At around 9:00 p.m. on Saturday evening, we were driving back from a friend's birthday party and came to the main toll station heading into Belgrade. The car was stationary as we waited in line to pay. Suddenly "crunch!" - I immediately knew that someone had run into us from the rear. Behind us was a Mercedes saloon with moderate damage to the front and the rear window completely blown out, and right behind that a Mercedes Jeep with quite heavy damage to the front. We had moderate damage to the rear but the hatchback door could still be opened and closed. What had happened was that the Mercedes behind had also been stationary and the Jeep which was traveling in convoy with the saloon had run into the back of it.
Communication was set to be problematic as neither of the Mercedes drivers could speak English or Serbian. They had Greek and Turkish passports but we're apparently driving together to Germany. As one of them said he spoke Greek, I asked "what happened?" in that language, but at that point there was too much distraction for any interaction to take place.
Eventually, the police came and we made our way to their prefab office on the other side of the toll booths. The front of the jeep was in pretty bad shape and a panel from around the right headlamp fell off. After a while, the other drivers and myself were called into the office and the admin process commenced. I was presented with a declaration form in Cyrillic Serbian. The gist of it was clear enough to me, but knowing exactly what data was required in each empty space required a fair amount of help from one of the police officers and Google translate. The process of recording data from documentation turned out to be lengthy. The other drivers did not seem to have basic intuition about the most essential information that would be required in the situation, and I was engaged by the police officers to clarify such issues as distinguishing between a first name and a surname, and street with house number as opposed to a town with a postcode.
In addition to completing the pro-forma part of the declaration, it later emerged that I needed to write a statements in my own words on the same sheet. This was dictated to me by one of the officers and was a very useful Serbian learning challenge for me. When I was beginning to think that they might let me go, completely unfilled declaration forms for the other drivers were placed on the table and of course it was my task to fill them in in the same manner as I had done my own. This is when it was confirmed that the saloon driver had also been stationary and we agreed with the jeep driver that he had been moving at about 20 kilometers an hour. The waiting time for making claims on insurance in such cases is apparently about three weeks.
In downtime, the policeman who had first come on the scene started a conversation with me and we found out that he had a relative in our village. At around 11, my wife who had been patiently waiting in the car, occasionally calling me to monitor progress, came on the scene with our 16-month-old son. This raised spirits and boosted momentum, Soon we were headed off home, about 2 hours behind schedule.
