Belgrade has been razed and rebuilt more often than almost any city on earth. Three days trace it in order: Celtic and Roman ramparts, Ottoman and Habsburg quarters, then the Yugoslav century — royal crypts, partisan monuments and NATO's scars still standing on Kneza Miloša.
The 60m-deep 'Roman Well' is actually Austrian, dug 1721-31 under Karl VI, and 194 steps descend past legends of murdered lovers. Around it stand Celtic Singidunum's successor walls and the Despot Stefan Tower of 1405. Open 10:00-19:00 summer.
Belgrade's oldest church, built into the fortress's eastern rampart and rebuilt in 1867 as a garrison gunpowder store. Its chandeliers are welded from WWI sabres, bullet casings and cannon parts by Serbian soldiers. The holy spring below fills the Sveta Petka crypt.
A 14km ride downriver to the type-site of the Vinča culture (5700-4500 BC), Europe's largest Neolithic settlement, excavated by Miloje Vasić from 1908. Nine metres of stratified habitation layers, anthropomorphic figurines and the disputed Vinča symbols predate Sumerian writing.
The only survivor of Belgrade's 273 Ottoman mosques, built around 1575 and named for the flag (bajrak) raised to signal prayer times across the city. Converted to a Catholic church under Habsburg rule 1717-39, then restored; firebombed in 2004 and rebuilt again.
Tito's marble tomb sits under a glass-roofed winter garden where he grew orchids, guarded until 1992 and still visited by thousands each 25 May. The adjoining halls hold the relay batons carried by youth brigades and state gifts from Nehru, Nasser and Elizabeth II.
Nikola Dobrović's 1965 Brutalist twin towers — designed as an abstraction of the Sutjeska gorge — were struck on 30 April 1999 during NATO's 78-day campaign and deliberately left in ruins. Opposite stands the equally gutted Ministry of Defence.
King Aleksandar I's 1929 palace and the White Palace of 1937, with Poussin and Canaletto canvases, a Romanov-linked library and a basement cinema where Tito screened Westerns. Guided tours only, weekends April-October, booked through the Tourist Organisation.
Meštrović's 1938 black-granite mausoleum on Avala's summit, its roof borne by eight caryatids representing Yugoslavia's peoples, raised over a WWI soldier's grave after King Aleksandar razed a medieval fortress for it. The 1965 TV tower beside it was destroyed in 1999 and rebuilt in 2010.
Across the Sava lay the Habsburg military frontier until 1918 — Zemun's Baroque streets, Nikolajevska Church of 1731 and the 1896 Millennium Tower on the ruins of a medieval fortress mark the old border between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire.
Belgrade's Sephardic community, settled here since the 1500s, was almost entirely destroyed by 1942 — Serbia was declared 'Judenfrei' in August 1942. The museum on Kralja Petra holds ritual objects, Sarajevo Haggadah facsimiles and camp records from Sajmište and Banjica.
In the basement of the former 18th Infantry barracks, where 23,637 prisoners were registered between 1941 and 1944 and around 4,200 shot at Jajinci. Original cells, the camp register and prisoners' scratched wall inscriptions remain in place.
Raised on the plateau where Sinan Pasha burned Saint Sava's relics in 1595 as reprisal for a Serbian uprising. Begun 1935, halted by war and communism, its 4,000-tonne dome was lifted whole in 1989 and the gold-mosaic interior finished only in 2020.