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Film that We Live
MARVELS
OF THE
ORDINARY

INSTITUTION STUDENTS’
RESORT “BELGRADE”
Business Unit “Ratko Mitrović” on Zlatibor
It includes several high category facilities, built in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
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are only a half kilometer away from the center of Zlatibor, in beautiful pinetree
forest, and they offer exceptional conditions for rest and recreation. There
is great interest among students for staying here. They also offer services to
external customers.
The complex consists of four facilities:
Villa “Srbija”,
On a surface area of 2.015 square meters, with 39 beds. It has a restaurant
with 250 seats (four stars), seminar room with 50 seats, and summer garden
with 150 seats.
Villa “Lovćen”,
On a surface area of 3.238 square meters, with 141 beds.
Villa “Zlatibor”,
On a surface area of 1.276 square meters, with 88 beds, with sports fitness club.
Villa “Romanija”,
Congress center, with two rooms with 250 seats each, surface area of 1.920
square meters, and with 58 beds.
Ulica sportova bb, 31315 Zlatibor
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P R O L O G U E
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OLD WANDERINGS AND NEW EXPERIENCES
Don’t Make Me Start
This May, snow has picked the raspberries around Arilje, and the
wind has moved garages into neighboring alleys in Jagodina. We
didn’t have any floods, but we are drowning in a social shallow. Those
who lose easily, but know where they’re heading, are dominant on the
public scene. An open competition is foreshadowed for a Serbian heroic
film about Vlah-Alija. The Football Association has unanimously
concluded that defense is the best forward and that fixed games,
which (of course) never happened, contribute to planning and predictability.
Which is an important element of the European business
environment. Our country has turned into a provincial bookmaker,
where everyone wins small and short-term, except for Serbia, which
loses big and long-term. Amateur bakeries and pharmacies, secondhand
ideas and new promises are still blossoming. We are living on
the expense of our great grandchildren.
“I’m gone, this is not for me”, said the professional vagabond of
National Review, multiplied in several copies. He took his rucksack,
camera and footworn sneakers. The old hit echoing in his headset:
“Oh, girl from Rovci, are you facebooking with your sheep?...” And
so he left.
Thus we arrived to Suvobor, the first Serbian mountain beach. We
were in the Slanci, property of Chilandar, monastic community near
Belgrade for a week. We counted horse and human powers at the
“Štraparijada” in Ruma. Discussed how the Serbian orphan TV show
World of Fishing conquered the planet. Reminded of the heraldry history
of Belgrade, Manak’s House and zenitist Ljubomir Micić. Bid
farewell to Bata Živojinović, Prince Aleksandar Pavle’s Karađorđević
and Žarko Vidović. Talked to Jovan Zivlak and Marina Maljković.
Many more things were rolling in our heads, but we remembered
the wise words of Nikita Mikhalkov’s movie character: “Hey, people,
don’t make me start!”
Partners of the Publication:
INSTITUTION OF
STUDENTS VACATION
BELGRADE
Cover page:
On Borsko Lake
(photo: Želјko
Sinobad)
Magazine registered in the Register of Public Media
of the Republic Serbia, no. NV000385
ISSN 1452-8371 = Serbia - National Review
COBISS.SR-ID 139201804
MUNICIPALITY
OF РУМА
RTS - PUBLIC
SERVICE OF SERBIA
VRNJAČKA
BANJA
THE BELGRADE
BUSINESS SCHOOL
Media partners:
ТЕЛЕВИЗИЈА
ВОЈВОДИНЕ
RTV VOJVODINA
- PUBLIC SERVICE
NEWSPAPER -
SERBIAN PATRIARCHY
THIS MAGAZINE IS PRINTED WITH SUPPORT FROM THE MINISTRY OF CULTURE
04 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

CONTENTS
Panorama
04 PROLOGUE
06 CHRONICLE
Road Sign
10 ALBUM: MOTIFS FROM EASTERN SERBIA
16 ROADS: KOŠTUNIĆI, ON SUVOBOR
24 PILGRIMAGES: SLANCI
32 ENCOUNTERS: “ŠTRAPARIJADA” IN RUMA
36 HOOK: “THE WORLD OF FISHING”
Chrestomathy
42 LIGHTHOUSES: SERBS IN RUSSIAN CHRONICLE (3)
50 INSIGNIA: HERALDIC HISTORY OF BELGRADE
56 MARK: MANAK’S HOUSE
Culture
62 OUTLOOKS: LJUBOMIR MICIĆ (1895-1971)
70 DEPARTURE: ŽARKO VIDOVIĆ (1921-2016)
78 LIFE, NOVELS: JOVAN ZIVLAK
88 PALLET: SERGEI APARIN
106 SLAVIJA: “THE DAYS OF SLAVIC LITERACY”
Introducing
96 THE WINNER: MARINA MALЈKOVIĆ
102 CONNECTIONS: TESLA’S TIME MACHINE
110 HEALTH: PRIMEVAL POWER OF WATER
112 CENTERS: “KARATAŠ” IN KLADOVO
115 JUBILEE: BELGRADE BUSINESS SCHOOL
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
05

P A N O R A M A
News Stream
>> In the first four months of this
year, Serbia was visited by 718,750
tourists, which is 15 percent more
than in the same period last year,
announced at the end of May the
Tourist Organization of Serbia. Of
these, there were 412,386 domestic
tourists (14 percent more than last
year), and 306,364 foreign tourists
(15 percent). By the number
of overnight stays, domestic guests
mostly stayed in the mountains (49
per cent) and spa resorts (26 percent),
while foreign guests stayed
in Belgrade (53 percent) and in
mountain resorts (15 percent).
>> Promotional tour of the Tourist
Organization of Belgrade started
on 27 May with a program in Timisoara.
On the central square of
this beautiful city in Banat, Romania,
the audience enjoyed in
Serbian folklore, tambura players,
delicacies of Serbian cuisine, wines.
Businessmen also had busy schedule
of meetings and presentations.
The TOB’s Caravan - then goes to
Vienna, Podgorica, Banjaluka, Sofia,
Thessaloniki, Ljubljana...
>> The past extended winter season
was the most successful in the history
of Serbian mountain tourism,
announced recently the public
company “Ski resorts of Serbia”.
Turnover was around 805 million
dinars, which is by 15 percent more
than in the previous season. The
highest turnover was in February:
285 million dinars.
>> “The future is now”. The three-week
long Belgrade International Architecture
Week was held under this
title, from 5 to 28 May. Through exhibitions,
lectures and seminars, the
near future of architecture was dis-
Dis’ Spring
Fifty-third “Dis’ Spring”,
with a number of
beautiful literary and
cultural events, adorned
Čačak again this May,
organized by the City Library
“Vladislav Petković
Dis”. On this occasion,
a special collection Dis’
poetry Separated Silences
was printed, the magazine
dedicated to the
fifty-third edition of this
event, catalog of the exhibition
about the poet
Tomislav Marinković,
this year’s winner of the
“Dis’ Award”. Anthology
Poetry of Branko V. Radičević (coeditor: the Institute
for Literature and Art in Belgrade) a tribute to one of
the founders of “Dis’ Spring”. The winner of “Young Dis”
Award is Ognjen Obradović from Užice, and awards for
an essay on Dis’ work went to Milica Bešić from Dubočica
near Leskovac.
Belgrade Festival of Poetry
More than forty participants from nine countries attended
the Tenth Belgrade Festival of Poetry and Books
“Snap out of it! Poetry!”,
which took
place from 25 to 30
May, in several interesting
locations in the
Serbian capital. From
the memory of Vasko
Popa (1922-1991)
under the slogan Far
Away, in Us, to the final
Eating Poetry, from
Roman Hall of the
City Library and the
Faculty of Philology
to Mladenovac, from
Stevan Tontić and Alvina
Panga to Roman
Honet and Andrej Ljupka,
yet another living
focal point of poetry
was created. Will
this finally convince
us that poetry is not
dead, but that those
who are numb to it are
dead?
06 SRBIJA • BROJ 54 • 2016.

cussed, and the use of new technologies
in this field.
Sterija Ran Away
The sixty first “Sterijino Pozorje” is taking place in a sad
trend of lack of quantity and particularly quality, from 26
May to 2 June in Novi Sad, with seven performances in the
competitive, and two in the international program “Circles”.
Obviously, “political correctness” prevails. Regulated media
are trying to draw special attention production of Foreign
Heart or a Theatrical Debate on Borders by Bilјana Srblјanović
directed by Dino Mustafić, and the production of We Are
the Ones That Our Parents Warned Us about by Tanja Šljivar
directed by Mirjana Karanović, performed by the Bosnian
National Theatre from Zenica. At the moment of conclusion
of this issue, the official winners are not yet known, but it is
known that the list does not include Theatre, Art or Serbia.
Sterija ran away.
Kočić Is Holding On
The production of Walking Ghost of the Serbian National
Theatre from Novi Sad and Centre for Development of
Visual Culture is the winner of the nineteenth Theatre Fest
held from 17 to 24 May in Banjaluka. This production won
the awards for best production and best directing, dramatic
text (Dejan Dukovski) and set design (Tadžiser Sevindž and
Saša Senković).
Best actor award went to Branko Vidaković as Momcilo
Jabučilo, and best actress was Nada Šargin as Zora Šišarka,
both in the production of Coffee White of the National Theatre
in Belgrade. The best costumes award went to Marina
Vukasović Medenica.
>> With the installation Heroik:
“Freeshiping”, authored by young
architects Ana Šulkić, Stefan Vasić
and Igor Sjeverac, Serbia will be
presented at the fifteenth Architecture
Biennale in Venice. From
28 May to 27 November, sixtyfour
countries will participate at
the Biennale. The budget for the
participation of Serbia is 20 million
dinars, and the national pavilion
was renovated this year.
>> Award for contemporary music
“Ernst von Siemens Music Prize”
was awarded this year to Serbian
composer Milica Đorđević. It was
presented recently in Prince-Regent
Theatre in Munich.
>> On the occasion of the fortieth
anniversary of the release of the
first book of Serbian writer and
poet Dragan Lakićević (Between
us, Winter, Matica srpska, 1976),
the publishing house “Partenon”
from Belgrade published a selection
of his poems entitled The
Poet of Snow. About forty poems
dominated by the motif of snow
were selected by Dr. Aleksandra
Žeželj Kocić who also wrote the
preface.
>> Anthology Prayers of Saint Sava.
Prayers to Saint Sava by Jovan
Pejčić was presented on May
10 at the House of Đura Jakšić
in Belgrade. Graphic design for
the book was signed by Bole
Miloradović, and the publisher is
“Magelan Pres”.
>> The first theater festival “Theatrical
Spring” was held recently in
SERBIA • N O 54 • 2016
07

P A N O R A M A
News Stream
Šabac. The audience saw twelve best
Serbian productions from 2015,
featuring the National Theatre from
Belgrade, Serbian National Theatre
from Novi Sad, the Yugoslav Drama
Theatre, “Zvezdara Theater”, the
National Theatre from Sombor...
Exhibition Commemoration of Serbian
Golgotha ​ by painter Dragan
Martinović was in the accompanying
program.
>> Crničani, the first novel by Dr. Miodrag
Stojković, from Leskovac, a
well-known Serbian and world geneticist,
was recently brought before
the readers. It deals with the
exciting life of the Serbs formerly
colonized in the south of South Serbia,
today Macedonia.
>> Jadranka Stojaković (1950-2016),
a famous singer and songwriter,
passed away on 3 May in Banjaluka.
Former Yugoslav music star, she
lived in Japan for a long time, and
spent her last years in the house of
the Nursing Home “Karitas” in the
capital of Srpska. Will be remember
her for many memorable songs,
especially “Why Are You Not Here”
and “We Could Do Anything”.
>> The exhibition Road to Abstraction
by Ljubica Cuca Sokić (1914-2009)
was opened on 5 May in the Heritage
House in Belgrade. In addition
to the twenty-seven works bequeathed
to the Heritage House by
the famous artist, exhibited are also
paintings loaned from the National
Museum, Museum of Contemporary
Art and the collection of the
Gatalović family.
Prince
His Highness Prince (Pavlov)
passed away on 12 May
in Paris, at the age of ninety
two. Born in 1924 in White
Lodge, Britain, he fled Serbia
with his family after the coup
on 27 March 1941. He lived in
Greece, Egypt, Kenya, England,
France... He graduated from
Eaton and other elite schools.
In World War II, at the age of
eighteen, he was a voluntary
pilot of the British air force.
After the war, among other things, he was the president of
the airline, one of the founders of the Serbian Unity Congress.
He had five children from two marriages. The only
member of the Karađorđević dynasty who apologized to
Serbian people for the “terrible mistake called Yugoslavia”.
He was buried in Oplenac, with the highest church, state
and military honors.
Bata
Velimir Živojinović (1933-
2016), a famous Serbian actor,
passed away in Belgrade after
a long and serious illness. He
was buried on 26 May in the
Alley of the Greats at the New
Cemetery. He was escorted by
thousands of people, known
and unknown.
He made his debut in
1955, in the film A Song from
Kumbara. He acted in more
than 350 films, including
seventeen westerns shot in
Germany. After the film Valter
Defends Sarajevo, in the
1970’s, he was regarded a national hero in China. At the funeral,
the actor Milorad Mandić, said goodbye to him with
the following words: “You liked us, Bata. We didn’t like you.
We adored you.”
>> Nagrada “Dositej Obradović” life
achievement award was awarded
08 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Banjani and Rudine
The first issue of the
Chronicles of Banjani and
Rudine, published by the
Association “Bishop Sava
Kosanović”, was launched
on 16 May in Belgrade.
Distinguished guests
from culture, economy
and politics, were addressed
by the Bishop
of Budim and Nikšić
Joanikije, President of
the Association, and a
prominent businessman Branislav Baćović, editor of the
Chronicles, writer Milutin Mićović, writer Čedo Baćović,
prof. Veselin Matović, prof.
Dr. Časlav Koprivica, gusle
player Milomir Milјanić,
actor Sava Radović.
The Association of Banjani
and Rudine “Bishop
Sava Kosanović” was established
to take care of preservation
of the cultural and
spiritual heritage of their
region, as well as the memories
of the Metropolitan
Sava Kosanović and his
legacy.
The Power of the Documentary
Ninth International
Documentary Film Festival
“Beldoks” was held
from 12 to 18 May in
Belgrade. It presented
fifty-seven films from
around the world.
The Grand Prix
went to the films The
Second Line by Nenad
Milošević and The Wall of Death and So On by Mladen
Kovačević. The award for best foreign film went to Sonita
by Roksara Gaem Maghami and Great Happiness by Kirsten
Burger, Mik Gaestel and Johannes Muller. Domestic vocational
awards were
introduced for the
first time.
The Best Cinematography
award
went to Pablo Fero
Živanović, and Best
Editing to Jelena
Maksimović.
recently to Raša Popov, writer
and longtime television journalist.
>> “Golden Jug”, life achievement
award, at the Eleventh International
Documentary Film Festival
in Velika Plana, was awarded
on May 3 rd to Radoslav Zelenović,
former long-time director of the
Belgrade Film Archive.
>> Short film Regression by Milan
Andrijašević was crowned with
the “Platinum Award” at the
World Fest in Huston, the oldest
and largest independent film festival
in the world.
>> “The Great Seal”, Award of Belgrade
“Graphic Collective” for
Belgrade, for the year 2016 , went
to Nikola Velicki for his work The
Head, executed in the technique
of screen printing and exhibited
at the May Exhibition of graphics
in Belgrade.
>> Evening of solo songs by Belgrade
composer and academician
Ivan Jevtić was held in early
May in Teatro Lírico Nacional de
Cuba, in Havana, with the participation
of Cuban opera star.
>> Brewery Museum “Đorđe Vajfert”
was recently opened in Pančevo.
It is situated on 9,000 square meters
of the old “Brewery”, which
was operational from 1722.
>> Water polo players of “Partizan”
from Belgrade won the title of
the state champion at the twenty-seventh
championship, having
defeated “Zvezda” with 10:9 in
the second game of the playoffs
on 25 May.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
09

