It is so dark that I can’t see more than a couple of inches ahead of me. My hand strokes its way along a cold, iron bannister and I shuffle slowly up the narrow stone staircase, feeling for each new step with my toes. “I think it might be on the next floor,” my friend, a Belgrade native, says from somewhere above me. “I’m not sure though. I’ve only been here once.”
We are halfway up a private apartment block on Sremska Street, on our way to a bar called Tijuana, one of the Serbian capital’s many secret drinking dens.
The city has plenty of bars in which tourists can sit beneath branded Tuborg umbrellas and pick hearty Slavic stews from laminated picture menus. The locals, however, like to drink somewhere a little more exclusive. So exclusive, in fact, that most of the bars they frequent don’t have anything as obvious as a sign – or, in many cases, even a name.