Belgrade keeps its art in unlikely containers: medieval frescoes cast at full size in plaster, Yugoslav modernism inside a marble pavilion on the Sava bank, and a bombed brutalist ministry left standing as a ruin. Three days of galleries, opera houses and courtyard scenes.
Serbia's modern art collection lives in a 1965 crystalline pavilion by Ivan Antić and Ivanka Raspopović — six split-level cubes clad in white marble and glass. Yugoslav art from 1900 on: Šumanović, Petlevski, early Abramović. Open 10:00–18:00, closed Tuesday.
A single hall of full-scale copies and plaster casts of frescoes from Serbian medieval monasteries — Sopoćani, Studenica, Mileševa, Gračanica, Dečani — painted 1:1 in the 1950s. You see ceiling work at eye level, without driving 300km south.
Five floors reopened in 2018 after 15 years shut: Lepenski Vir stone fish-heads from 6000 BC, the Miroslav Gospel, Paja Jovanović's monumental 'Migration of the Serbs', plus Degas, Gauguin, Picasso and a Van Gogh in the European wing.
Dobrović's 1965 defence ministry split into two blocks to abstract the Sutjeska gorge — the boldest piece of Yugoslav brutalism in the city. NATO ordnance tore it open in April 1999 and it has stood as an unrepaired ruin ever since.
Founded 1869 in a Renaissance-revival block modelled on La Scala, still home to Serbia's opera, ballet and drama companies. The box office opens at 11:00 and same-day seats for opera or ballet cost a fraction of Western European prices.
The 1932 hall built with Ilija Kolarac's bequest is the home stage of the Belgrade Philharmonic and has the best acoustics in the country. The lobby noticeboard lists the week's chamber concerts and public lectures, most of them cheap.
Three buildings on Tito's former estate: the House of Flowers holding his marble grave, the hall of 22,000 relay batons carried by youth brigades, and rotating shows on the socialist state. Open 10:00–18:00, closed Monday.
The country's most serious repertory company, founded 1948, playing in a glass-and-steel house rebuilt after the 1997 fire. Programming leans on regional new writing and Balkan reworkings of Chekhov and Krleža rather than tourist fare.
Belgrade's largest open-air market and the one locals actually shop at, trading from 06:00. Rows of homemade ajvar, sheep's kajmak, dried paprika strings and forest honey, with a flea section of Yugoslav-era enamelware along the south edge.
A cultural centre inside an 1884 Austro-Hungarian riverside warehouse: exhibitions and design shop downstairs, concerts and film nights upstairs. It anchors what remains of Savamala's art scene after the Belgrade Waterfront demolitions.
The abandoned Bajloni brewery yard, taken over from 2014 by bars, galleries and record shops — Dim, Polet, Ludost, Kvaka 22 — around bare brick and graffiti. Afternoons are quiet enough to read the murals before the night crowd arrives.
Zemun was Habsburg territory until 1918 and still looks it: low fishermen's houses, Baroque church towers and a hill topped by the 1896 Millennium Tower marking a thousand years of Hungarian rule, with the Danube confluence below.