TOURING SERBIA – BY ROADS, RAILWAYS, AND RIVERS
THE SECRET OF A TRUE JOURNEY
Discovering Serbia
A journey is not only a way to pass a distance between two points in space, most often using the shortest way and most efficiently. Much more than that, a journey is exploring, getting to know, conquering the new, adventure, game. It can be a passion, philosophy, point of view, it may have its aesthetics and poetics, its ceremonies. In it, there is something of the ancient alchemy secret: not only the lands one travels through change, but also the traveler himself. A journey is not only getting to know the world we live in, but also one’s own soul. And this is not only a phrase, like the too often wasted one that “beauty is in the eye of the one who watches”; it is the original announcement given to us by sages: “The divine is not in the object of admiration, but in the one who admires.”
To travel – it is not only to watch, it is to see.
It is not only to acknowledge, it is to feel, to experience, to take within oneself, to make one’s own, a part of one’s experience and one’s being.
You can travel to a country several times, and still not know anything important about it. It may not open to you, or you to it. You can remain just a user of technical services, like you use the ATM on the corner, in a nameless city, waiting to change a plane for who knows where. You cannot truly get to know a country if you don’t penetrate the soul of its people, its colors, scents, tastes, lightness and darkness, symbols, wines, spices, melodies, peaks, waters. If you don’t listen to its singing, its laughter and its silence. If you don’t feel how it expresses its joy and its sorrow. If you don’t check what travelers before you had written and if you don’t leave a letter to the ones that will come later.
This book before you is, before all, an invitation to a true journey, and then support during the journey. An invitation to discover Serbia, regardless whether you are a host or a guest, regardless whether you are here for the first time, or coming back to it as to an old flame.
This book is an invitation to a journey not only through space, but also through time, not only through the real and virtual, but also through dreams and imagination. It is a combination of a rich tourist guide, geopoetics, cultural-historical and economic panorama, a road sign for traditionally good places and calling upon creativity. All this together.
This book unifies within itself many forces and many voices, it interlaces innumerable sources and texts, it is joyful above any vanity, therefore representing, in the real sense of the word, a joint deed.
What is good in it – it is yours.
What you think is not good – forgive.
The roads, railways and rivers await.
Serbia awaits.
Let’s go.
