Back to Belgrade, eight years on

The last time I was in Belgrade it was for WordCamp Europe 2018, the last full European WordCamp held in Serbia. On 18 and 19 September I am going back, this time for WordCamp Belgrade 2026 at Dom Omladine on Makedonska 22.

I am looking forward to the talks. If I am honest, I am looking forward to everything around them just as much.

The people are the reason

Eight years is long enough for a city to change and nowhere near long enough to forget it. What I remember most clearly about 2018 is not a session title. It is the people.

This community has a peculiar quality that I have never found anywhere else in my working life. You meet someone at an event in one country, you talk properly for an hour, and then you do not see them again until a different country two years later, at which point you carry on the conversation from exactly where it stopped. I have made friends that way who I now count among the people I value most in this industry. A good number of them will be in Belgrade, and some of them I have not stood in the same room with for years.

WordCamp Belgrade describes itself as a community run conference for the people who actually build the open web. It is volunteer organised, bilingual by design, and not affiliated with any agency or vendor. Two tracks, ten or more talks, four or more workshops, two panels, and somewhere around three hundred people, with tickets starting at forty euros. That is WordPress doing what WordPress does best. It is worth saying out loud that events like this only happen because people give up their evenings and their weekends to run them.

The city, on foot

Belgrade sits where the Sava meets the Danube, which is one of those geographical facts that sounds ordinary until you are standing at Kalemegdan looking down at it. The fortress is where I intend to start, as I did last time. It is the best free view in the city.

From there it is a walk up Knez Mihailova, the pedestrian street that runs through the middle of everything, and then on to Skadarlija, the old bohemian quarter with the cobbles and the kafanas. It is touristy in the way that Montmartre is touristy, which is to say that it is still worth your evening.

This trip I want to spend proper time in Dorćol and Savamala, and to get across the river to Zemun, walk up to the Gardoš Tower and eat somewhere along the quay watching the water go past. If there is a warm afternoon going spare, then Ada Ciganlija, the river island that Belgraders treat as their seaside. The Temple of Saint Sava is worth the detour whatever you happen to believe, simply for the scale of the thing.

And then there are the splavovi, the floating clubs and bars moored along the river banks – I know I had a good time there, I just can’t remember much of it – Serbian hospitality got the better of me. Belgrade nightlife has a reputation right across Europe and it is entirely deserved. I make no promises about what time I will be at the venue on the Saturday morning!

The food, which is the other reason

Serbian food is generous in a way that is almost confrontational. Portions arrive on the assumption that you have not eaten for a day and may not eat again for another one.

I intend to work through as much of it as is decent. Ćevapi, obviously, with raw onion and proper flatbread. Pljeskavica. Karađorđeva šnicla, which is rolled, breaded, fried and filled with kajmak, and which is a very serious commitment for one lunchtime. Burek in the morning with yoghurt. Kajmak and ajvar on anything they will let me put them on. Sarma if the weather turns. Gibanica with coffee.

Then rakija, which will be poured for you whether or not you asked for it, and which deserves rather more respect than the size of the glass suggests.

The kafana is the part I am most looking forward to. It is not quite a restaurant and it is not quite a bar. It is a room where people eat and drink and argue and sing for four hours, and it is one of the great European institutions.

What I am bringing with me

I am not going purely to eat, whatever the previous section suggests. I will be showing what I have been building with AI tools and page builders, live, on real sites, including this one.

The short version is that I have spent months now working with tools that let you describe the work and have it built in native WordPress, on your own hosting and in your own database, with nothing proprietary holding your content hostage. If you want the detail, I have written it up separately in what I am bringing to WordCamp Belgrade.

Bring me a site that is giving you grief and I will show you what it looks like to fix it by describing the fix.

Come and find me

This is the actual point of the post. I would like to meet you.

If you are coming to WordCamp Belgrade, come and say hello. If you are not coming to the WordCamp at all but you happen to be in Belgrade, that is just as good. I am happy to meet anyone who wants to, at the event or well away from it, for a coffee, for a rakija, or for a long dinner somewhere with far too much food on the table.

We can talk about your site, or about the thing you have been stuck on for a fortnight, or about none of that whatsoever. I am just as happy talking about why this community is the reason I have stayed in WordPress for as long as I have.

Book a slot in my calendar, or simply find me in the room. I am not hard to spot.