By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Nov 9 2006 (IPS)

Billboards that say ‘Welcome to Serbia’ are back now after a 15-year absence due to wars and isolation. And there will be more after some surprise announcements about what they can do.

“In the first eight months of this year the tourism industry has grown 34 percent compared to 2005,” head of the Tourist Organisation of Serbia (TOS) Miodrag Popovic told journalists last week. “This did come as a surprise, because we were not so interesting in so many years.”

Not for tourists, certainly. “Serbia could hardly offer anything at the time of the wars of the 1990s, years of isolation, and particularly after the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) bombing in 1999,” former TOS head Milica Cubrilo told IPS.

“For people who occasionally came to visit it was interesting to see the downtown Belgrade ruins caused by bombing,” Cubrilo said. “Other visitors could not have been described as tourists either, they were transit visitors, just passing through Serbia to Greece, Bulgaria or Turkey. Tourism practically did not exist since 1991 and the wars of disintegration of former Yugoslavia.”

Real tourists began to appear after the change of regime in 2000.

The first to come were young Slovenes, Croats or Bosniaks for whom Serbia was an exotic place, part of the large homeland they once shared. It was interesting also because it was described as the source of all evil within their countries.

The young came mostly for New Year festivities or for pop concerts by international stars. Business people followed, after Serbia reopened for foreign investments.

The revival of luxury boat cruises along the Danube from Vienna to the Black Sea after a ten-year break pushed Belgrade and Serbia into the top list of many international tourist organisations.

More than 300 ships docked in Belgrade port from May to September this year. “More than 30,000 people from those ships visited Belgrade in the summer,” TOS spokesman Dejan Veselinov told IPS. “That is fantastic, the port was on the verge of dying for years.”

But TOS head Miodrag Popovic said tourism income in Serbia was only 258.7 million dollars in the first eight months of the year, a fraction of the billions of dollars tourists bring every year into neighbouring Croatia.

“But Croatia has the wonderful Adriatic Coast, while we have to develop so many things,” he told IPS. “Mostly it will be village tourism, as we have well preserved areas with unspoiled nature in central Serbia.”

More than 80,000 people spent this summer in several village tourism centres. Most of these were domestic tourists, but they included some foreigners living in Belgrade.

“Another promotion will be so-called city tourism, short visits by young professionals who are changing the trends of tourism in general, while the ancient Roman sites will also be of particular interest for many,” Popovic added.

Small family hotels are being built all over Belgrade for more tourists. Tucked away on streets here and there, these offer high quality service and luxury facilities. They are in high demand, and often have to be booked months in advance.

The Serbian government has set aside 55 million dollars for tourism development over the next two years. The first two million dollars have paid for education of tourism employees in Belgrade and at the popular mountain ski centre Kopaonik in the south.

“It’s not enough to be kind or speak some English with foreigners,” Veselinov said. “There are more sophisticated ways of communicating with tourists, and people have to make an effort to learn them.”

Several places are being developed to draw tourists. Ancient Roman sites along the Danube have been reconstructed over the past five years. The sites had been neglected for decades.

A group of enthusiasts from Belgrade University made use of domestic and foreign funding to begin reconstruction of the Viminatium, the Roman fortress that thrived from the first until the fourth century AD, when it was destroyed by barbarian tribes.

At a distance of only 100 km from Belgrade, visitors can see here the thermal baths, temples and squares of Viminatium, a small museum with jewellery and artefacts some 2,000 years old, as well as the site where more than 13,000 Roman soldiers and members of their families were buried through the centuries when the 50,000 strong fortification flourished.

“We have examined and reconstructed only five percent of Viminatium,” chief archaeologist Miomir Korac told IPS. “We expect to create a first archaeology park in Serbia in the next couple of years.”

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