Belgrade

Belgrade - darkometer rating : 6 - The capital city of Serbia , and the greatest metropolis of the entire Balkans. As a dark tourism destination it offers a pretty unique combination of recent war scars and propagandistic military exhibitions with some remaining Tito cult-of-personality thrown in, as well as a couple of WWII -/ Holocaust -related sites. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: Belgrade (or "Beograd" in Serbian) is one of Europe's great capital cities – and even though it can't quite compete with the likes of Paris for sheer grandeur and size, it is still not far off closer competitors such as Budapest . In its history it was battered about by the Ottomans as well as the Austro-Hungarian empires, and changed hands between those powers a few times. This cross-roads position, on the other hand, ensured its strategic importance and so it was fortified and grew in size too. It became the capital of Serbia in the mid-19th century, and that of socialist Yugoslavia at the end of WWII in 1945, after a period of occupation by Nazi Germany . The latter was ended by partisan leader Tito, who managed the remarkable feat of keeping united the various peoples of Yugoslavia for 35 years, and for a while even beyond his death in 1980. But with the subsequent break-up of the Yugoslav federation from the early 1990s onwards (in the wake of the collapse of the surrounding Eastern Bloc ), Belgrade's status and sphere of influence became more volatile. Still it clung on to being the capital of the diminishing rump Yugoslavia , then "Serbia and Montenegro ", until the latter too decided to go it alone in 2006. Since then Belgrade has been the capital of independent Serbia .