A L B U M
On Borsko Lake
EASTERN SERBIA IN THE LENS OF ŽELJKO SINOBAD
Wonders of the Ordinary
It is a magical landscape of mythical depths. Cones and sphinxes of eastern
Serbian mountains remember more than books and humans. Their people
know how to live with the secret of the world. They don’t ask redundant questions,
they don’t give answers after which there is no turning back. Life there is
a ritual.
Željko Sinobad (Belgrade, 1962), our Željko, is a master of photography. His
documentaries live, from events, artistic as much as art exists in this “rigorous
earthly prose” of ours. And it does.
This Željko dived into the wondrous worlds of eastern Serbia so many times.
The exhibition of photographs Motifs from eastern Serbia, which had its premiere
last April in the Regional Museum in Ruma, testifies about those remarkable
encounters.
We were there and saw a comprehensive poetics, with strong cinematographic
elements. A scene reduced to its black and white weft, colored by each observer
in their own specific way. Ordinary life, which constantly makes you wonder.
Consecration of a holy oak tree. Apple, bread. A wreath of yellow bedstraw with
a lit candle, dropped into the river. Dodolas, koledari, lazarice, rusalke. Rituals
that work even when their participants don’t know why. A boy on the window,
astonished, perhaps even afraid of the world. The joy of cattlemen because of
a calf, a new baby. A gnarled hand on a polished stick. A shot of golden rakia,
under a white mulberry tree, in dark times. Old memories and young breasts.
A fire that will question everything. And people everywhere. Eyes. Faces pure,
childlike, or those on which life has written a long story, “all those faces faded
from pain”.
Raw realism full of fiction. Documentaries made of dreams and thundering
vagueness.
For a moment you think that there is something of Bergman there. Something
of Parajanov and Fellini, Bela Tarr and Saša Petrović. But no. It doesn’t fit
in. It’s Željko Sinobad, himself. His flesh, blood and footstep. With a two-day and
three-life beard. (B. M.)
10 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
11

А Л Б У М / А Л Ь Б О М / A L B U M
12 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
13

A L B U M
On the peak of Rtanj
14 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
15

R A D S I G N
IN KOŠTUNIĆI, ON SUVOBOR, THE FIRST SERBIAN MOUNTAIN BEACH
Gifts of
the Earth and Sky
16 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

This is that grain of Serbia from which everything sprouts all over again. That beautiful scenery, the
healthy water and food, hardworking and noble people. Certain wisdom and effort, and investments, of
course, are necessary so that all this would shine in its full and irresistible splendor. That is why people
ccome here aall the way from Cacak, Milanovac, Pozega, Valjevo, but also from Sweden, France, Russia,
from all over. The beauty and grace do not need to be explained, we should just let ourselves to hem
By: Miloš Lazić
Photo:
Saša Savović
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
17

R A D S I G N
At the beach
in Koštunići
If you go there via Rajac, the road is
shorter and more beautiful, but it is
faster via Čačak and Pranjane. It will
be like this until they have completed the
E-763, known here as Corridor 11. When
taking the shorter route to Kostunići, it takes
more than three hours by car, but it’s worth
it. Because, everything they say about this
corner of Serbia is the truth: water from
Čemernica is really drinkable, and the only
time it is not good is in the spring when it
overflows, and after heavy rains, and the air
is clear as a stream. And the same goes for
the remaining five rivers that flow through
the village, in Drenovača, Bukovača, Grab,
Dučina and Šiban. This is because the closest
factory stack, if releasing smoke at all, is
25 kilometers away. From the above, from
Ravna Gora, a great view extends of almost
half of Serbia, forests are abundant, and the
domestic animals roam lazily in green pastures
grazing the nightshade. People are few,
but if one comes to talk to a traveller, all will
be compensated.
If someone interested in geography,
Koštunići is twenty-five kilometers away
from Čačak, forty from Gornji Milanovac,
and the same from Pozega, and as much as
sixty from Valjevo. Although it is the second
in Serbia by its surface area, the village has
barely two hundred households, mostly scattered
around the undulating beauty: all in
all, about six hundred souls.
People are similar as everywhere, those
hardworking, good and virtuous prevail.
The village center is near the Church of St.
Petka, the newest of the three existing, but it
slightly exceeds behind the hills, where a curios
ethno-village settled down, with a lake
created recently, when the Čemernica was
dammed. Its banks were chained with hewn
stone, and a part covered with sand for beach
and swimmers. Upstream is a pond that is
teeming with fish, and near the bank there
are nine little wooden houses for guests, resembling
large tubs, which werre due to the
coincidence in numbers and affectionately
nicknamed “Nine brothers Jugović”. Developed
sports courts are all around. Above the
dam is a nice restaurant for about a hundred
guests, and that nobody in the village would
be embarrasd for it. On the contrary! And all
this is settled at 520 meters above sea level!
The rest is above, in the hill.
The central building looks like a large
village house from the time of Obrenović
dynasty, while the smaller ones surrounding
it remind of windowless wooden cabins.
They look like this outside, but inside each is
equipped with all kinds of miracles of mod-
18 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

ern times. Between is an ancient linden, and
in its shadow a spacious wooden terrace. It
is where the guests and locals meet, over
rakia, fruit preserves and ice water for welcome,
so that no one feels like they are here
for the first time. It is here also that they will
be saying farewell as if they have just became
best of friends, when the time comes.
If someone happens to come there on St.
Vitus Day, they will make sure to return at
the same time next year.
OLD SCHOOL, NEW STUDENTS
Everything feels like some ecological
zone, as they are now called. Because, Ravna
gora has been anathematized for decades,
and the famous Battle of Suvobor almost
forgotten. Therefore, there has been almost
no new development here until recently. All
this has turned out to be good, at least for
what they are planning to do here – to restore
and improve the village and agriculture,
predominantly production of food,
healthy and organic food, before Serbia
joins the European Union and they bring
that Europe to their villaage.
The idea came from Jovan Čeković, an
occasional resident of Koštunići. In his former
life he was a general, and he spend his
lifetime a little in the military diplomacy,
a little in military economy, the dedicated
one, and retired young, just to continue
where he left off. Perhaps out of spite, but
more to leave a trail behind, he decided to
build an ethno-village, an endowment, so to
speak, in his homeplace. not for profit, but
to employ those few children that are left
there, to bring some youth energy into the
village and help it survive. Because, according
to the story of the evillage priest, which
now there is almost no one to hear, until
yesterday in its spacious but, by the number
of souls, small parish, five to six homes have
been permanently closed every year.
One ethno-village already sprouted in
Koštunići about twenty years ago, probably
the first in Serbia. They wrote in newspapers
about it, he was on TV all the time. They said
that he was a role model for many of the re-
Children
Pupils from
Belgrade a the
recreational class
in Koštunići
As someone said – so that they don’t get sad every year
when they announce that fewer and fewer students are getting
enrolled in the old school. Well, God willing, if there is enough
of them to finally open an eight-grade school in their village, so
that the children of the fifth would not have to walk six kilometers
to Pranjani and, in cold winters and hot summers, as their
fathers and grandfathers had to do.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
19

R A D S I G N
20 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

maining two hundred and fifty, as there are
now! Yes, it sprouted, but it also withered. It
is that old story about government property
that belongs to everyone and no one.
– That is why I decided to build this
ethno-village by myself, on my own land, to
hire about twenty people to work there and
to earn a fair wage. But it got out of control,
became independent, and now it employs
three times as many people, and in the high
season, when there is most work both on the
eland and in the Centre, there are as many
as two hundred. And yet, that something has
really changed for the better, I understood
from something else: nobody has ever heard
of Koštunići before, so the local villagers
presented themselves as if they were from
Pranjani, while today those from Pranjani
claim to be from Koštunići!
The only concession to himself Jovan
Čeković did when he officially named the
ethno-village with the lake after his father;
the Tourist and Recreational Center „Momcilo
Čeković”.
– It does belong to him. – It all sported
on his land! If my Momčilo could have seen
this, he would have left happyly... although
he was hard to please.
COW ON LEASE
It started ten years ago, when he bought
an old log cabin and disassembled it, marking
carefully its every part, and then transferred
it here. When it was later assembled,
it was even more beautiful than before. It
is now the central building. And then, little
by little, something would sprout every
year. That is how, I guess, most of the other
ethno-villages in Serbia were built, but they
are usually organized as family cooperatives,
while this is organized as a real company.
– When the prefix “ethno” is given to a
village, you cannot buy groceries in a grocery
store, and import “handicrafts” from
abroad, thus cheating the guests – explained
Danijela Damljanović, Director. – You can
do it once, and then what? So we immediately
established the rule that everything we
offer is local. And everything people eat or
drink here is produced in Koštunići, and we
only buy oil, sugar, salt, coffee, spices and
– beer and mineral water. In order to stay
like this, someone has to produce it, all that
must be of good quality, just when you are
producing for yourself. It was up to us to
organize all that and pay it fairly, which we
do, and that is why the farmers make much
more money than when they sell their products
in the market in Čačak or Melanoma!
Only, they did not stop at that!
Once some idle walkers wondered into
a yard of a farmer, and he was just taking
a pregnant cow out of the barn. Impressed,
the started praising it, and asked him where
he got it, and he told them, just like that, that
he had taken it on lease. The guests got offended,
they thought he was joking, making
fun of them, but when he explained everything
in detail, it all came together. Because,
Lesson
Fruit from
Koštunići arrives
in many parts of
the world
People in Koštunići thought to increase the production of
healthy food because of the Frenchman. But they recalled that
the Serbian winemaking ruined socialism with the idea that the
winemakers would compete in quantity but not in quality, and
they gave up.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
21

R A D S I G N
it really turns out tu be like that. From the
ethno-village they donated to the neighbors
some cattle, about a hunderd, and in turn,
when the need arises, these they should deliver
their products such as kajmak, cheese,
eggs, fresh and dried meat, vegetables, fruit,
wheat or corn flour, mushrooms... and it is
good for everyone, there is even more than
enough.
For this reason they built a dryer, refrigerator,
plant for the production and bottling
of exceptional fruit rakias, primarily plum
rakia, and for honey ... and many more wonders.
Today these are little factories unified
under the same name “Grab”, after the creek.
So, when a guest takes any such”souvenir”
from Serbia, it will truly reminiscent of
Koštunići, the hosts, and the time they spent
here, at the foot of Suvobor.
– Once I got a visit from Ljuba Jovković,
an old friend who lives in Marseille, where
he runs a decent family hotel – Jovan says seriously.
- He heard, he says, that we produce
organic foods, and as the French are crazy
about it, he decided to offer them something
“made in Serbia”, to boast how we also
know how to make something right. But,
when he tried, he almost had a stroke, and
he insisted that we make a business deal. We
barely restrained him, and that only when
we explained that this is intended primarily
for the local guests. But if his French people
really care so muc, they can stop by, they
wwill get an original of everything, at the
very source.
When he was goingt back, they packed
for him a bit of everything. He called a day or
two later to boast that what he had brought
was gone immediately, and that everything
was bought by the French, right befor ethe
noses of the local Serbs. He cried that they
sent more of that. It may be the case, but if
things develop the waay they planned.
VILLAGE DIPLOMACY
Roughly, Koštunići lake with its beach
could accommodate at least two thousand
swimmers, while there are about six hundred
people living in the village, half of
whom would not dare to jump into water
even at gunpoint, not even to moisten their
feet. But they have not miscalculated. This
benefit is primarily intended for guests of
the Center, then the residents of Koštunići
and the surrounding villages, and finally
those from Čačak and Milanovac, for whom
this is a substitute for the increasingly remote
sea. Admission is free for guests, and
the rest paid symbolically, only to cover the
cost of water and electricity. And, as the
prices at the restaurant are far below those
in the town, it is sometimes difficult to get
hold of free space on the beach, let alone in
the restaurant.
It is interesting that this village was
somehow discovered by foreigners, and
they often drop by. Recently, a large group
of young Swedes stayed here for a month:
they encamped in Koštunići, and from there
they cruised around Serbia studying our
folklor. Tey didn’t want to leave at the end,
they fell in love so much with village, nature
and the people.
So, people in Koštunići came to an unusual
idea. They offered to several foreign
diplomats as a gift, land up above the Centre,
to build houses there in their national style
to go there on vacation and bring guests.
All of them have accepted the gift with enthusiasm,
and with gratitude, and will soon
a true “diplomatic settlement” will be built
here. It remains for the friendly villagers to
learn a few words in English or Russian, and
they will be ready to embark on the “International
Relations”. And generally – there is
no better diplomacy than Serbian chastity
and cordiality, local food and drinks, and
this much beauty that God has given to us.
When asked why he engaged in this,
rather uncertain adventure, the host was
thoughtful for a moment, then uttered almost
emarassingly:
– In my working life, I earned enough, I
do not need more. But just because of that
I feel an obligation to repay to this people.
That’s why some time ago I established the
Association of Serbian Hosts, which gathers
under its wing truly reputable hosts
and businessmen from the country and
the Diaspora who have that same need to
repay their motherland... and to help hiter.
Not everyone can be compared with Ilija
Milosavlјević, Luka Ćelović, Nikola Spasić,
Vlajko Kalenić, Sima Andrejević or Miša
Anastasijević, with people who restored
and improved Serbia in the past century
and century before that, but if each of us
contributes a little, as much as e can, everything
would start getting better. because, as
Nikola Spasić described it long ago, wealth
is not measured by how it is acquired, but
by how it is used. If it benefits the people,
for sure you will not go wrong.
22 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
23

