Belgrade
Destroyed and rebuilt 44 times, the Western Balkans' largest arms exporter now faces a threat no fortification can stop — 30,000 skilled workers leaving annually.
Belgrade has been destroyed and rebuilt 44 times across 115 wars. No other European capital comes close. The city sits at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers — a position so strategically valuable that every empire from Rome to Ottoman Turkey to Habsburg Austria fought to hold it, and every one eventually lost it.
The modern version of this pattern is quieter but equally corrosive. Serbia's defence industry — the largest in the Western Balkans, with over $1.2 billion in annual exports — produces both NATO-compatible and Russian-compatible ammunition from factories concentrated in and around Belgrade. This dual-compatibility is the city's competitive edge and its diplomatic trap: selling to both sides requires belonging to neither.
Belgrade has solved the regeneration problem — 44 destructions, 44 rebuilds. It has not solved the haemorrhage problem: 30,000 skilled workers leave Serbia every year, most of them from the capital.
The brain drain runs deeper than economics. Between 2007 and 2016, over 415,000 Serbs emigrated, with 60% choosing Germany. The people leaving are disproportionately engineers, IT professionals, and medical workers — the exact demographic Belgrade needs to modernise beyond defence manufacturing. The city produces talent it cannot retain.
EU accession was supposed to be the fix — the institutional anchor that would slow emigration by raising living standards. Instead, it has stalled indefinitely. Serbia refuses to recognise Kosovo's independence (a non-negotiable EU prerequisite), and public opinion has turned: polls show more Serbs oppose EU membership than support it. The accession process, which began formally in 2014, has become a permanent limbo.
Belgrade functions like a flood-plain species perfectly adapted to catastrophic disturbance — capable of regrowing after any single devastating event. But the current threat is not another invasion. It is chronic metabolic drain: the slow, steady loss of human capital that no amount of regenerative capacity can replace. The city that survived 44 destructions may not survive the 45th, which arrives not as an army but as a departures board at Nikola Tesla Airport.