Belgrade (Serbia)
02 - 11 April 2026
There is always something strangely familiar about arriving in Belgrade, but not necessarily in the way you might expect from returning somewhere you have visited many times before. It is not the familiarity of knowing exactly where everything is, the confidence of navigating streets without thinking, or the comfort that comes from knowing what sits around each corner. It is something far more subtle than that. It is the feeling of returning to a place that somehow existed before you arrived; a place that carries memories that are partly yours, partly inherited and partly constructed from stories that have been repeated so many times that they begin to feel as though they belong to you… there is essentially a sense of belonging.
This time, however, the reason for returning was somewhat different. Although, if I am completely honest, I have never really needed a reason to return to Belgrade. It's part of me and always will be.
On this occasion, Aiden and I travelled back to spend time with my mother after she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Naturally, that was the most compelling reason for visiting on this occasion. Seeing Mum again was something I had already been thinking about for some time, and when something as significant as the Big ‘C’ impacts someone you really care about, you don’t make a ‘decision’; you just do. And so, we arranged some time for Aiden and me to head to Belgrade.
In addition, there is always something deeper that I find myself recognising as I grow older, something I probably would not have fully understood before having Aiden myself. There is a certain reassurance that comes from being surrounded by the people who have known you the longest. A quiet strength that comes from the connections that existed before you became who you are today. The people who remember you before careers, responsibilities, mortgages, parenthood and all the other layers of adulthood accumulated around you. The people who knew you when you were simply someone’s child, someone’s grandchild, someone’s cousin. And perhaps that was part of what always draws me back into the mindset of visiting, because Belgrade has never really felt like somewhere I consciously set myself a task of ‘wanting’ to travel to, but it certainly has always felt like somewhere I return to… it's what I need. Perhaps that is because, despite never having lived there permanently (aside from three years between 2015 and 2018), Belgrade has always been part of my understanding of myself.
Growing up in Australia as the child of Yugoslav parents created a strange, but not complex, relationship with my own identity. Australia was home, unquestionably. It was where I was born, where I was raised, where I went to school, where I formed friendships, built my life and eventually created my own family. Yet alongside that life, there was always another thread running quietly in parallel, something connected to a place thousands of kilometres away that existed through language, food, family gatherings, stories and those long summer holidays when the normal rules of childhood seemed temporarily suspended.
My parents came from what was then Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian on both sides, and I was the first person in our family to be born outside Europe. As a child, I never really questioned this duality. It simply existed and felt normal. There was Australia, the place where my everyday life happened, and there was Belgrade, this almost mythical place that appeared every year or two and seemed to contain another version of my family, another version of myself and another world that operated according to a completely different rhythm and a different set of rules that I knew, somehow adopted, but also somehow neglected.
Coming back here as a child never really felt like travelling. It always felt like returning to something that was already mine.
The anticipation would always begin months before the trip. The immediate nights before leaving were always interrupted by the inability to sleep, replaced by that strange childhood excitement where time appears to slow down precisely because you want it to move faster. There was the anticipation of seeing cousins again, the conversations that would happen around tables late into the evening, and the familiarity of streets and neighbourhoods that seemed enormous through the eyes of a child.
Looking back now, I think what made those summers so memorable was not necessarily the individual experiences themselves, but the feeling that everything existed in a kind of high-definition colour. Everything felt exciting, exaggerated and somehow larger than life. I was always both part of it and detached from it at the same time, almost like when you hear stories about a place or watch documentaries about somewhere in the world that you have never personally experienced, and then all of a sudden have the opportunity to experience it.
Even in my childhood, there was that sense of permanence. The places, the people and the family structure all felt like they existed as something fixed. Something that would continue exactly as it was because, from the perspective of childhood, there was no reason to believe otherwise. Of course, childhood has a wonderful way of protecting us from the reality that everything is temporary.
When you are young, you do not really understand that the people you love are also moving through their own timelines, that everyone around you is changing while you are simply experiencing the present moment. The grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who form the backdrop of your childhood do not feel like individuals with their own stories, their own ageing and their own eventual endings. They exist, fixed in your own framework of the way you form your own reality (that’s solipsism, baby, and I brought lemonade – thank you, Gang of Youths, for that line). They feel like part of the landscape. They are the people who are simply there. It is only later that you begin to understand that nothing remains still.