P I L G R I M A G E S
Photo:
Želјko Sinobad
24 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SLANCI MONASTERY NEAR BELGRADE, A METOCHION OF HILANDAR
Under the Third Hand
of the Virgin
According to legend, this sanctuary is an endowment of King Dragutin Nemanjić. The monastery had
special significance in Stefan’s despotate. Đurđe and Jerina visited often. They say that the relics of St.
Stefan archdeacon and martyr, used to lie here. However, it is known for a fact that, in 1961, Patriarch
German stored particles of the relics of this Saint, obtained from Russia, at the altar table. From 1969,
when the monastery became an appendage of the Hilandar, a replica of the icon of the Three-Handed
Virgin was also consecrated here. Prayers from Slanci are heard far and are effective
By: Danijela Knežević Stevanović
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
25

P I L G R I M A G E S
At the liturgy in
Slanci
Deputy Protopriest
Haji Milan S.
Tanasić
Father Andrej,
abbot of the
monastery
A
few kilometers from Višnjička
Banja, a winding road through a
hilly landscape brings us to the
village of Slanci, then to the monastery
dedicated to the Holy Archdeacon Stefan.
Week after week, and on holidays,
the liturgical assemblies take place there
People from different parts of Belgrade
and Serbia come to pray for help from
the Three-Handed Virgin, the miraculous
icon of Hilandar, and the blessing of Saint
Stefan.
According to legend, the relics of St.
Stefan rested in this holy place, and then
disappeared without a trace. The old
chronicles say that Slanci was the favorite
resort of Đurđe and Jerina Branković,
as well as many other people at different
times. In the era of the Turkish occupation,
significant a great number of clergy, monks
and hermits died a horrific death here, including
thirty students. After the massacre,
the non-decomposed body of the eldest
Icon
A chronicle mentions the story by Bishop Lukijan of how the
monks of Slanci monastery, during the migrations under Patriarch
Arsenije Čarnojević, saved valuable icon of the Mother of
God. They carried it to Austria-Hungary and put away. Today, it is
located in Romania.
student Stefan remained, and the monks
transferred it to Vojlovica near Pančevo.
During the reconstruction of the temple,
in the second half of the 20 th century, Patriarch
German stored a piece of the relics
of St. Archdeacon Stefan in the altar table.
The holy particle was given to him by the
Russian Patriarch Alexei in 1961, during
German’s visit to Russia.
From its inception until today, the
monastery of Slanci has been attracting attention
of many devotees and pilgrims.
On the date of transfer of the relics
of the Holy Father Nicholas, on Sunday,
May 22, when the reporters of National
Review also came to Slanci Monastery, a
large number of believers gathered. The
Church of Saint Stefan was crowded.
Thanks to the great efforts of Abbot Andrew
(Jovičić) and the entire fraternity,
it has been many years that hundreds of
people attend the liturgy in this holy place
every week.
– Yesterday there was a monastic ceremony
here, we received another brother
– father Andrej tells us. – According to
tradition, Slanci is an endowment of King
Dragutin Nemanjić whose “Northern
Kingdom” included this area as well. At
first, the monastery was dedicated to the
Presentation, and later, from the time of
26 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
27

P I L G R I M A G E S
28 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Despot Stefan Lazarević, it was dedicated
to St. Stefan the Martyr. Then, in Stephen’s
despotate, the monastery had a particularly
important role, because it was located in
immediate vicinity of the old capital. There
is also reference to the then Abbot Vasilije,
who visited Jerusalem. The fate of the
sanctuary, as elsewhere, is closely connected
with the history and fate of the Serbian
people. Every time people were suffering,
the monastery was also destroyed. During
the Great Migration under the Patriarch
Arsenije Čarnojević, the local monks were
also forced to flee. They took what they
could and headed toward Fruška Gora.
Only after the Požarevac Treaty (1718),
they returned to Slanci, renovated the
monastery as much as it was possible and
continued to live here.
HISTORY OF SUFFERING
AND ELEVATION
– The monastery then continued to
vegetate until 1834, when it was deserted
and collapsed – continued Abbot Andrej.
– Two churches were erected from this
material: St. Elias in Mirijevo and the Holy
Archdeacon Stefan in Slanci. In1833, when
prince Miloš Obrenović ordered him to
make an inventory of churches and monasteries
in the vicinity of Belgrade, Joakim
Vujić writes that Abbot Damaskin received
him very cordially in Slanci. Vujić
describes the church with two domes, says
that the previous one was repaired, but
was later abandoned and collapsed. It remained
like this until 1905, when villagers
built a rectangular chapel, probably on
the foundations of the old church. Later, in
1969, Patriarch German built this apse and
a small dormitory. Then, for St. Patron’s
Day, for the consecration of the monastery,
Nikanor, vice-abbot of Hilandar also arrived,
with several monks. They brought as
a gift of an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin,
painted and consecrated in Hilandar.
With the blessing of Patriarch German, the
monastery of Slanci was then declared an
appendage of Hilandar.
After World War II, it was not easy to
establish a greater brotherhood in Slanci,
because in the communist Yugoslavia the
monastery land had been confiscated.
To Live Truthfully
After the
liturgy: lighting
candles and meal
in the monastery
dining room
Wonderful spiritual lessons of noble Russian elders of Municipal
are compiled in the book “Live Truthfully”. It is a true and effective
guide to non-hypocritical and humble life “on the path to
Christ and in Christ”. Prof. Janja Todorović, an Orthodox publicist,
gave a lecture about this in Slanci this week.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
29

P I L G R I M A G E S
Hieromonk
Stefan serving
Sunday liturgy in
Slanci monastery
After a long time, father Andrej says, the
brotherhood of the monastery managed
to recover their estate. With the support
of the City of Belgrade, they created an
urban plan for the reconstruction of the
monastery. The monastery redeemed
from farmers their former lands and it
now owns ten hectares of land. Today in
its estate, in addition to the Church of St.
Stefan and the dormitory, there are two
outer dining rooms that can accommodate
hundreds of people.
– When I came here, in 1992, the then
abbot of Hilandar father Mitrofan was
very active and visited Slanci regularly.
Thanks to him, redemption of the land and
restoration of the monastery began. Father
Mitrofan then passed away, and there was
that terrible fire in Hilandar, so that now
we don’t have such a big support as before.
THE VINES THAT BEARS FAITH
The discussion about Hilandar brings
back from memory the story of the golden
age of Serbian medieval state, the story of
great kings and emperors of the sacrosanct
Nemanjić dynasty. Interestingly, the abbot
says, almost nothing remained of the courts
these powerful ruler s, of everything they
had built for their glory and comfort. Only
pale and faint traces, everything was swallowed
by time. And what they built for the
glory of God is today is pride, pivot and sacred
center of our nation. From Studenica
and Žiča through the Patriarchate of Peć,
Gračanica, Banjska, Virgin Ljeviška, Visoki
Dečani, to Hilandar.
Abbot Andrej reminds us about the miraculous
vines of St. Simeon Mirotocivi,
one of the great miracles of Hilandar and
blessings given to Serbian people.
– We know, before the transfer of his
relics from Hilandar to Serbia, Saint Simeon
appeared to be one monk and said: “I
am to go to Serbia, but a vines will grow
from my grave. While it is green and fertile,
the grace of God will rest on people”.
Indeed, vines grew from the stone, which
has been bearing fruit for eight hundred
years. Every autumn, the grapes are
picked. It is not particularly cared about,
just dried and given to couples who do
not have children. There are numerous
cases of people who had children thanks
to the miraculous vines of St. Simeon
Mirotocivi. I personally witnessed that
seven or eight families who came to us
were blessed with children thanks to the
vines of St Simeon – Father Andrej speaks
with joy. – There is a well-known medieval
example when a Turk came asking
the Hilandar brotherhood asking for help,
because he had no children. When he had
a son, he returned to Hilandar and donated
large estates to the monastery. Today,
30 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Kakovo monastery is located on that land,
another appendage of Hilandar.
Among the Orthodox in many countries,
the monks in Slanci known as an
earnest and effective when preying before
Christ. Their prayers, as witnessed by
many, have brought many wonders. They
have been tirelessly gathering the people,
helping the poor and feeding the hungry.
As a true Hilandar appendage, with the
blessing of the icon of the Three-Handed
Virgin (who wept in 1989), they take care
of the spiritual rebirth of their people.
After the liturgy of this festive Sunday,
the St-Patron’s Day wheat was consecrated
and a cake was cut in honor of St. Nicholas.
The sacred assembly continued at the dining
table. s
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
31

E N C O U N T E R S
32 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SEVENTH “ŠTRAPARIJADA” IN RUMA AND ITS ECHOES
All
Horsepower
“Horses and turkeys are always in fashion”, the witty people of Srem would say. “And logs have
been are in power here for decades” In Bosnia, horses pulling logs are led by “štrapari”. That is how
they call them. It requires strength, skill and practice. When you make a competition in that,
you get “Štraparijada”. Many stories wove around it, by themselves, and many people gather.
And if someone would also invite tambura players...
By: Katarina Filipović
Contemporary agriculture has long
been dominated by machines, various
ones. Working horses, which
were once used to work the land, today
seem to serve only for events. We could
see them again this year at “Štraparijada” in
Ruma, the seventh one, supported by the
municipal cultural fund.
The image of Serbian villages in the recent
past, not further than half a century,
was quite different. Towing horses were
“the main drive and all the machinery”. The
farmers did not have to follow the municipal,
provincial and national competitions
for subsidizing fuel and other things. They
were, literally, “left to their own devices”.
Those who had better horses were better
off. Today we know how much money it
could be saved like this, and the extent in
which it was environmentally friendlier...
Mile Đokanović, a newcomer from Srebrenica,
is telling us that he founded the
event “Štraparijada” in Ruma, modeled after
the one from Drinić, which he saw in
2006. And the first such event was organized
in Bosnia, he says, due to a wager.
– Before my folks from the Republic
of Srpska founded this competition, a lot
of time passed – says Đokanović. – Everybody
claimed that they had the strongest
horse. People placed bets and it was
decided that three lambs and three pigs
Horses and logs
Photo:
Relјa Popović
In western Bosnia, people who are managing horses who are
pulling logs are called “štrapari”. In eastern Bosnia they are called
“furmani”, in Croatia “šlajseri”, in Srem “coachmen”. And they do the
same work, explains Mile Đokanović, organizer of “Štraparijada”
in Ruma at his suggestion, and with his enthusiasm.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
33

E N C O U N T E R S
We Also Have a Racing Horse
Horse is God’s gift to man, says an Arab proverb. The Cheyenne
considered their mustangs sacred animals, and in 1971 the
US Congress declared the Mustang as the historical symbol of
the Wild West. Mustang embodies the beauty, speed, grace and
intractability. Hence it is used as a metaphor in the automotive
industry. The seventh “Štraparijada” in Ruma showed that – still,
after all – we also have a racing horse.
would be the stake. The prize fund was
established before the official entry of the
meadow. After the victory of Mirko Garov
in Drinić, in 2006, they came to the
conclusion that all this could not be left
with a few contestant who placed a bet.
And so, after coming to Srem, I organized
„“Štraparijada” for the first time in 2010.
Now, when it is held for the seventh time,
we got people from Kraljevo, Kragujevac,
Sjenica, Novi Pazar, Lučani, Ivanjica,
Požega, Valjevo, Loznica, Banja Koviljača,
Pavlovci, Žarkovac. Although in Srpska
they have their own “Štraparijada”, although
there is aggravating circumstance
on the form of border rules on certificates
of horses when entering Serbia, the competitors
from the other side of the Drina
arrived again this time.
EVERYBODY IS PRAISING
THEIR OWN HORSES
This year, “Štraparijada” was opened
by Stevica Kovačević, a citizen of Ruma,
who had been, from various offices in the
municipality, supporting this event. At the
competition, the horses of Milinko Bugarin
from Banja Koviljača performed the
best, then those of Braca Borojević from
Pavlovac, and Žarko Nikolić from Loznica.
Their horses were the best in heavyweight
category, in pairs.
– Horses must have wide legs and be
selected – explains Mile Đokanović. – Not
every horse can handle it, but those that
are longer, heavier and bigger. Such horses
were once used to work the land in Srem,
and today the horses are “out of work”.
They also seem to have joined the “transitional
losers”.
All owners, of course, speak elaborately
about their horses. Just like in the poem of
Jovan Jovanović Zmaj “the Gypsy praises
his horse”. But one also has to show this,
confirm it. The seventh “Štraparijada” in
Ruma was well attended, despite the frivolousness
of this rainy May, which at times
revived painful memories of 2014, the year
of great floods.
– I know, this is the 21 st century, and
working with horses is a matter of the past.
Still, many people still hold horses, some
out of love, others for a necessity in – says
Đokanović. – I also used to do a lot of work
by using horse-drawn cart. Who knows,
maybe the horses come into the spotlight
again. Small households, of which there
are many in Serbia, can still perform some
lighter agricultural work in a cost-effective
manner by using horses. Transport of
smaller loads, furrowing of corn on small
parcels, especially in vegetable growing,
and much more, can be done with horses,
and “does not cost anything”. No registration,
strict regulations, penalties, tax collectors...
I am seriously thinking of buying a
medium sized horse. s
34 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
35

H O O K
Фо то:
Ар хи ва
с а го в ор ни к а,
Жељ ко Си но бад
36 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

