EUROPE TO-DAY

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXVII, Issue 12518, 30 November 1938, Page 7

EUROPE TO-DAY

THE WHITE CITY The white city is Belgrade, and while we are in Serbia we must look at it. The old name suits the new little city well, for here are * white stone houses, white, wide streets, and stucco walls. The speed and energy with which Belgrade has made itself new, and has grown to be worthy of the new Serbia is truly astonisn ing. If we described it as it was before the war we should be hopelessly wrong, for Belgrade to-day is mo ing. It has imposing banks with a great display of stone. It has King Peter’s Street, clean and pleasant and imposing—its new name (it was once Dubrovatschka Uliza) in keeping with the new spirit here. It has a cathedral with a lofty spire soaring above the roofs, the old roofs, and the new. It has traces of the old walls which once protected the town, and it keeps some of its quaint old streets to show that it is not contemptuous of the past. We might well spend a few minutes in the old corners—at the venerable fortress crowning Belgrade’s height. It is set bn a limestone rock 150 feet high, and from it& walls and towers, scarred, by centuries we may look over a panorama of the city; or we may walk through the old Turkish town and see the plaster walls of the houses overhanging the cobbled street; and it is possible that we may And a chimney here and there with a stork’s nest bulging at the top. And then, to come, back *to the new, we find Sir Percival Philips saying: The Serbs do not believe in hastening slowly when they are concerned with town planning. Reconstructing a city piecemeal—a brick at a time —-is far too tedious. They have hoisted entire blocks of glaringly up-to-date office building and apartment houses into the air, and there are tall, assertive structures plastered above with statues of heroic size and frivolous little red balconies below. This is Belgrade.