Which was perhaps why bringing Aiden to Belgrade felt so significant.
Initially, I saw the trip as an opportunity to introduce him to a part of himself. I wanted him to meet family members who had shaped my own childhood, to walk through streets that had been part of my memories and to experience some of the things that had contributed to making me who I was. There was something appealing about the idea of passing on a connection, of allowing him to understand that his story did not begin with him, that he was connected to generations and places that existed long before he arrived. But what I slowly began to realise during our time there was that memories are not transferable. They can’t simply be handed from one person to another like some kind of emotional inheritance.
The streets were still there. Some of the buildings were still there. The neighbourhoods still existed. Yet the Belgrade that lived inside my memory was not the same Belgrade that existed in front of me now. The playgrounds where I spent hours as a child had changed. The people I remembered had grown older or moved on. The friendships and experiences that had felt so important at the time had become fragments, preserved mostly through stories and occasional reminders of places, sounds and images.
The physical locations remained, but the emotions attached to them belonged to another time. And that’s the part of my thinking that shifted during my short time there. I had arrived thinking that I was bringing Aiden back into my childhood with me, sharing something that I could explain and somehow make him understand. But somewhere along the way, I realised what I was actually doing was using him as a way of revisiting it myself.
Watching him explore these places created a strange reflection. I was seeing Belgrade through his eyes, but at the same time I was seeing my own memories through an entirely different perspective. I found myself searching for connections between what he was experiencing and what I remembered feeling decades earlier, almost hoping that somehow those same emotions were still waiting for me. And occasionally, they were.
There were fleeting moments when everything seemed to align, when you would feel that childhood magic. Just like hearing a song that can suddenly transport you back to a specific moment in time, where for a few seconds you are no longer simply remembering something, you are almost inhabiting that space and time again – like that connection between now and then is directly connected.
I found myself remembering sitting on concrete stairs, playing my Mickey Mouse electronic game, surrounded by my cousin and his friends. I remembered walking through parks with my grandmother, the autumn leaves creating those deep orange and golden colours that seemed impossible as a child. And then I would look across and see my own son walking beside my cousin, and for the briefest moment, the distance between those two versions of life seemed to disappear.
There were other moments too, such as sitting in the afternoon light of a beautiful sunset streaming through the windows, creating an almost dreamlike atmosphere where I allowed myself to drift backwards through time. I could almost imagine that downstairs, my father, my mother and other members of my family were sitting together having coffee, or perhaps something a little stronger, talking, laughing and reminiscing about their own lives and experiences. Those moments when memory ignores the passage of time or tricks you into believing that you’ve transported yourself elsewhere. Sweet melancholy. For a brief moment, you reconnect with something you know no longer exists.
And perhaps that is the strange beauty of returning somewhere from your past.
You never really return to the place itself.
You return to the relationship you had with that place, and that relationship belongs entirely to a previous version of yourself. You arrive somewhere familiar, but you are not the same person who originally experienced it. You are almost checking in on earlier versions of yourself, revisiting those moments through the perspective of everything that has happened since.
Aiden’s Belgrade was always going to be different from mine. It took me a little while to accept that, but ultimately, it had to be that way.
His memories should belong to him. His relationship with this place should be created through his own experiences rather than inherited from mine. The purpose was never for him to see the same things I saw or feel the same emotions I felt. It was simply for him to have the opportunity to create his own connection, his own stories and perhaps one day his own understanding of what this place means.
During our stay, my cousin and I took him around the city, showing him places that were significant to us, introducing him to relatives and allowing him to experience small pieces of a world that had shaped so much of my own life.
Whether those moments remain with him, I have no idea.
Perhaps years from now he will remember a particular meal, a particular conversation, a particular afternoon walking through Belgrade with his family. Perhaps he will remember the feeling of being surrounded by relatives who were excited to see him, even if he does not fully understand the significance of those moments until much later in life.