HOW SERBIAN TV SHOW “FISHING WORLD” HAS CONQUERED THE WORLD
Return
to Nature
Author Radomir Krkić owes most of his gratitude to local TV sages who had abolished the show
“Fishing World”. If they had not, he would have never knocked on the doors of big foreign TV houses.
Today, his show is produced in English and broadcast in over sixty countries. It is characterized by
simplicity and authenticity. Spontaneity. Nature without Photoshop, dominance of sincerity and talent
over big budgets and technology. His viewers know that “water is the best grounding”
By: Vladimir Janković
In a debate about who is more noble,
fishermen have proven to be ahead
of the hunters. They argued that, unlike
the hunters, they can always return
their prey to nature, namely to the water,
which is what they have been doing in the
last few decades! We heard this recently
from Radomir Krkić, author of the most
watched documentaries on fishing. The
reason for our interview and socializing
was the recently signed agreement with
the Turkish television “Jaban” from Istan-
Salmon caught
in Alaska
Barracuda from
Cuban waters
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
37

У Д И Ц А / У Д О Ч К А / H O O K
Photo: Archive of
the interlocutor,
Želјko Sinobad
bul on the Broadcasting Rights. While Serbian
TV stations are purchasing the cheesy
heartbreaking Turkish TV series, Radomir
returns the responds with a series of superb
shows on “the most popular pastime
of idlers”.
Every self-respecting cynic would notice
that chess, hunting and fishing are not really
sports, although there are stories about
them abeingre published in sports sections.
– And they are not – Radomir confirmed
reluctantly. – Chess is, for example,
the return to logic, a hunting and fishing
are return to nature, to what the man in
this time is often missing, only they have
assumed a competitive character. As some
passionate fishermen would say, “water is
the best grounding”, the strongest bond
with nature.
SWIMMING WITH PIRANHAS
The first thing that caused confusion in
this story, even doubt, was that provision
on the ratings, because even the proven addicts
to television programs were not able
to erase the show Fishing World from their
memory!
– Unfortunately, in our counry it was
only aired on the cable channel “Hunting
38 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

and Fishing”, which broadcasts its program
also in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and
Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia
– Krkić explained. – Ali But the show is
now viewed in more than sixty countries!
Suppose, via the Russian television, it is
videwed in as many as twenty-six states.
American broadcast network DMG airs it
on five of its eight channels, and it is viewd
by many, from Jamaica and Trinidad and
Tobago to Kenya. These documentaries
are also watched in Spain, Poland, Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania
... to mention only a few. After all,
these shows were originally made in the
English language, and the official name of
the series is actually Fishing World!
Still, it all started in Serbian, almost
quarter of a century ago.
– As an average fisherman, neither better
nor worse than others, I was a guest
of Mića Nikolić on Television “Politika”, in
his then popular TV show about fishing
–Krkić remembers. – Thanks to this the
idea was born, and I modeled for a year
or two later with Dragiša Kovačević, then
the sports editor of the editorial board of
Television “Studio B”. For this television
I recorded my first documentary, which
was a novelty for them. Later I moved to
the “BK TV”, because Perica Karić, the Editor-in-Chief,
had a nose for these things.
Thanks to Radoš Bajić, my countryman
and friend, at the end of the last decade
the show also appeared on the RTS, but,
unfortunately, for a very short time. Due
to the unfair treatment it was quickly
abolished. I am grateful to them. Maybe
I would have given up then, but I was encouraged
by my friend Stuart Edmonson,
an American from San Diego. He told
me that the reports I was making were
“truly remarkable”, and he introduced
me to the American television network,
which immediately accepted my project.
Although they knew that I was a Serb,
therefore belonged to the libeled nation
there, the whole deal was concluded and
agreed, orally. And when, was four years
ago, I signed a contract with the Russian
“Stream TV”, their manager solemnly declared
that he was signing a contract with
a Serb with a particular pleasure, and paid
the fee in advance.
He wonders how someone on the Serbian
TV can says that fishing is no longer
“in trend” and decide to give time to, for
example, newly composed folk music.
– It is impossible. People have been
fishing since time immemorial, and it will
last for as long as human civilization lasts.
The most abundant food resources for the
growing population of the planet are located
exactly in the water: in rivers, lakes,
seas and oceans. In the poorest of coun-
Leisure
Alligator-fish
caught in Texas
Yes, they say that fishing is the “favorite pastime of idlers”. Two
hundred thousand registered fishermen in this little Serbia may
testify to this, along with as many unregistered.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
39

H O O K
Halibut caught
in Alaska
Radomir Krkić
(in the middle) with
Bora Đorđević and
Eddy Grant during
fishing in Grocka,
near Belgrade
tries, fish and seafood are today virtually
the only source of protein.
DOCUMENTARIES
WITHOUT MAKE-UP
Since he has completely surrendered
himself to this pleasure, he has made
about sixty reportages, which may be misleading.
– Because of them I have traveled
around the world and fished a lot – Krkić
smiles. – And I was fishing in Nicaragua,
Costa Rica, Guyana, Barbados, Cuba,
Mexico, St. Louis, Florida, Alaska, Texas,
Idaho, Oman, Malaysia, Thailand and
even ... in Romania! When they make
such documentariees for major television
and production companies, the teams
spend, at the average, at least ninety thousand
dollars for one, and I would probably
make ten with so much money. But
not because I am frugal, but because I
usually travel only with the cameraman.
On the other hand, this little money at my
Key
Serbian television broadcasters with national frequency often
present in public the ratings of their shows, where they always
choose the key by which they would present themselves as champions.
But, Krkić points out, they never include in that race the
specialized programs, such as “Discovery”, “History” and “Animal
Planet”, because they understand how they would score in such
a race.
disposal does not allow me to make subsequent
tinkering, and so my documentaries
are authentic, true documentaries,
and every viewer can recognize this unmistakably,
even if they are not fishermen.
As an illustration, he told us an anecdote
about the great mistake made by the
team of a world-renowned program. They
were so wrapped up in “directing” that
they missed that the fisherman who was
wrestling with a fish, in three connected
shots, each time appeared in different
clothes and with a different fishing rod.
Experienced guides told Krkić that many
crews often purchase their “good catch” at
fish markets.
– I was almost slandered for forgery
when once I showed them a photo with a
fish-alligator I caught in Texas – says Radomir.
- That fish really had a head irresistibly
resembling that of an alligator, and
was thus named after it, and those who do
not know think that it was photoshoped.
He admits that he also sees his work as
a mission.
– I have always wanted to show by example
to young people that there are no
obstacles to present their work to someone
abroad. For what is wise and good,
there are no obstacles. Perhaps the most
interesting illustration of my idea was
that four years ago I managed to drag Eddie
Grant and Bora Čorba for fishing in
Grocka.
True Serbian story... s
40 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
41

L I G H T H O U S E S
ST. SAVA IN THE RUSSIAN IMPERIAL CHRONICLE (3)
Serbian
Miracle-Workers
in Kremlin
Photo: Aleksandar
Ćosić and “National
Review” Archive
42 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Immediately after the coronation, Ivan IV the Mighty continued
the construction of imperial Kremlin. The Cathedral of Archangel
Michael was painted as a congregation of ancestors, on whose behalf
he was ruling. All his precursors, Russian rulers, are there, in glory
and vestment. Only four painted people are not Russian, only two are
in monastic, not imperial robes: St. Sava and St. Simeon, “Serbian
miracle-workers”. The remaining two non-Russians: Byzantine emperor
Michael VIII Palaiologos and Holy Prince Lazar of Serbia. Only one
person in the Cathedral was painted twice: St. Sava of Serbia
By: Milovan Vitezović
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
43

L I G H T H O U S E S
A view of
the Archangel
congregation (the
temple in the
middle) from the
Moscow River
After Ivan IV reached legal age, the
Grand Muscovite Principality
ceased to exist and Imperial Russia
appeared. He, following vows, wanted
an empire without delay (his grandfather
and father delayed it). However, he did not
proclaim it himself.
The decision on creating an empire
was an agreement on symphony – compliance
of the terrene and spiritual authority.
Moscow (Russian Empire – Russia), as the
Third Rome, is based on the compliance
on which Constantinople (Byzantine Empire
– Byzantium), as the Orthodox Empire,
lasted for one millennium. The decision
on creating the Russian Empire and
coronation of Ivan IV as first emperor was
brought by the supreme state authorities
of the Grand Muscovite Principality, led
by, besides the Grand Prince, Princess Ana
Glinskaya and the Synod of Bishops of the
Russian Orthodox Church with Muscovite
Metropolitan Makarije as the first among
the equal. So the decision was made that
Ivan IV shall become the first Anointed
One on the Russian throne.
Historians of this époque indicate several
versions of the description of Ivan’s
coronation ceremony, which took place on
January 16, 1547 in Moscow. All versions
emphasize that there was a sacred anointment
ritual, that the emperor was thereby
introduced into the “Autocracy of Spirit”
and thus became the heir of Byzantine emperors,
while Moscow became the Third
Rome, capital of the great Christian Orthodox
empire. After the anointment, he was
crowned with Monomah’s crown. As the
legend goes, that crown was a gift of the XI
century Byzantine emperor Constantine
IX (army commander who became emperor
by marrying Empress Zoja, niece of
Basil the Great “the Bulgar-Slayer”) to his
grandson, the Grand Kiev Prince Vladimir
Monomakh (son of Prince Vsevolod and
imperial daughter Anastasia, first Byzantine
princess married to a pagan). There
is also an apocryphal legend, preserved
among both Serbs and Russians, without
any historical basis, that Dušan’s imperial
crown was secretly taken from the, again
secret, Dečani treasury to Russia for the
coronation of Ivan, and returned afterwards.
Just like Emperor Dušan, the first emperor
in his dynasty famous by his folk
name Emperor Dušan the Great, Emperor
Ivan IV was famous as Ivan the Terrible
(Horribly, Mighty, Magnificent).
There is no emperor in imperial dignity
without an empress and courtiers. Along
with the coronation, Ivan IV, among a thousand
daughters from his Principality’s aristocratic
families, chose an empress to select
courtiers. He chose Anastasia, daughter of
aristocrat Roman. With this choice, making
Roman the father-in-law of the empire,
he attracted the historical attention of the
Empire to this aristocratic family. From it,
after the Rurikovich dynasty, with him as
its climax – its crown, a new Romanov dynasty
will grow.
LAWS, ARMY, RELIGION, CULTURE
After achieving the natural (by the nature
of dominion) and centuries-long aspiration
of the great princely dynasty of
Rurikovich, mostly expressed and most
worked for by his grandfather and father,
Emperor Ivan IV continued developing
what his mother, princess Elena Vasilevna,
began and intended to continue.
As an erudite ruler, determined and pious,
although still too young, with a difficult
princely experience, he wanted a powerful
empire, using the benefits of symphony,
based on laws (as the only way to restrain,
to a certain extent, and obligate the boyars,
as well as to bind the serfs to the land), on
a standing army (for guarding and keeping
the western and north-western borders, for
expanding and preserving the empire, for
winning and conquering the Kazan and
Astrakhan khanate and incorporating Siberia
with the empire), on faith as a state
ideology (on votive agreements with representatives
of the Lord, who will be given
power and whom his power will be given
from God), and on culture (to educate the
country and establish connections with the
world by bringing masons and artists and
purchasing the first printing shop, which
will create testimonies for future centuries,
such as the unique Letopisnyi Litsevoi Svod
/Personal Chronicle Compilation/).
Almost everything he had done was in
that name and for that purpose, especially
in the so-called golden age of his dominion,
the time of expansion and establishing
the empire on the first printed book Kormchaia
Book, investing his entire energy into
such endeavors, while quieting his unrestrained
and often moody character, which
44 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
45

L I G H T H O U S E S
In the Archangel
congregation:
Fresco Saint Sava
and Saint Simeon,
Serbian miraclemakers
Saint Sava of
Serbia, an altar
fresco
Holy Prince Lazar
he, entirely dedicated to Russia, showed
in creating and defending autocracy, after
which, as some assume, he was given the
name – the Terrible (Horrible, Great, Magnificent).
He established the imperial assembly,
representing all parts of the empire, with
legislative authorities, corresponding to
today’s parliament, then called duma and
rada, as well as the imperial council, with
which he agreed to a consultancy-like division
of dominion.
The era of Ivan IV was a time of creating
and strengthening the empire, which lasted
almost half a millennium after him. In his
clear vision, he saw Russia and created it as
such, as a new, first Orthodox Christian empire
in the world, but not out of the world.
He cared about the state of Orthodox Christianity,
supported Orthodox monasteries in
enslaved Serbian lands, in Bulgaria, Greece
Under the Protection of St. Sava
The title “Serbian miracle-workers” indicates that Ivan IV, already
as a prince, at a time he considered humiliating, put himself
under the protection of St. Sava, and believed that he survived
the bad times due to his miracles. Thus such a title is a form of
great imperial gratitude. Another fresco of St. Sava also indicates
gratitude to this miracle-working saint (the only one presented
with two frescoes in this edifice), on top of the northern altar pillar.
Two frescoes of St. Sava in the most colossal monument of his
dynasty’s glory are truly great imperial honors.
and Mt. Athos. After learning from Chilandar
monks about the difficult situation in
the monastic state on Mt. Athos, he wrote
to Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent.
He wanted to establish closer connections
with the English kingdom, anticipating an
emerging empire. The aspiration was mutual,
so the English discovered the northern
sea route in 1554 and founded the Muscovite
Company in London.
HOLY LAND DEEDS ON THE EMPIRE
After eliminating the aspirations of
the boyars towards a state of independent
principalities, Russia became a complete
empire. In his conflicts with the boyars,
Ivan IV showed an imperial character,
strong will and iron hand. Boyars were
prone to all kinds of fights, both public and
secret. Inclined to all means they could use
for achieving any objective, from public
rebellions, mostly secret unions with enemies
of the empire, public betrayals and
conspiracies, poisoning closest members of
the imperial family (mother, wife, son), to
big intrigues and slanders they proclaimed
lasting historical facts, and denying historical
successes. While he was entirely dedicated
to raising the empire, Ivan IV was a
tragic personality in his personal self-sacrifice
and never anticipated he would become
a great victim of subsequent histories
46 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

