"Your purpose here?" asked a smartly uniformed woman immigration officer after we had been waved aside from a queue of briskly-approved cars travelling from Bosnia to enter on a basic, non-descript border checkpoint and beyond. "Sightseeing beautiful Belgrade," I offered truthfully, eliciting what suspiciously looked like a smile forming but which was curtly arrested in compliance with demands of probity. "And you have return arrangements?" she asked. We showed her our flight tickets from Belgrade to Zagreb. This was good enough to trust us as tourists. "Have a nice day," she said, finally allowing herself a full smile having stamped our passports, and waved us inside. We were in Serbia!

It was about 9.30am. My friend and travel companion, Iqbal Khattak and I were in a comfortable private car and had been travelling for the past three hours having departed Sarajevo at the crack of a crimson dawn and gentle strains of azan from a nearby mosque.

It was a dream drive: Breathtaking rolling green hills with stray lazy houses starting up their smoking chimneys for a bright April morning. Running along for long, beautiful stretches of the calm turquoise waters of the Drina River snaking alongside the valley roads in Bosnia. Had auteur Peter Jackson travelled to these parts of the Balkans, I could imagine him easily basing at least a couple of episodes of his Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit trilogies here.

Once we jauntily sojourned into Serbia, though, this setting became mostly pastoral flatlands interspersed with small towns and a couple of industrial settings before an hour later we sneaked upon Belgrade, the clouds breaking up to let the sun flood the city as if our arrival served as a cue for special visitors.

There was little time to lose -- the second leg of our Balkan tour demanded full immersion. Belgrade is a massive city (there are over two million residents, more than in most European capital cities) and not unlike several European capitals with rivers running through them -- a confluence of the Danube and Sava in this case -- with one flank roughly constituting the old city with its historic and ancient splendours and the other a gleamy, expansive concrete and glass wonder, albeit much less densely populated.

The newer city -- mostly sprouting over the past two decades after the country’s newest avatar as Serbia -- didn’t interest us much. So, we went straight to downtown to our rented apartment and then out almost immediately.

The historical character of the city hits you straightaway. Both its grandeur and its age. Dating back to a stunning 4th century BC, Belgrade in areas actually reflects its partial medieval physiognomies. For most of its history until 120 years ago, the current-day Serb region centered on ancient Belgrade remained mired in bloody battles between Ottoman and Austrian empires. The modern Serb-Yugoslav status emerged only around 19th century fin de siècle (end of century). The ensuing World War I and the Red Revolution in Soviet Union brought in massive communist influences in the state which post-Yugoslavia now lie at the heart of Serbia’s tortured transition into 21st century.

The unmissable, sprawling St Sava Church, the biggest eastern orthodox specimen of its kind in the world and the unending Soviet-era buildings spread over large parts of the city are a testimony to enduring Russian sway over the young state of Serbia’s current avatar. Most parts of the Serbian capital I saw have a largely communist-era spirit about them. In places it is so thick you can cut it with a knife. This is epitomised by most buildings tracing their lineage to Soviet days. Many are crumbling as though weighed down by their wearied glories.

Read also: The melancholic spirit of Sarajevo

Even though the Yugoslavia implosion and breakup into several smaller states after a bitter war happened almost a quarter of a century ago, it seems Serbia is struggling to get over it. You get the overwhelming feeling Serbia is still hurting and is in a royal sulk about it. The people I talked to selling newly-sewn flags of old, unified Yugoslavia and newly-minted emblems; the images everywhere I saw of Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Serb nationalist leaders (otherwise reviled elsewhere, particularly in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia for their alleged crimes against humanity, especially in Bosnia) Karadzic, Mladic and Milosevic in military fatigues on T-shirts and posters (and some graffiti) reinforced this impression.

There was more proof of a national sense of loss that has apparently not been internalised. Women running impromptu mobile souvenir shops in the Kalemegdan Garden-Belgrade Fortress Complex (this beautiful complex is an obligatory visit if you’re in town, I was told) were selling souvenir busts of ‘father of Yugoslavia’ Josip Broz Tito who carved out his own brand of communism forcing even the Eastern Communist Bloc to expel the erstwhile state from its ranks.

"All these [now-independent Balkan states] were ours. After [Tito], they took them from us. It’s unfair," replied a woman with an undertone of anger when I asked why.

I quickly made my obligatory purchase of a Tito bust to add to a long list of political and literary statues that my shelves at home are groaning under. I think communist leaders outnumber others. Sometimes, I wonder why…..

Also, on sale everywhere were not Serbian but Yugoslav-era stamps and currency notes. This meant more obligatory purchases for my large philatelic and numismatic and currency note collections. I was particularly pleased with acquiring 10 billion and 5 billion dinar notes. Yes, you read that right. By the time Yugoslavia disappeared from the world stage, hyperinflation was one of many challenges it was grappling with. This was also the closest to my becoming a billionaire…..

In the lazy late afternoon, it was a great experience walking the Knez Mihailova and Skadarlija streets and the Republic Square with its beautiful bookshops (some, to my delight, selling English translations of Serbian literature), bands playing live music, craft shops and many, many cafes. Skadarlija is a cobble-stoned street that added a nice touch even as the old buildings tended to be a tad imposing.

It was time to do a thoroughly Serbian thing to do: toasting up some Rakija, a brandy made of plums and considered one of the finest toasts of Europe. So I raised a glass to Faisal Buzdar, who was following my travels and had sent me several notes, for making sure I did not forget.

But what I shan’t forget about Belgrade is the numbers of a wide variety of canines. I’ve never seen so many dogs anywhere else. Every third Belgradian, it seemed, had one. A golden Labrador not on a leash ambled over to me; his head tilted and locked his soft brown eyes with mine. The images of Whiskey, my golden Labrador back home in Islamabad, came flooding to mind. My heart melted.