Or perhaps they will simply become another collection of childhood memories that sit quietly in the background, occasionally resurfacing through a photograph, a smell, a song or some completely unexpected trigger decades later.
And that is completely fine. Because the purpose was never to recreate my childhood. My purpose now is to help create his.
However, as much as this trip had initially been about Aiden, about introducing him to another part of his own story, the most significant moment of our time in Belgrade actually came on our final evening.
Our immediate family gathered together at Mum’s place for a catch-up. Mum, my aunt, my two cousins and their children were all there. On the surface, it was simply a family gathering. Nothing particularly dramatic happened. There were no grand speeches, no emotional declarations, no moment where someone acknowledged that this might be one of the last times we would all sit together in exactly that combination.
It was simply what families do when they are together.
Food on the table. Conversations overlapping. People laughing. The familiar rhythm that exists only when you are surrounded by people who have known each other for decades. And yet, somewhere during that evening, something shifted.
It is difficult to explain exactly what it was because nothing tangible had changed. Nobody announced anything. Nobody acknowledged that time was moving faster than any of us wanted it to. But there was an unspoken understanding.
A quiet recognition that this particular version of our family existed within a limited window.
The people who represented the foundations of my childhood were now reaching the stage of life where time was no longer an unlimited resource. The generation that had created the framework of so many of my memories, the people who made Belgrade feel permanent and familiar, were slowly moving towards the point where their absence would change everything.
And perhaps that was the most difficult realisation.
Not the idea of loss itself, because intellectually, we all understand that life moves in one direction. We understand that people age, that children become adults, that parents eventually become grandparents and that those who once appeared invincible slowly reveal their humanity.
The difficult part is recognising that something you assumed would always exist has quietly started disappearing while you are still standing inside it.
That evening, surrounded by the people who had been such a significant part of my life, I realised that I had been spending my entire time in Belgrade walking through the ‘Ghost Hotel’.
Not ghosts in the traditional sense.
Ghosts of memories.
Ghosts of childhood summers.
Ghosts of conversations that once filled rooms.
Ghosts of people who had occupied the same spaces and left pieces of themselves behind.
And perhaps the strangest thing was that these ghosts were not frightening.
They were comforting.
Because the people and places that shape us never truly disappear. They continue to exist through the parts of ourselves that they created. My grandmother walking through the park with me. My father sitting with family late into the afternoon. My cousins as children, running through streets that seemed endless.
My mother, my aunt and the older generation creating a family structure that, at the time, felt as though it would continue forever.
And somewhere amongst all of those memories was another version of myself.
The child who waited impatiently for another Australian summer to end because it meant another Serbian summer was beginning.
The son who saw his parents as permanent.
The grandson who did not yet understand that one day he would look back and realise how temporary those moments had always been.
Returning to Belgrade allowed me to briefly reconnect with those versions of myself, not as the person I was then, but as the person I have become.
A father.
A husband.
Someone now responsible for creating those same memories for another generation.
And perhaps that is the strange cycle of family.
We spend our childhoods believing the people before us will always be there. Then one day, we become the people responsible for creating that same sense of belonging for our own children, while quietly realising that we ourselves are also moving towards becoming memories for them.
One day, Aiden may return to Belgrade and experience his own version of this feeling. Perhaps he will walk through a street, visit a place or hear a story that suddenly reconnects him with something from his own childhood that he did not fully appreciate at the time.
Perhaps he will understand then what I understand now.
That places are never really the important part.
It is the people who temporarily occupy them.
The conversations that happen there.
The laughter that fills the rooms.
The moments that feel ordinary while they are happening, but become precious years later because they were never ordinary at all.
That is the nature of life.
Everything is temporary.
Everything changes.
The families we belong to, the places we call home, the people we love and even the versions of ourselves that we carry throughout our lives are all simply passing through.
And perhaps that is what makes them meaningful.
Not their permanence.
But their impermanence.
Because eventually, every place becomes a Hotel of Ghosts.
The only question is whether we were fortunate enough to be there while the rooms were still occupied.
.jpeg)