(the boyar histories will represent his time
as dark and fatal, suitable for histories of
the new Romanov dynasty, whose emperors
wanted everything to start from them).
The biggest world opponent to the empire
of Ivan IV, besides the constant threat
of Suleiman the Magnificent’s Turkey, was
cesaropapism. The Holy See was against
Constantinople, as the second Rome,
against which it was helpless until the appearance
of the Latin empire, which it also
did not succeed in preserving. Only after
the fall of Constantinople and its conquering
by the Ottomans, it sharply opposed
the ascension of Moscow into Third
Rome, the creation of the Russian Empire
of Ivan IV, especially because it had powerful
Catholic kingdoms near the Russian
borders: Poland, Sweden and Livonia in the
Baltic, the state of Teutonian knights. (One
of the different interpretations how Ivan
IV was named the Terrible is the assumption
about the German origin of the nickname.
It says that the Teutonian knights,
great opponents of Emperor Ivan, named
him Gross in German, which in Russian
turned into “Grozni” (Terrible).
Immediately after the coronation, Ivan
IV continued the construction of imperial
Kremlin, commenced at the time of the
boyar “empire”, now with special imperial
care and attention, in order to make Kremlin
the face of the empire. So he began the
painting of the Cathedral of Archangel Michael,
as a church of ancestors, on whose
behalf he was ruling, as a church of the
Russian state and historical magnificence
– as a land deed on the empire. That is
why all previous tsars, all previous Russian
rulers, were presented in the nave of this
church, in full glory and robes.
However, according to his will, not only
Russian rulers were presented in the nave.
Already from the entrance, first seen by everyone
entering the church, on the northern
supporting pillar, the visitor’s attention
is caught by a fresco painting not in imperial
glory, but in a monastic robe. The fresco
represents Mt. Athos monks St. Sava and
St. Simeon, “Serbian miracle-workers”. A bit
further, in different places of honor, noticeable
are frescoes of another two, non-Rus-
Bowing to Sava’s Cross
Illustrations
from the
“Chronicle Vault”:
Byzantine Emperor
Alexius Angel
gives to St. Sava
and St. Simeon
the Charter of
Hilandar as
an imperial
monastery
Nemanja’s people
arrive on the
Mount Athos and
find the young
prince Rastko
A story told in Chilandar for centuries testifies about how
much Ivan IV respected St. Sava. It says that the monks, during
one of the numerous missions, took the emperor one of their
greatest relics as a gift – Sava’s cross, which St. Sava received
from Byzantine Emperor Jovan Vatats, when he got the title of
archpriest, which was, according to tradition, made of wood from
Christ’s cross. Ivan IV took the cross enthralled and filled with piousness.
He bowed several times to the Saint’s cross and kissed it.
Shaken, he said to the Chilandar monks: “I am endlessly thankful
to you for bringing it to me, to bow to it and kiss it. Now, take it
back where you brought it from, because it only belongs there.”
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
47

L I G H T H O U S E S
48 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

sian rulers. They are frescoes of Byzantine
emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (the
emperor who liberated Constantinople
in 1261 and, by abolishing the Latin empire,
returned its old glory into Orthodox
splendor) and Holy Prince Lazar of Serbia.
THE LIFE OF SAVA IN 250 PICTURES
Russian historians, in their studies
about the Cathedral of Archangel Michael
and the frescoes in this Pantheon
of Russian history, determined that “Ivan
the Terrible had a crucial role in selecting
eminent people and iconographic wholes”.
So, the emperor himself decided how
to emphasize, as well and as noticeable as
possible, the dynastic connections of his
palace, as well as his personal connections,
with Greek (Byzantine) and Serbian dynasties,
by painting their forefathers Nemanja
– Nemanjić dynasty, Michael VIII –
the Palaiologos, and Lazar – Lazarević and
Branković. It is clear that the emperor was
especially attentive regarding the presentation
of Nemanja as St. Simeon together
with St. Sava, who has priority in the
presentation, the only ones not in terrene
imperial robes. The attention was also emphasized
in their unusual title – Serbian
miracle-workers.
This indicates that the same honor, not
only with the approval of the emperor, but
according to his wish, was given to the Hagiography
of St. Sava, the book on which
the young prince’s education was based
on, thus it was illustrated with so much
detail and in such volume, and embedded
in the unique, comprehensive history
made for him – the monumental Letopisnyi
Litsevoi Svod. The fourth, such entitled
Laptevsky volume of the Letopisnyi Svod,
on sheets numbered 551 to 611, on more
than 100 pages, besides the genealogy of
the Nemanjić dynasty, according to Teodosije’s
Hagiography of St. Sava, tells and
pictures the life of this Serbian saint. It was
told in reduced and dignified sentences,
intoned like sermon tributes. It includes
all facts of the original Teodosije’s hagiography,
some with the original mistakes of
the biographer, but without bigger historical
deviations.
Pictures, although miniatures, are far
more “eloquent”. Each picture includes
two, three or even four episodes from
Sava’s life, indicated by a short text. The
number of pictured
scenes, more than
250 of them, makes
the miniatures fuller
and the illustrated
hagiography of St.
Sava more sublime.
Such a high number
of scenes were dictated
by artistic expression,
“requesting”
consistent repetition
of characters and also
consistent schematic
presentation of landscapes
and architecture.
The illuminations
were done in
aquarelle technique
directly on paper (the
paper was of imperial
quality, which provided imperial durability
of the work).
The painted atmospheres from Sava’s
terrene and monastic life and his spiritual
deeds from Ras to Mt. Athos, the atmospheres
of his monasteries Studenica, Chilandar,
Žiča, Mileševa, the atmospheres of
the cities of his audiences: Thessaloniki,
Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cairo, Trnovo,
the atmospheres of his pilgrimages to holy
places, all have a Russian appearance and
Russian character.
He was honored in them during his
lifetime. A miraculous feeling spreads
from these warm-colored pictures and
their narrative ardor, a feeling that this is
“a hagiography of a saint as much as the
spirit of the époque and country they
were created in”.
The history of Russian literature calls
Letopisnyi Svod an imperial anthology,
an imperial chronicle, and most often an
imperial book, which is the name of the
tenth volume “Царственная кннига”,
which it indeed is, both for its idea and its
achievement.
As much as the Letopisnyi Svod, an
exciting Russian capital work of world
history and history of art, is worth of admiration,
none the less worth is this separated
whole dedicated to Serbs and their
saint, who is their first signature and the
one they were named after, as well as his
illustrated hagiography of added pictures
of the crucial event in Serbian history, the
Battle of Kosovo.
From the
“Chronicle Vault”:
Transfer if the relics
of St. Simeon from
the Mount Athos to
Serbia
A view of
the Saint Basil’s
Cathedral from the
edge of Red Square
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
49

I N S I G N I A
A SHORT HERALDIC HISTORY OF BELGRADE
Under
the Eagle’s Shield
Golden seal from the times of Holy Despot Stefan is the oldest surviving heraldic trace of
the coat of arms of the Serbian capital. The oldest complete image of the coat of arms is in the list
of coat of arms from 1555. Under the Turkish occupation, Belgrade had no coats of arms.
Austrians and Hungarians brought and took away their own. The first clear regulation on the
coat of arms of Belgrade is from 1914, but it was implemented only in 1931. Today’s coats of
arms of Belgrade are modified version of that solution
50 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.
By: Vladimir Matevski

The first heraldic insignia of Belgrade
are mentioned by the history at the
time of Despot Stefan Lazarević, who
received the city in 1403 from Sigismund of
Luxemburg, king of Hungary. A testimony of
the golden seal of the city was given by Constantine
the Philosopher in his most famous
work The Life of Despot Stefan Lazarević: “...
And he (Despot) gave them the golden seal,
which had the image of the City, and for those
who want to make any kind of purchase in
any part, would provide the book with the
seal proving he is a resident of that city, so
would never have to pay customs or toll”.
If we take the phrase “had the image of
the City” literally – that it is the panoramic
view of the City walls, we come to the reconstruction
of the seal created by prof. Dr. Milos
Ćirić, well-known Serbian graphic artist. We
should not forget that Belgrade had previously
been in the territory of Hungary, where
the oats of arms of settlements appear during
the 18 th century, so it is not impossible that the
city had previously had such insignia.
After the death of Despot Stefan in 1427,
Belgrade was, under the contract, returned to
the Hungarians.
The earliest known image of Belgrade coat
of arms is in Fugger’s Mirror of Honor from
1555. In this work, which contains more than
30,000 coats of arms, and was named after the
Fugger family, the famous family of merchants
and bankers, and later a family of a prince, the
coat of arms of Belgrade is presented with a
tower between two Patriarchate ( double)
crosses and with two beams that symbolize
two rivers, the Sava and the Danube. The earliest
information about this coat of arms was
presented by great Aleksa Ivić who says about
it: “This coat of arms is a heraldic combination
of coat of arms of the old and new Hungarian
states with a tower that represents the
city of Belgrade.”
With minor changes, mainly in the form of a
shield, this coat of arms survived until Belgrade
fell into Turkish hands in 1521 (today it used by
Stari Grad, as the oldest Belgrade municipality).
It is well-known that for a long time the Ottomans
did not recognize coats of arms as part of
the national and state heritage, and with their
arrival the heraldic history of Belgrade was interrupted
for the next two centuries.
IN THE SHADOW
OF FOREIGN WINGS
In the turbulent history of the Serbian
capital, the year 1717 was a new milestone,
when the Turks took over the city from the
Austrians. The Austrian military government
then introduced a new coat of arms, featuring
three mosques with the imperial black
double-headed eagle flying over its minarets.
There is also the slogan: “Sub umbra alarum
tuarum” (“In the shadow of your wings”,
Psalm of David, 17/8). In 1910, in the Vienna
archive, Aleksa Ivić discovered the heraldic
description of that coat of arms from 1721,
and the appended stamp. The circular inscription
on the seal was: “Gross insigl. dor Statt
Belgrad in Servien 1721.”
In 1724, the imperial governor in Belgrade
Aleksandar Wuerttemberg filed to the Viennese
court working council two proposals for
The large
coat of arms
of Belgrade
Medium
and small
coat of arms
of Belgrade
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
51

I N S I G N I A
the coat of arms. One was the already mentioned
heraldic seal, and the other one was
“the ancient coat of arms of the town”. “The
ancient coat of arms of the town”, as interpreted
by Đorđe Stratimirović, was actually
is based on a coin depicting a Roman soldier
holding hands on the hips of a bull and
a horse. Above everything is the inscription
Taurunum, i.e. Zemun. The second proposal
was not approved, and the one with three
mosques was accepted, with the removal of
the slogan “Sub umbra alarum tuarum” and
replacement of the circular inscription on
the stamp with the text: “Alba Graeca Recuperata
Anno MDCCHVII”.
In accordance with the Belgrade Peace
Treaty from 1739, the Turks return to the
city, and the issue of the coat of arms is sidelined
again.
The beginning of the 19 th century brings
new winds to the Balkans. Serbia, first the
one of Karađorđe, then the one of Miloš, adopted
all European attributes of statehood,
including, of course, and the state insignia.
With the adoption of the constitution of Sretenje
in 1835, Serbia finally received its coat
of arms and flag. A coat of arms of Belgrade
was not even contemplated then because the
municipal authorities had considered themselves
part of the state administration and
used state symbols in their work. (A good
example is the stamp of the Belgrade magistrate
from 1807). That is why, in the coming
decades, Belgrade, along with Athens, was
one of the few European capitals that did not
have its own coat of arms.
On the occasion of the 300 th anniversary
of the Turkish burning of the relics of Saint
Sava in Belgrade, in 1895 Đorđe Stratimirović
publicly proposed to include the first archbishop
of the Serbian Orthodox Church on
the coat of arms of the Serbian capital:
“The coat of arms, as we imagine it in
heraldry, would consist of a simple shield
with vertical image of St. Sava, according to
the standards of painting from our ancient
monasteries. The field of the shield is blue,
the saint in gold attire, standing at the gold
ambo; in the top corners of the shield there
is inscription in old-fashioned gold lettering:
Saint Sava; the top of the shield is the golden
crown of the city.”
Although this idea did not meet with approval,
it is significant in the heraldic history
of Belgrade as the first proposal of a
Serb for the image of the coat of arms of
52 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

the Serbian capital. All previous ones were
made by foreign invaders.
THE FIRST LOCAL COAT OF ARMS
In the draft Law on Municipalities from
1914, in Article 111, for the first time we find
a description of how a coat of arms of Belgrade
should look like:
“The Belgrade Municipality has its own
coat of arms. It consists of two sections: the
lower covering 2/5 and the upper covering
3/5 of the entire coat of arms. The lower part
ends in a spike. In the lower part of the walls
of Roman castle of Singidunum, and at its
foot of his a Roman ship on the river (trireme),
with Roman sails. In the upper field,
Nebojša Tower in the lower town, with its
shape as it was in the Middle Ages, with twoheaded
white eagle without a crown, from
which beams of light radiate on all sides.”
The beginning of the Great War prevented
Belgrade from getting its coat of arms.
The competition for the coat of arms was
announced only in 1931. It was preceded
by a public debate, which also included the
Stratimirović’s proposal that coat of arms
of Belgrade should feature Saint Sava. Great
Serbian painter Uroš Predić objected:
“...And it was proposed for the coat of
arms of Belgrade to display an image of Saint
Sava. Brought up in the spirit of our wise
and humble high priest and educator, I can
almost hear how he himself protests against
it, not to use his holy face and body, where it
is not appropriate. He is not a patron of Belgrade,
but patron of schools, education and
the Serbian Orthodox Church. (...)And I say
after all this: the glory to the Saint Sava! The
glory to Belgrade!”
Milan Nešić, President of the Belgrade
municipality, set up an Expert Committee
for the coat of arms of the city, which was
supposed to decide on the propositions of
the competition. The committee members
were Beta Vukanović, Uroš Predić, Ilija
Šobajić, Dragi Stojanović, Bogdan Popović,
Milan Nikolajević, Stanoje Stanojević, Aleksa
Ivić, Đorđe Čarapić (who drew sketches
during the debates at the Committee), Vladimir
Ćorović and Nikola Vulić.
The committee members did not take
into account the old coats of arms of Belgrade,
foreign and made by the enemy, but
they focused on Belgrade getting a brand
new coat of arms. A great desire of Milan
Nešić, the Mayor of Belgrade, was to depict
the suffering of Belgrade on the coat of arms,
as well as its major role in the creation of the
new state, Yugoslavia. Upon the proposal of
the Committee, and with the accompanied
sketch of the coat of arms made by the Secretary
of the Office of the Royal Medals Đorđe
Čarapić, the Court of the city municipality
of Belgrade has announced an art competition
for the best artistic solution of the coat
of arms with the following elements: 1) the
national colors, 2) the rivers as symbols of
the primordial power of Belgrade, 3) Roman
ship, trireme, as a symbol of antiquity of Belgrade,
4) walls with the open gate: the lower
part of the walls to represent the borough,
the upper part to represent the town, and the
open gate to represent free trade.
“Land in the wedge of the coat of arms,
between the rivers, and under the walls,
should be red as a symbol of blood, eternal
suffering of Belgrade; the rivers should be
white (according to the heraldic laws); the
walls of the town and the city are white as
a symbol of the White City; sky is blue as a
symbol of hope, faith in a better future. The
coat of arms must take the form of a shield,
ending in a spike at the.”
EMBLEMS AND CONFUSIONS
The assessment committee comprised of
Stanoje Stanojević, Bogdan Popović, Branko
Popović, Uroš Predić, Beta Vukanović,
Živojin Lukić and one member of the Tribunal
of Belgrade City Municipality. The
proposal of the Belgrade painter Đorđe
Andrejević Kun won among the fifty-six received
entries. The second prize went to Vera
Bojničić-Zamola, and the work of Demetrius
Mordvinov received special recognition.
The assessment committee also agreed
to make the following changes to the winning
proposal: 1) to add watch towers on the
square stone in the same form as they are
presented on the second Kun’s image; 2) to
make a hole in the darkened area in the background
of the gate to, so as to obtain an opening
in the perspective; 3) to cut the horizontal
line of the hill on which the city is standing
starting from the edge of the walls, in order
to better emphasize the position of the city.
Medals
Unveiling the
Monument to
Prince Mihailo, 6
December 1882
The city of Belgrade received four medals. These are: French
Order of the Grand Cross of the Knight of the Legion of Honor
(1920), Czechoslovakian War Cross (1925), Order of the Star of
Karađorđe with swords of the 4 th degree (1939), Order of the National
Hero (1974).
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
53

