Belgrade has a metro that doesn't exist. The city is jokingly called a half-metropolis because of this (it rhymes perfectly in Serbian — "pola metropola" or "metropola samo do pola").

Serious conversations about building an underground railway started in the early 20s. No, not the current twenties, but those from a hundred years ago, the 1920s. World War I had just ended and people wanted to rebuild their lives. By the end of the 1930s, there was a plan to build three metro lines, but World War II started and priorities changed dramatically.

People only started thinking about the metro again around the 1970s and spent a long time discussing future plans. In the early 1980s, they finally made a decision and wanted to bring in the USSR to help with construction in exchange for paying off foreign trade debt. But the Croats and Slovenes didn't agree to this: the debt was to all of Yugoslavia, not just Belgrade. So the capital's residents were left without a metro once again.

By the mid-1990s, they did dig some tunnels and build two whole stations. One of them, Vukov spoménik, is the deepest station in Europe outside the former USSR. 43 meters! But they don't operate as a metro: nowadays suburban trains run there. And they run rarely. Once an hour, if there are no strikes. I went down to the station once to look around, and lucky for me, a train arrived a couple of minutes later. If I'd come five minutes later, I would've only seen an empty platform.

The train in the video is from right there. Covered in graffiti. Old, beautiful.

Anyway, we've reached modern times. There's still no subway. But they promise it's coming soon. Around 2015, the Serbian government estimated the project at ~1 billion euros. France decided to help, and so far the French government has allocated over 8 billion euros for construction. But for some reason, the timelines keep getting pushed back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In November 2021, preparatory work supposedly started. But actual construction is promised to begin only in 2023. And they're threatening to deliver all 43 planned stations by 2030 (opening of the first line in 2028). We'll see when they actually open them. If they do :)