We had a very successful, but tiring day today.
We began the morning with a pleasant walk to the National Library of Serbia where we saw round the impressive reading rooms, the memorial rooms (featuring various memorial collections - for example not just a famous author's books and papers, but his writing desk, family albums and so on.) We saw many interesting things (like the room for people with visual disabilities, or the special floor navigation system to help visually disabled folk find various parts of the library) and got to understand the workings of the library as well as it's history. It is rather poignant that they have on display in the front lobby some of the burnt remains of books and manuscripts destroyed during the bombing of the old National Library in 1941 (you may remember we saw the site of the old library on Sunday.)
After this we had a tour of the wonderful preservation lab, where a team of highly trained paper scientists and other conservators work on old books, maps, and manuscripts from all across Serbia. It is astonishing what they are able to do, and the director of the lab and his staff were very gracious in showing us manyof their current projects.
We had time for a short visit to St. Sava's Temple, the largest Serbian Orthodox church in the world, and the second largest Orthodox church. The outside of the temple was only finished a few years ago and work on the inside continues (a couple of world wars and 45 years of communist government got in the way of completion) but the crypt is now fully finished, and is an astonishing riot of color and imagery.
Our second library stop was the library of the University of Belgrade (90,000 students) and again we enjoyed an interesting tour, featuring both the history of the library (it is a Carnegie library from 1926) and the challenges they face and how they are dealing with them. (Imagine a building designed for 300,000 books with actual holdings of over 1 million books - and then imagine the effect of all that extra weight on the actual fabric of the building.) We also got to visit the rare books room and saw 13th century Perisna manuscripts, the first book printed in Serbian, the first book printed in Belgrade (in the 16th century) and so on.
We had a couple of hours off before our third visit, during which some folk visited the Nikola Tesla museum. (Tesla invented the Tesla coil, among other things, and was responsible for AC current, which was found to be far better than Edison's DC system and so became the standard for electricity transmission.)
Our final visit was to the American Corner in Belgrade. This library is a collaboration among the American Embassy, the Belgrade City Library, and the Youth Cultural Center. We learned all about their work, their collections, and their programs (for the librarians - they run about 550 unique programs a year, in a very small space, for children, young adults, and adults.)
Various people have already identified their favorite Serbian restaurants or delicacies, and are exploring during the non-official visits.
Tomorrow we go north to visit Subotica near the Hungarian border and will then return to spend the night in Novi Sad, where we will spend Thursday and Friday.