I N S I G N I A
The coat
of arms of
Belgrade from
the 16 th was
included in
today’s coat
of arms of
Belgrade
municipality
Stari grad
Rejected
proposals for
the appearance
of large and
medium coat
of arms of
Belgrade
The coat of arms with these changes was
adopted by the Committee of the Belgrade
municipality on 10 December 1931. It was
confirmed five days later in the Decision of
the Ministry of Interior.
After World War II, namely in 1945, new
difficulties began with Belgrade coat of arms.
Without any formal decision, a red star was
put on the coat of arms. The shield remained
unchanged, probably because of the merits
of Đorđe Andrejević Kun, who was one of
the creators of the emblem of communist
Yugoslavia.
The statutes of Belgrade in the period
from 1954 to 1964 mentioned the city emblem
(instead of the word coat of arms) or
do not make any references to the symbol
of Belgrade. Only the Statute of 5 February
1960, which was in force for less than four
months, informs that Belgrade has a coat of
arms. A new version of the coat of arms of
Belgrade appeared in 1960. It is not entirely
clear who the author was. Some experts say
that, the changes on the coat of arms were
produced, under the instructions of Đorđe
Andrejević, by Belgrade painter and graphic
artist Ivko Milojević. Thus, a new version of
the coat of arms appeared, without the old
one being previously formally withdrawn
from use.
In the early 1990’s there are new public
debates on the coat of arms of Belgrade.
Miloš Ćirić makes two proposals for
a coat of arms and proposal for the flag of
Belgrade. The first proposal is a redesigned
version from 1960, and the second one is a
completely new solution. Ćirić also points to
the need for Belgrade to get its large (complete)
coat of arms. He proposed to include a
rampart crown above the shield, branches on
the sides (laurel, oak or both) in the form of
semi-wreath with a sash and important years
in the history of Belgrade, and in the lower
part the four medals of Belgrade.
HERALDIC ROUNDING
In 1991, the Assembly of Belgrade set up
a working group to identify the situation in
relation to the coat of arms of Belgrade. It
consisted of Mira Kun, Branko Milјuš, Dragomir
Acović and Tomislav Lakušić. In March
1991, it completed its work and presented its
proposals. It was agreed to make changes on
Kun’s coat of arms from 1931, but was decided
not to develop medium and large coat of
arms of the city, as well as the flag.
Changes with respect to the coat of arms
from 1931:
Another row of oars was added, so the
boat would be in accordance with the description
of trireme. The comic book-like
lines and shadows were removed from the
sails. The head stone of the gate archivolt
was moved. The watch towers were separated
against the remaining part of the walls.
There was also the idea of changing the
shape of the shield, but it was discarded.
The situation with the heraldic emblem of
Belgrade is today clear and regulated.
The use of coat of arms and flag is governed
by the decision adopted on 4 July 2003
54 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

y the Belgrade City Council. The coat of arms
is used on three levels: small, medium and large.
The small coat of arms is a term for the basic
heraldic composition of the shield without
paraphernalia.
The medium coat of arms is a shield with
heraldic composition crowned by appropriate
rampart crown. It may have floral composition,
sash with a slogan or name of the titular, as well
as medals. Belgrade, as the main city and historical
capital, has golden rampart crown with five
visible merlons and golden tiara with pearls.
The term large coat of arms means the
shield se with rampart crown, holders, flags,
plinth and other paraphernalia. The large coat
of arms is silver double-headed eagle in flight,
with the basic coat of arms of Belgrade resting
on its chest. The eagle holds a sword and
olive branch in his claws. Below the eagle are
golden oak tree branches, over the crossing of
which the first known coat of arms of the Belgrade
was placed. Over the oak tree branches
there are also four medals that Belgrade received.
s
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
55

M A R K
MANAK’S HOUSE AND ITS VALUABLE ETHNOGRAPHIC COLLECTION
In Spite of Transience
and Oblivion
In this house on the Sava slope, built most probably in the early 19 th century, there used to be a post
office, bakery, tavern and apartment. Renewed in 1968, it became home to Hristifor Crnilović’s
wonderful ethnographic collection, including folk costumes and jewelry, tools and accessories,
handicrafts and weapons… It recently flashed again, after another restoration, and once more Manak’s
House became an important spot in Savamala, the quarter of creativity and culture
By:
Dragana
Barjaktarević
Whether you set off to Bosiljčić’s
candy store to buy homemade
Turkish delight and caramels,
or went down the stairway painted as a
Pirot rug from Zeleni Venac to Gavrila
Principa Street, and then further down
to the new Savamala, your eye must have
been caught by Manak’s House – apartment,
post office, bakery, tavern, museum
– a monument which, although erected
on uneven soil, steadily stands amidst two
hundred years of changes. It preserves different
histories under its tiles and, as it
goes with many years, all kinds of legends.
FROM A TAVERN TO A MUSEUM
The exact time of construction of
Manak’s House is not known. It is assumed
that it was raised in the early XIX century,
approximately at the same time as the Residence
of Princess Ljubica and the “Ques-
56 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

tion Mark” kafana. It belongs to eastern-
Balkan type architecture of rich merchant
houses and people believe that a Turkish
aga lived in it, who left Serbia with his family
after the liberation wars and retreats of
Turks began.
At the time, the Sava embankment
looked like a rural settlement – about a
hundred small houses and dilapidated
fishermen huts, surrounded by fields and
orchards. Following the Edict from 1833,
Serbian authorities were granted internal
command of Belgrade, so Prince Miloš
Obrenović decided to build a modern city
at the Sava banks, looking up to the architecture
of European cities living on rivers,
such as Vienna or Budapest. He ordered
the demolition of hovels and paving new
roads, but requested Manak’s House to be
spared, perhaps because it was the location
of the Prince’s temporary post office.
There were no real post offices at the time.
Tatars, postmen on horses, delivered mail
to post stations in which they rested, had
lunch and changed horses. Since it was located
on a busy road, Manak’s House was
seemingly one of such stations.
The first noted information is that the
house was bought by Manojlo Manak, Aromanian
from Macedonia, who dwelled on the
first floor and operated a bakery and tavern
on the ground floor. Since he came to Serbia,
he took a Serbian surname Mihajlović,
so the state books from 1860 mention the
“Tavern of Manak Mihajlović”. There is another
story that Manak Mihajlović was actually
the cousin of Manojlo Manak. Be as
it may, the house was later called Manak’s
House.
The following credible document about
the house is dated 1893. It is an advertisement
in Srpske novine about the sales of a
house belonging to Jovan Manaković and
Agnija, widow of Manak Mihajlović, because
of their debt to the Fund Administration.
As the ad stated, they were selling
Balkan Architecture
Manak’s House is one of the few preserved monuments of Balkan
architecture of oriental type. Besides it, there are a few more
examples of such architecture in the city, such as the “Question
Mark” kafana, Residence of Princess Ljubica, Museum of Vuk and
Dositej… The features of such architecture are tiled roofs, timbered
construction filled with adobe, protruding porches and
verandas. Manak’s House was originally smaller in size. Bedrooms
and guest rooms were on the upper floor, a tavern and a bakery
were on the ground floor and storerooms in the cellar. New
rooms were added later, which can be seen by windows in the
inner part of the building.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
57

M A R K
The yard side
of Manak’s House
and a part of its
museum exhibition
Hristifor Crnilović
“the land, one house looking at Savamalska
Street (five rooms, bedroom, two kitchens,
bakery, two cellars, a storeroom, two
rooms)”. The house was offered at an auction
and sold for twelve thousand dinars.
Numerous lessees, tenants and owners
changed after the sales. One of them was
Arsa Petrović. The oldest preserved picture
of Manak’s House is kept in the Museum
of the City of Belgrade. It presents
the façade of the house, with an inscription
“Tavern at Manak’s – Arsa Petrović”,
and set coffee tables on the pavement in
front of the building.
The piece of land on which Manak’s
House was built was allotted to the Housing
Cooperative “Betonjerka” in 1960.
The plan was to demolish all dilapidated
buildings on that land and raise modern
residential buildings instead. One of
the dilapidated buildings was Manak’s
House. It was first saved from demolition
by Prince Miloš, and then for the second
time by the City of Belgrade Institute for
the Protection of Cultural Monuments.
Instead of bringing it down, the house
was renovated. The project was assigned
to architect Zoran Jakovljević, and the
works on the restoration and conservation
lasted for four years. In 1968, the
renewed Manak’s House became home
of Hristifor Crnilović’s wonderful ethnographical
collection.
LONG AND DEDICATED RESEARCH
Hristifor Crnilović was one of the most
important collectors of Serbian traditional
handicrafts. Already as a boy, enchanted
by ethnological varieties, he made sketches
of folk costumes’ ornaments and motifs,
which further determined his path of life.
At the time tenants and lessees changed in
Manak’s House, Hristifor Crnilović studied
painting in Belgrade and Munich, exhibited
his works in Paris, fought in both
world wars, worked as a drawing teacher
Not to Forget
A gallery for temporary exhibitions, lectures, training courses
and workshops is on the ground floor of Manak’s House. Courses
for traditional arts and crafts have been held for twenty-five
years, in order to preserve old crafts and household handiworks
from oblivion and make them accessible for as many people as
possible.
in several places in Serbia, but before all,
explored in depth and collected folklore
material from the area of Central Serbia,
Kosovo and Metohija, thereby unconsciously
creating one of the most beautiful
collections of Serbian cultural heritage.
Clearly, he was a painter and aesthetician.
He selected material based on its cultural
and historical significance, but mostly
based on its beauty. Compared to other
collectors, he is remarkable for his systematicness
and attention to detail during
his research. He tried to find complete
folk costumes and place them into a wider
context. For example, next to valuable jewelry,
there is almost the entire equipment
of a goldsmith’s workshop.
Besides folklore material, he left us
sketches, photos, documents, postcards,
magazines, descriptions of what he was
not able to purchase. Besides the research
equipment kept in the museum (camera,
compass, rucksack, boots, clothes, personal
hygiene accessories…), we find out
most about Crnilović’s research in his own
notes from his travels: “For that purpose,
I usually bought a horse at the end of the
scholar year and, riding the horse, visited
villages in the area I was researching for
the entire summer, without a plan determined
in advance. During my journeys,
I firstly observed folk costumes and their
textile ornaments, in order to collect material
for a detailed description of certain
types of costumes. While traveling, although
with very scarce means, I couldn’t
resist the temptation to give the last cent
I had for purchasing a rare folklore antiquity,
only to save it from ruining. At the
beginning of a new scholar year, I’d sell
the horse and return to my regular job in
school. And so it was every summer between
the two wars.”
As he writes, he paid most attention,
time and means to folk costumes and jewelry
as its integral part. Furnishings, parts
of interiors carved in wood, various dishes,
rugs, tools of certain craftsmen, smoking
and writing accessories, combs, tools
for spinning, dyeing, weaving, weapons,
parts of horse equipment, music instruments,
church relics… are represented to
a lesser extent.
When Hristifor Crnilović died in 1963,
his family, according to his last wish, gave
the entire material to the city of Belgrade,
58 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
59

Б Е Л Е Г / З Н А К / M A R K
60 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

under the condition that the collection
is kept as a separate whole. The city provided
the restored Manak’s House for the
collection and engaged the Museum of
Ethnography to take care of it. The permanent
collection “Folk costumes and
jewelry of the Central Balkans area from
the XIX and first decades of the XX century”
was officially opened on November
17, 1968 and has been resisting time for
almost fifty years.
NEW IMPULSES OF AN OLD PLACE
We will even leave the showcases used before.
However, museology advanced in the
meantime, so we will adjust to new rules
of conservation, ways of preserving and
exhibiting artifacts. We will continue with
educational programs, and mostly insist
on the promotion of crafts enlisted in the
Serbian national list of intangible cultural
heritage. Such craftsmen will be able to
present their products, which will be sold
in the museum shop. The program of the
souvenir shop will thereby be enriched
with certified traditional products.
Part of
ethnographic
exhibition in
Manak’s House
Half a century after the first restoration,
Manak’s House was renewed again
and ceremonially opened. At the same
time, Crnilović’s collection was conserved.
– The idea was to make Manak’s House
a small oasis in that part of the city –
explained Jelena Tucaković, curator at
Manak’s House, for National Review. – Besides
the polished collection, we also want
the house to shine from the outside, which
will be achieved with new illumination.
The concept of the permanent collection,
established before us, will not be changed.
Rug
A few years ago, a workshop was held in Belgrade within an
international project “Acupuncture of the City”. The main idea
of the project was the realization of small urbanism interventions,
which will improve the quality of life in certain city quarters.
“Kriška” design studio, led by Barbara Ismailović and Tijana
Tripković, was selected for implementing the interventions in the
then still pretty drowsy Savamala. One of their solutions was a
stairway covered with Pirot rug colors and ornaments. It is behind
Manak’s House and leads from Gavrila Principa Street to Zeleni
Venac. For this spring, “Kriška” studio announced the restoration
of the faded cover.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
61

