collection is the most tender and motherly depiction of Mother of God with the Child I’ve ever seen.

Legacy Sekulić, the largest collection of icons on permanent display in Belgrade, includes 160 pieces ranging from 15th to 20th century and from Russia to Italy. A gift from the Sekulić spouses to Belgrade, displayed at their home within the original interior. The personal history of the collector is yet another intricate unthinkable biography of a man who lived and worked in both pre and post WW2 Belgrade.

The Cathedral is where we see the icons in their liturgical and architectural function of the threshold to the divine. Here the icons are in a different visual language to what we’d just seen at Sekulić collection, in a pictorial style that is Western Christian or Central European, pertinent to a specific political moment when the Cathedral was built and decorated in 1830ies+.

Unorthodox Socialism Architecture

• Duration: 2 hours
• Move: walking, public bus, car
• Days and times: Mon - Fri, 10am
• Meeting point:  In front of Museum of Contemporary Art
• Ending point: Sava Center

You’ll experience

• Close up on 5 exemplary buildings of Yugoslav socialist architecture
• Understanding of socialist Yugoslavia and how it differed from Soviet and Eastern European socialism
• Personal account of living in New Belgrade in the last decades of the socialist era

Find out why this architecture recently created a hype at exhibition at MoMA in New York and world-wide. Hear about it from the art historian guide who has not just studied it, but actually lived in it. You’ll discover the buildings for the socialist elites, buildings for socialist business, buildings to impress the non aligned comrades and social housing blocks for the classless society. You'll see how and why the architecture changed from the Soviet-like to modernism to brutalism. In 2 hours you'll understand 50 years of Yugoslavian utopia.

The buildings you’ll see include:

1. Museum of Contemporary Art, close up
2. Palata Srbije, pass by without stopping
3. Hotel Yugoslavia, close up
4. Belgrade Western Gate, close up
5. Housing Block 23, close up
6. Sava Center, close up