BELGRADE, Serbia — It was looking doubtful whether Marina Abramovic would manage to eat lunch. She had barely taken her seat in the restaurant before being interrupted by an emotional admirer who dashed over for a selfie. Moments after presenting the main dish, the waiter came back seeking an autograph. Then a message arrived that a fan had delivered 44 bottles of brandy to her assistant’s apartment — one for each year since Ms. Abramovic last staged an exhibition in Belgrade, the city of her birth.

Ms. Abramovic looked triumphant. “And I don’t even drink!” she said.

The artist’s return to Belgrade after nearly a half-century has been an event. Across the city, there are billboards advertising the retrospective of Ms. Abramovic’s work that opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, showing the artist astride a white stallion (a still from her 2001 video work “The Hero”). On Saturday, the day the show opened, her face was on the front page of nearly every national newspaper in Serbia. When you turned on the TV news, there she was again, being picked over by pundits with a zest that locals generally reserve for soccer and stories about political corruption.