B E L V E D E R E S
LJUBOMIR MICIĆ, THE MAN WHO WANTED TO SAVE EUROPE WITH BALKAN VITALISM
The Zeniths of
Our Premonitions
He wouldn’t leave alone puritans and upstarts, the great philistines. He persecuted conformists,
war and antiwar profiteers. The thought it is better to wander away than to sink into staleness. He
believed Europe will be cured with new art, commenced from the free and clean Balkan mountains.
He cooperated with Malevich and Kandinsky, Blok and Ehrenburg, Marinetti and Vasari, Tolkien and
Vinaver, Crnjanski and Krakov… Enemies were fewer, but more dangerous
By:
Petar
Milatović
Ljubomir
Micić
When “Zenit” magazine first appeared
in Zagreb, in February
1921, with the subtitle “monthly
international magazine for art and culture”,
not many people anticipated that the story
about it and its founder would, despite everything,
live until the present days. Our
world, or at least the one that doesn’t consider
art and culture as a redundant burden
compared to irreplaceable reality shows
splashing us from morning till dawn, was
happy to see an unusual exhibition in the
old building of the Museum of Yugoslav
History, entitled Russian Avant-garde in
Belgrade. Especially due to the fact that an
important part of it belonged to us, our National
Museum in Belgrade, which added
eleven works from its collections to the
temporary exhibition. All this was part of
Ljubomir Micić’ legacy, the man credited for
making – besides expressionism, futurism,
cubism, Dadaism, surrealism (…) – one of
our “isms” part of the artistic and cultural
heritage of Europe.
The “Man and Art” manifesto, published
in the first issue of Zenit (emphasizing a
clear stand against war, unsparing criticism
of the society and political circumstances,
and announcing a ruthless fight against religious
bourgeois and philistine values) also
writes:
“The ghost of the red fury of war dug
out a graveyard with its criminal claws for
all of us – for millions of people. One dead
per two soldiers. We must never forget that
13 million people were killed in the previous
decade, ten million died from poverty
and 150 million weakened. And we, who remained
as the last patrol, carry a common
pain in our heart, a common soul of desperation,
a common protest: Never again war!
Never! Never!... Man – created to be God
– was killed like livestock in butcheries!”
Europe, believed Micić, could be initiated
only by the brotherhood of artists, but those
with fresh blood, coming from the Balkans.
That “Barbarogenius” – he wrote – comes
from the clean mountains and areas of the
Balkans, he has got something new to say and
he will confront the old, exhausted European
civilization that initiated World War I.
“Echoes and reactions” followed immediately.
So, for example, the literary magazine
Kritika from Zagreb calls Ljubomir
Micić Ludomir (Serbian “lud” – “crazy”).
He was also criticized because his magazine
was “colorful and boastful like a poster. His
founder and editor in chief Mr. Ljubomir
Micić, unknown to public while he was
writing Orthodox Christian poems… suddenly
became a hero of our time”.
Who was exactly Ljubomir Micić and
what can be said in a single magazine article,
without failing to state important things
about his life and deeds?
FOR A NEW, BETTER EUROPE
He was born in 1895, in the village
of Sošice near Jastrebarsko, then Austro-
62 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
63

В И Д И Ц И / В З Г Л Я Д Ы / B E L V E D E R E S
64 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Hungary, present Croatia, in a family of
a royal forester, originally from Banija.
Preserved biographies say that he finished
elementary school in Glina, where
he first saw the cinema, circus and traveling
theater, and that those first impressions
of his childhood, almost phantasmagoric,
directed him towards his later
creative work.
Curiosity and searching for his own
self made him, high school student at the
time, one of the founders of the Serbian
Middle School Society in Zagreb (1913-
14) and accompanying theater, staging
works of Serbian playwrights. He, Micić,
was the manager, dramaturge, director,
production designer and actor. He was
a freshman at the Faculty of Philosophy
when World War I began. He was mobilized
and, after a brief nursing course,
sent to the Galician front. Traveling to
the first lines of combat, he saw the sights
of war horrors. There is a story that he
entertained his comrades with acting,
and that he saved himself from further
army service, even execution, by faking
madness. He ended up imprisoned in a
military hospital (previous convent) in
Samobor.
An important moment, crucial in
some aspects, happened in the spring
of 1918, during his participation in
the big historical meeting of Slavic nations
in Prague, where he accepted, with
great enthusiasm, a common conviction
about a “new and better Europe”. As a
“graduated student” of the University of
Zagreb, he began publishing his verses
in magazines, as well as reviews about
theater, literature and fine arts. His
first book of poems Ritmi moje slutnje
(Rhythms of my Premonition) was published
in 1919, and caught the attention
of Miloš Crnjanski, especially because
of the new free verse and reduced poetic
form. The following spring, the
book Spas duše (Salvation of the Soul)
was published, and Micić’s verses soon
found their place in the anthologies of
modern Croatian, Southern-Slavic (in
German) and Yugoslav lyrics.
The rest of Ljubomir Micić’s life and
work was determined by his magazine
Zenit, herald of the Zenitism art movement.
In many ways and in many directions.
WITHOUT CENTRAL-EUROPEAN
DROPPINGS
February 1921 and publishing of the
first issue of Zenit was a turning point in
the life and creative work of Ljubomir
Micić, but also, we may as well say, something
completely new in Europe of that
time. From its form, highly unusual, and
very liberal graphic design for that time,
to a multitude of collaborators, already
known and acknowledged artists, whose
contributions were printed in their
mother tongues (French, German, English,
Russian, Dutch, Czech, Esperanto,
Hungarian and, of course, Serbian and
Croatian), as well as those whose “otherness”,
avant-garde, was already seriously
doubtful in terms of art.
Already from that first issue (of a total
of 43 published), the pages were filled
with literary and fine arts works of European
artists, as well as texts about literature,
art, theater, film… Their list is too
long for a magazine article, but we will
mention names such as: Kazimir Malevich,
Wassily Kandinsky, Alexander Blok,
Alexander Archipenko, Lazar El Lissitzki,
Ilya Ehrenburg, Lunacharsky, Yesenin,
Mayakovski, Tommaso Marinetti, Ruggero
Vasari, Delaunay, Lajos Kassak…
There were also, of course, artists from
the country, then Kingdom of Serbs,
Croats and Slovenians or Yugoslavia:
Boško Tokin, Stanislav Vinaver, Miloš
Branko Ve Poljanski
Branko Ve
Polјanski, brother
of Ljubomir
Micić, 1921
Photo: From
the collection
of the Film
Archive in
Belgrade
Ljubomir Micić’s two years younger brother appears in literature
under pseudonyms Virgil, Valerij and Vij Poljanski. His name
first appeared when he was expelled from all schools in Croatia
and Slavonia in 1915, because of publicly mocking their anthem
by paraphrasing it “Our beautiful land full of bottles”. He was first
mentioned in literature when he signed his name as editor in
chief and only collaborator in “Svetokret. Magazine for transporting
the human spirit to the North Pole”, published in Ljubljana
in January 1921. He later published a novel “77 Suicides” and
a book of poems “Panic under the Sun”, both presented at the
Exhibition of Revolutionary Art of the West, in 1926 in Moscow,
within Yugoslav Zenitism, whose participation was organized by
Ljubomir Micić.
In Paris, Branko presented his brother’s art movement in
reputable magazines. He established good relations with the
Russian avant-garde as well. He fiercely confronted the poetics
of futurists, especially Alfred Kerr, author of pogrom verses “Serbia
must die”, so convincingly that Kerr had to leave Paris the
next day.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
65

B E L V E D E R E S
Ljubomir Micić
on Serbian Street
in Cannes, 1934
Crnjanski, Rastko Petrović, Dušan Matić,
Dragan Aleksić, Stanislav Krakov…
Serbian modernists, however, did not
cooperate long with Ljubomir Micić.
They wanted to write about their poetics
on the pages of Zenit, but this couldn’t
pass. The June 1921 issue published the
“Manifesto of Zenitism”, and they did
not want to take part in the new art
movement. They wanted to remain independent.
The days of Zenit and Ljubomir
Micić in Zagreb ended with a text published
in 1923. The then authorities and
Micić’s (intellectual) opponents did not
like the caption stating that Zenitists
will resolutely defend themselves from
the “cooperation of mediocrities and despicable
intruders and Central-European
droppings”.
MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING
Another February, this time in 1924,
meant a new beginning of Zenit. This
time at its Belgrade address. In this issue,
Micić tells: “Humanity can be united
only by common work, on a common
deed – for a common cause. Behold: we
are united by new art”.
He didn’t find more understanding
for “new art” in Belgrade either. Micić
replies in his own manner: “It is true
that we are dangerous for a state of cultural
philistines, painting dilettantes and
plagiarist poets, of all empty pumpkins
and hollow heads, braking at stinky
paragraphs.”
The resistance Micić was confronted
with in the capital of the Kingdom of
Sad and Uncertain Ending
The beginning of painting of Branko Ve Poljanski, Ljubomir’s
younger brother, is related to Paris. He had two exhibitions, in 1926
and 1930, after which he disappeared. The last document about
him is from 1932, a letter of great French writer Henry Barby sent
to Ljubomir Micić, telling him that his brother is tortured in the Parisian
prefecture and that he will try to help him, with the support
of “Le Monde”.
There is no reliable information about what happened with
him later. It is known that he ended up as a bum under the bridges
of the Seine, probably before the beginning of World War II, but no
one knows what kind of breakdown he had when he left poetry
and painting “just like that” and departed with his brother, whose
most faithful follower, comrade and fellow sufferer he had been
ever since the appearance of “Zenit”.
Serbs, Croats and Slovenians was, perhaps,
most obvious in April that year,
when he organized the First International
Exhibition of New Art. He responded
the only way he could, with a
text in Zenit:
“Officially cultural Belgrade was, unsurprisingly,
absent. There were 12 countries
with 110 originals – who in Belgrade
would be interested in it, especially since
it’s Zenit’s exhibition. Besides Kandinsky,
Archipenko, Zadkine, Delaunay, Gleizes,
Lissitzky, Lozovik, Biller, Peters, Paladini
and many others, the audience could also
see the first Zenitist painters Petrov and
Josif Klek… Perhaps everything would
be different if Micić was hanging in the
middle of the exhibition hall, people
would come in masses. But…”
It’s worth to say that the exhibited
works, belonging to “Zenit’s Gallery”,
were actually an intersection of the
avant-garde scene of the 1920s and, why
not, the first encounter of Belgrade with
modern art. They were collected since
1922 and Micić’s trip to Berlin, as well
as with the help of his associates from
Paris, Prague, Vienna and Berlin. He announced
this gallery already in the double
issue of Zenit 17-18, thus we know
that he also possessed works of artists,
mainly his associates, from Russia (most
of them were exhibited recently in the
already mentioned exhibition Russian
Avant-Garde in Belgrade in the Museum
of Yugoslav History), France, Yugoslavia,
Denmark, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the
Netherlands, Germany, USA.
The conflict and (mutual) misunderstanding
between Micić and his environment,
not only in Belgrade, did not cease.
On the contrary. Micić did not hesitate
to indicate everything that was, in his
opinion, bad in the culture of the newly
founded state. He even directly named
the “guilty ones”, from painter Mirko
Rački to writers such as Isidora Sekulić
and Miroslav Krleža, and literary critics
Jovan Skerlić and Bogdan Popović. He
ragingly claimed that art is “absolute creation”,
not “reproduction of nature”. Together
with his brother Branko Ve Poljanski
and a small group of supporters,
he organized protests against the visit
of the Indian poet, Nobel Prize winner,
Rabindranath Tagore, to Belgrade. Dur-
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68 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

