Belgrade's beach for the troubled in spirit

Many Serbs come to the lake because they are denied visas to vacation in other European countries, especially in the West, which wants to limit economic migrants from the East. The European Union, which has admitted struggling nations such as Hungary and Latvia as members, is in no mood these days to open up to a hard-pressed, nationalistic Serbia. Serbs sense a conspiracy to keep them down.

"We need visas and, as almost everyone on the planet knows, Serbs are not welcome," says Kostic, who believes that if the world was playing fair, he would be fixing, as he was trained to do, tiny mechanisms inside air conditioners. "We need to go ahead and make peace to get things moving forward. Many people are trying to leave. There are no jobs. But this is a beautiful country. I would never leave it. I'm a hardened patriot."

Veljko Bulatovic, in plaid shorts, is a soon-to-be seminarian. He's walking along the pebbles, looking for a spot beneath the trees, where the "tomato tourists" gather with homemade salads rather than buying lunch. Beyond them, in a state of tangled teenage bliss, a boy kisses his girlfriend out near the buoys. She laughs and swims away.

"After all that has happened -- the sanctions, the wars -- there is somehow still no real peace. The West doesn't respect us," Bulatovic says. "As soon as some progress is made, something else happens. We get bombed, and now we've got this global financial crisis. We're Serbs, so we're used to it. I was in first grade during the NATO bombing. I was in diapers during the Bosnian war."

It's hard to escape that nasty bit of recent history. Even in the wee hours, say around 2 a.m., one can watch porn on TV and then switch to snippets from the war crimes trial of ultranationalist Vojislav Seselj, accused of conspiring with former President Slobodan Milosevic to "ethnically cleanse" Yugoslavia. Euphemisms and strange juxtapositions -- such is Serbia, day or night. The lake is an escape.

Radojko Pokimica has been coming here for 40 years. He's got bushy eyebrows and a straw hat that sits on a picnic table next to a folded newspaper in the shade. He buys one beer a day, relaxes for a few hours, takes a dip and heads home before it gets too hot.

He retired 18 years ago as the general superintendent for Yugoslavia Railways -- back when Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia were all the same color on the map.