Nis Fortress Nightlife

Nis fortress walls. Disco to the left.

A day exploring Crveni Krst concentration camp and climbing Bubanj Hill to see a mass execution site can depress the average tourist.  Serbia has a simple, powerful solution to cure this depression: coffee.  Or if that's not strong enough: rakia.  The Balkans can easily convert a sworn coffee-hater into a coffee addict (and potential rakia addict.)

He's sad because the Mafia made him into a disco

Coffee and rakia are two likely reason you will visit Nis Fortress in Serbia.  Nis Fortress is not so much a historical site as it is an organic extension of the city center.  There is no charge to enter and it has been left open to the public to function as a decadent city park.  Local Mafia took advantage of the lenient rules and built a large disco-cafe, Klinika, directly on the fortress stones.

Some people would say it's a tacky, tasteless way to deface a historical monument, but it sure is a fun place to party.  If you don't care to join the beautiful people dancing in the open-air disco, just buy a few liters of Jelen beer at the nearby kiosk, grab your friends and dance on the fortress walls overlooking the disco until sunrise.  You can still hear the pounding music and watch the sun rise from the fortress walls.


I experienced Nis' nightlife for the first time in 2010 and loved it so much that I had to return in 2011 to do it again.  If it were possible I would return to Southern Serbia every summer for partying.  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Balkan people's flair for living rivals any typical Latino's "vida loca" attitude.  Perhaps due to the Balkans proximity to Asia, there's also a magical Eastern mysticism there that Latin America lacks.  While the world changes, The Balkans seems trapped in a time bubble that remains the same every year.  This night I experienced could have been in 2010, 2011, 2012 or any year...you decide...

I was Couchsurfing with some friends I had met from the previous summer.  I had the good fortune that summer to surf with my friend when he had 2 nice Bosnian girls surfing with him at the same time.  When I meet the girls, they told me (teasingly) that they hated Americans.  Yeah right...  What started as teasing hate over dinner and drinks ended up as love (?) by the time we had arrived at Nis Fortress later that night.

My Serbian friend and I are sensitive modern men, so we cooked a lovely dinner for the Bosnian girls.  After much debate of USA-Balkan politics, foreign food, counterculture (and beer) one of the girls and I ended up kissing in the moonlight in Nis Fortress on that hot summer night.  She fascinated me for being what I wasn't.  She was a wild, dancing, free-spirited hippie who was an expert fire-thrower.  I had my guitar and watched her mesmerizing fire-dance as I sang on the top of the Nis Fortress walls.  The music from Klinika disco below us provided an odd trance accompaniment.

Unfortunately, there were many people partying in the park, including several other beautiful Balkan girls.  I became very distracted.  Dare I say Balkan girls are one of my weaknesses, and a Serbian medical student caught me that at that moment.  While the Bosnian girl was showing off her fire-throwing skills on the fortress stones, I began chatting with the student.  Many Southern Serbian girls get pretty excited when an American guy with a guitar shows up in their town.  I'm a complete liar if I said I don't take full advantage of the situation, and I love my Serbian friends for telling me this.  They are some of the few people I know who will tell me to my face what a complete 'American asshole/fucker/sonofabitch' I am sometimes.

...America, Fuck Yeah!

An "American Fucker" in Nis, Serbia

Rakia and beer flowed freely in the fortress park, and people drifted in and out of my memory.  We danced, drank, sang, reveled and eventually the Serbian and I left for a quieter place.  I didn't notice until the sun was rising what had happened.  The Bosnian girl wasn't happy to find out I had changed allegiances and was in a rage.  When I'm traveling, I can be the naughtiest American asshole.

The Bosnian and I returned to our shared Couchsurfer place in the early hours of the morning.  She was angry and refused to even touch me even though we had to share a bed that night.  Now what do I do?

In The Shade of The Bubanj Memorial Fists, Nis, Serbia

(Part Two of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia)

Welcome to the dark side of the moon.

The three stone fists of the Bubanj Memorial Park stretch defiantly skyward.  They jut unnaturally out of the featureless, flat grassy field like alien-made monoliths on the surface of a far away planet.  Or as one of my friends so eloquently put it, "Dude, it looks like the cover of a Pink Floyd album."

It was still scorching hot.  I sat in the shade of the largest fist in deep, melancholy thought.  My thought process was a depressing continuation of that from Crvni Krist Concentration Camp where I had just came from.  Although Bubanj Memorial Park is located several kilometers from Nis and requires a 30 minute walk uphill, it is intimately connected to the camp.  The prisoners of Crveni Krst were executed at Bubanj Hill.

The three fists are different sizes to show that men, women and children were all killed and buried here.  Since bodies were buried with bulldozers and many were burned to cover up evidence, the number of dead can only be vaguely placed at somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.  At one point between February 16th and 17th, 1942 over 1,400 prisoners were executed on the hill.

Bubanj Memorial was as lonely that day as Crveni Krst.  I sat under the largest fist for nearly an hour and not a soul came to interrupt my peace.  Once again there were no signs to explain the history nor tourist-friendly lights to illuminate the stones.  The only signs of human interaction with the monuments were squiggles of blue graffiti.  The wide, grassy field was overgrown and unkempt.  Amazingly the loneliness here felt more crushing than in the camp.  Dying in a concentration camp is horrifying enough, but being brought to die on an extremely isolated, unidentified hill in the middle of a forest seems far more frightening.

This sculpture has no explanation

The sun was setting and the moment was over.  I am not some heroic backpacker who independently desires to learn of the history and suffering of the Serbian people by visiting such an unfamiliar place.  The reality is that a Serbian friend told me about it and I thought, "That sounds like a good idea."  She was kind enough to let me explore the field and monoliths on my own as she slept by the path that lead to the desolate area.  If not for her, perhaps I never would have translated the Cyrillic message on a stone I saw at the memorial before we descended the long hill back to Nis:

  “From the blood of communists and patriots fists were born: fists of revolt and warning, fists of the revolution, fists of liberty. We were shot, but never killed, never subdued. We crushed the darkness and paved the way for the Sun.”    
                                                                                                                      --Ivan Vuckovic