ing his lecture at the Kolarac University,
they threw paper airplanes and managed
to drop an open letter, which no one
wanted to publish, into a peasant shoe
meant to be given to the poet as a gift by
the hosts.
NEW STATE, OLD TROUBLES
Zenit experienced its dusk with number
43, published in 1926, specifically
with the text “Zenitism through the
Prism of Marxism”, signed by a pseudonym
(?) M. Rasinov. The almighty Law
on State Protection banned the magazine,
because of its “communist propaganda”. It
was its last issue and, even though Ljubomir
Micić claimed he was not the author
of the controversial text, a warrant
for his arrest was issued. Then follows his
exciting escape over Rijeka to France, in
which capital city he lived and worked for
the following ten years, making his living
by translating and writing in French,
further developing his Zenitist ideas and
the image of “Barbarogenius”, the main
bearer of those ideas. He tried to open an
art gallery several times, and was friends
with many reputable artists, writers and
magazine editors.
He returned to Belgrade in 1936 and
four years later published the “Manifesto
of Serbiandom” in his new literary-political
magazine Serbiandom, oriented,
among other things, towards questioning
the previous relations of Serbs and Croats,
ardently fighting for the rights of Serbian
people and cherishing the Cyrillic
alphabet. Only one issue was published.
He spent the years of Nazi occupation
of Belgrade fighting for survival, selling
different (valuable) things from his home,
together with his wife Anuška, his faithful
companion ever since his days of youth
in Zagreb, coming from a rich Jewish
family, which renounced her after she got
married and took over Orthodox Christian
faith.
New state, old troubles. His criticism
of institutions and authorities was not
suitable for the newly established order at
all. As before, he was again considered an
inconvenient, undesirable, harmful, even
dangerous person. Life, however, must
go on. Anuška and Ljubomir survived
by collecting and selling scrap paper, and
occasionally packs of then very popular
chewing gum, delivered to him from the
Orthodox Christian Church Community
in Trieste. He was later thrown out of his
apartment in Njegoševa 69 and moved to
a narrow space on the last floor in Prote
Mateje 18. Then came the greatest blow,
Anuška’s death. One of the rare people
who remained friends with him, Branislav
Skrobonja, told that Ljubomir went
to the Novo Groblje cemetery every single
day, to visit Anuška’s grave, as long as
he was able to walk. He then confided to
him that a reputable daily newspaper refused
to publish an obituary for Anuška.
Makes you shudder…
AT THE END
Micić died in the hallway of a nursing
home in Kačarevo near Pančevo in 1971,
from “pneumonia, as well as from exhaustion,
malnutrition and an accumulated
feeling of disappointment because
of permanently failed battles”. (However,
with the help of two of his young friends,
he was buried next to his Anuška.) The
probate proceeding lasted for ten years.
Since it was determined that he had no
heirs, his entire legacy became ownership
of the National Museum in Belgrade.
Books, documents, magazines and
artworks on paper were packed in twelve
metal cases. The thirteenth, discovered
by accident in one of the Museum’s offices,
included neatly arranged works of
famous avant-garde artists: Marc Chagall,
Wassily Kandinsky, El Lissitzky… The
list of Micić’s legacy, as ascertained by
art historian Irina Subotić, who was his
friend and enlisted his entire inheritance,
is under number 1772…
The Serbian public was introduced to
the rich Micić’s legacy for the first time
at the big exhibition “Zenit” and Avant-
Garde of the 1920s, organized by the
National Museum in Belgrade in 1983,
prepared by Irina Subotić and Vidosava
Golubović. The reprint of all 43 issues of
Zenit was published a quarter of a century
later, with a voluminous (deserved)
study of the life and work of Ljubomir
Micić, prepared by the two mentioned
authors.
Did Ljubomir Micić finally catch the
rhythm of his premonitions?
Ljubomir Micić
with wife Anuška
in Cannes, 1934
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PROFESSOR ŽARKO VIDOVIĆ, PHD (1921–2016), GIANT OF SERBIAN CULTURE
Witness
of Golgotha, Prophet
of Resurrection
He was in the train of death, used by the Croatian army in 1942 to transport Serbs from
Sarajevo to “Jasenovac” concentration camp, to a road of no return. (That is when he heard the
original version of the song “Đurđevdan”.) He finally ended in a labor camp in Norway, later escaped
to Sweden and returned to Yugoslavia after the war. Studied, gained his PhD degree, gave lectures. He
wrote books exceptionally important for Serbian culture and the Serbian idea. He realized early that
horrible times in Serbia will continue and that there is no survival without internal renewal. For that
reason, he was attacked both by Serbophobes and pseudo Serbs. We are publishing parts of his war
memories, which he recently shared with us
By: Dejan Bulajić
We often stay near people who
walked narrow and steep paths
all their life. They possess enough
determination, undisputable courage and a
bit of solitude, as a light shade of mystery.
Žarko Vidović, historian of civilization, art
critic and Orthodox Christian philosopher,
was a man who conquered many steep paths
of life. They created a stable personality in
him, dominated by achieved objectives and
real perception of the world and time. We
asked him to take a walk down some of these
paths for National Review, and to retrieve
from his memory distant traveling companions,
a song and evil in soulless bosoms. This
brought him back to the St. George Day’s
train of death, which took him and another
three thousand Serbian prisoners from Sarajevo
to Jasenovac in 1942.
“After two years of studying in Zagreb,
where I could already feel the growing resentment
towards Serbs, and a short stay in
a military unit in Petrovaradin, I returned
to Sarajevo in mid-April 1941. An elite Austrian
troop arrived there, with the main task
to convince Serbs about the need to renew
the heritage of Austro-Hungarian dominion.
Germans also insisted on it and wanted
to create good relations with Serbs. Ustasha
units, which had already begun their
bloody feasts in the heartland of Bosnia, arrived
to Sarajevo on April 20, but, because of
the Germans, could not immediately attack
Serbs. It was so until June 22, when Germans
attacked the Soviet Union. Life in Sarajevo
significantly changed after that day. Since
the German units were transferred, the control
was assigned to Ustashas and they were
allowed to do whatever they wanted. They
didn’t hesitate a single moment and immediately
started hunting down Serbs. They arrested
and abused whoever they’d catch.”
He was soon arrested as well.
“I was arrested on October 6, 1941. I
spent a month in their prison, under constant
beatings, so intense that my own
mother couldn’t recognize me when she saw
me. I was subsequently transferred to a German
prison, where the situation was better.
I stayed there until April 3 of the following
year, when I was cleared of charges for communist
agitation. My joy did not last long. At
the exit of the court building, Ustashas arrested
me only because I was a Serb and returned
me to the City Prison dungeon. There
were 60 of us in cell number 4 and the circle
Photo: Dušan
Jauković
(Archive of
“Zenit”)
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D E P A R T U R E
of humiliation and torturing opened up
again. At the end of April, they brought my
acquaintance Mića Subotić to our cell, who
encouraged us by saying that Italians would
soon come to the city and that they were
kind towards Serbs. Their units showed up
in Ilidža in early May, raising hope among
people in the city that the end of Croatian
terror is near. However, at the same time,
the Germans left the city to Ustashas, who
knew what the Serbs were hoping for. They
decided to undeceive us and forestall the
good will of Italians. On St. George’s Day, at
dawn, the dungeon doors slammed open. A
haughty Ustasha face yelled: ‘C’mon, Serbs,
time for morning picnic!’”
BURIED IN THE TRAIN OF DEATH
That St. George’s Day morning picnic was
the last for many people of Sarajevo from
famous Serbian families, brought to prison
together with their sons. Among them were
also Muslims who stood up for Serbs or declared
themselves as Serbs. They were also
convicted of being against the annexation
of Mostar by the Banate of Croatia. Before
dawn, under the dark sky of Sarajevo,
in packed railway wagons, everyone began
singing Đurđevdan (St. George’s Day), as hope
and forgiveness, rarely standing side by side:
“Spring is landing on my shoulder, lilies are
turning green…” Many years later, with the
recognized skill of a show-biz acrobat, the
song with the same name and changed text
will become a mark of drunken celebrations.
“They took us out of the prison and surrounding
barracks and led us to the bank
of Miljacka. A long composition of freight
wagons was placed from the City Hall to the
Electrical Power Station, with three locomotives.
We didn’t know where we were going,
and even if we did, it wouldn’t mean a lot
A Sketch of the Path
Žarko Vidović was born in 1921 in Tešanj. He was a volunteer
in the April war in 1941. In October 1941, he was arrested in Sarajevo.
He was first detained in a German and then in an Ustasha
camp. He was deported to Norway and later escaped to Sweden.
In Uppsala, where his daughter Zaga was born, he graduated at
the Faculty of Philosophy, first history of philosophy and then
history of art.
After the war, he gained his PhD degree in 1958. He taught at
universities in Sarajevo and Zagreb. He was dismissed from the
university in December 1967, and until his retirement in 1986, he
worked in the Institute of Literature and Art of Serbia.
to us. Unfortunately, or perhaps luckily, we
didn’t know what was happening in Jasenovac,
as we didn’t know about other parts of
the country. News arrived late to the city
and almost never to the prisons. We thought
they were taking us to German labor camps,
which was certainly better than being a prisoner
of the Ustashas. Inscriptions on wagons
read: ‘7 horses or 40 soldiers’. That was
their capacity. They, however, packed 200 of
us per wagon, about three thousand people
in total. We stood there closely crammed to
one another. Among us were boys, people
already exhausted in dungeons and those
who couldn’t resist panicking, so we started
singing to encourage them. Still open wagons
resounded with songs ‘From the other
side of Jajce, hemp is growing…’ and ‘Let’s
sing Mitrovčanka, as if we were free…’ Then
someone started singing ‘Đurđevdan’. He
had a deep voice, roaring with desperation
and spite. At the crack of dawn, over a sleeping
city, which was not even anticipating the
burden of our weakness, a song of desperate
people rumbled. The Ustashas were furious
and immediately closed and chained the
wagon doors. ‘Now you can sing as much as
you please!’ they yelled. By the way, the song
‘Đurđevdan’ was joyful and full of hope. It
celebrated the beginning of spring, love, a
new circle of nature and life, working in the
fields and fertility. As such, it was always
sung on St. George’s Day morning picnics.
After all, St. George’s Day was one of the
most joyful holidays at the time. With this
song, we cheered one another not to languish,
not to lose faith that we will make it,
perhaps even flee some of the labor camps.
After all, being a German prisoner was incomparably
better than being in an Ustasha
casemate, and we believed we were going
to the Germans. However, when the train
started, it became more and more difficult
to encourage yourself and others. We were
standing crammed, in the darkness, almost
without air. The air coming from four small
louvers, high up in the wagon corners, was
sufficient for half a lung. No one gave us
water or food. We couldn’t budge, move our
hands or unbutton. When they took us out
of the dungeons, we didn’t have time to go
to the bathroom, so we did it standing next
to one another. Weakened people fainted,
but continued standing next to us, because
it wasn’t possible to fall or sit down. And so
it was for two days… We arrived to Brod
only the following evening.”
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AT THE EDGE OF ANOTHER WORLD
They moved to wide gauge wagons in
Brod.
“As soon as the train stopped, we heard
someone yelling: ‘Out, quickly!’ When our
door opened, we were ordered to move to
wagons placed on the next gauge. We started
jumping out, while the Ustashas beat us
with gunstocks. Then I saw a horrible sight.
As if at the edge of another world, next to
us and behind us, people were falling like
tree trunks. Dead, suffocated, strangled,
broken… They were standing next to us, as
if sleeping on their feet, swinging cold and
extinguished, keeping a bit of living space
for themselves. They passed out without
a word, without strength to ask for help.
We didn’t notice them. And now, when we
moved away from one another, their bodies
were falling with a dull crash. Some,
however, stayed in the wagons, incapable of
moving. Ustashas quickly finished them. At
least 50 people from our wagon didn’t continue
their trip to Jasenovac. They moved
us to other wagons – from two Sarajevo
wagons into one for Jasenovac. Nobody was
speaking anymore, while songs disappeared
a long time ago. Silence and agony… and
again the same darkness, the same anxiety,
again no air. We arrived to Jasenovac
on May 8. We thought our suffering finally
came to an end. How sorrowful!... We were
happy to be in Jasenovac.”
And there…
“When the wagon door opened, we saw
Croatian soldiers, Ustashas. One of them
yelled: ‘Welcome! Anyone hungry?’ Nobody
said a word, nobody moved… only one boy
replied: ‘I am hungry.’ The Ustasha asked
him to come out. He came to the wagon
door, hardly capable of standing on his feet.
I have never forgotten the expressions on
their faces. One haughty, with a sneer, and
the other tired from suffering and weakness.
That’s life too, I thought, but it doesn’t have
to look like that. The Ustasha bent over, took
a handful of gravel, brought it to his mouth
and yelled: ‘Open your mouth!’ His face was
distorted: ‘Eat! This will be your meal.’ He
filled his mouth with gravel and then waved
our head towards us: ‘Out!’ Once again,
many motionless bodies remained behind
us. I think about two thousand people
reached Jasenovac; every third died during
the transport. We ran from the station
to the camp under blows of the Ustashas. If
anyone would stumble and fall, he would be
finished off with gunstocks or bullets.”
UNDER A DARK SKY
However, after all the suffering, the
hopes sung in Đurđevdan came true. Germans
were waiting for them in front of the
reception camp.
“It was a surprise only rare concentration
camp detainees got to have. The ‘Tot’
organization, labor department of the Third
Reich, was waiting for fresh labor material.
They were selecting workers for camps in
Norway. We were lined up in several rows in
front of the main camp entrance. German
soldiers come behind our backs and with
their heavy military boots hit us below our
knees. Those who kneeled or fell couldn’t
get up, while those who stayed on their feet
had to run to the other side, to the group
chosen for labor in German camps. A horrible
fate of Jasenovac awaited those who
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D E P A R T U R E
stayed on the ground. A few hundred of us
were separated in a special area, to barracks
where they prepared us for departing to labor
camps. We had three meals a day, while
our brothers, brought with us from Sarajevo,
separated from us by a barren space about
thirty meters wide, fenced with barbwire,
were dying of hunger, exhaustion, illness, under
a dark sky. Ustashas left them for nights
on wet swampy wastelands, in rain and cold,
without food and water. During the day, they
were mainly working as gravediggers. I remember
them coming to the fence, putting
their hands on the barbwire and watching
us, sorrowful and tired, while we were standing
on the other side. Someone smiles, waves
his hand or crosses himself, as if wishing us
something good. Among them are our cousins,
friends, fathers… They call us, ask about
those who survived and add: ‘If you ever see
my folks…’ We turn around so they wouldn’t
see our tears. We both anticipate that we are
departing forever. When we were served our
meals, we moved to the side, so they wouldn’t
see us eat. About ten days later, they took us
from Jasenovac by train to Zemun, and then
from there, through Poland and Germany, to
Norway. At the end of June, we arrived to
an empty camp ‘Beisfjord’, whose previous
prisoners, Russian captives, obviously hadn’t
survived. Many of our compatriots from the
St. George’s Day transport had the same fate
– Čedo, Đorđe, Vukašin, Dobro… and many
others, who didn’t survive the hell of Jasenovac.
Only about two hundred of them lived
to see freedom.”
WARS AFTER THE WAR
Descendants Judge about Our Deeds
When we were making this interview in his apartment in
Belgrade, in 27. marta Street, Žarko Vidović was coming close to
his 95 th birthday and was still vital. His thoughts were clear, he
had excellent control over sentences and the flow of the story.
He already had remarkable works behind him. He passed away
in Belgrade, on May 18, 2016, a day after his 95 th birthday. He
left a monumental philosophical and historical opus behind
him. We will mention only a few: “Essays about Spiritual Experience”,
“Tragedy and Liturgy”, “Logos – the Liturgical Consciousness
of Orthodox Christianity”, “Njegoš and the Vow of Kosovo
in the New Era”, “Confronting Orthodox Christianity and Europe”,
“Serbs in Yugoslavia and Europe”, “Faith is Art too”, “Art in Five
Epochs of the Civilization”. (…)
Žarko stayed in Norwegian camps until
May 1943, when, with the help of Norwegian
workers, he fled to Sweden. He
was granted a scholarship in Uppsala and
a possibility to enroll in the university. He
returned to his country after the war. He
graduated history of philosophy and history
of art and defended his PhD thesis in 1958.
He was arrested twice because of his criticism
of the social system. He taught history
of civilization in Sarajevo and at the University
of Zagreb, which dismissed him because
of his stands about Serbophobia. He
didn’t find support in the Serbian academic
public either, which, under the influence of
Dobrica Ćosić, turned its back on him. He
worked until retirement in the Institute of
Literature and Art of Serbia. Žarko belongs
to a small group of philosophers who put
the Christian view of the world and social
issues in the foreground. He thereby indicates
our true identity – primarily religious
and then national.
“We are living in the strategically most
important area of Europe. For the English,
who have an important influence on geopolitical
events in the world, the issue of
the survival of Europe, as the foundation
of the western world, is an issue of Eastern
Europe and its borders. We are located
on those borders, which is a fact the western
world will never accept and will never
leave us alone, regardless of how we behave.
It is a world of superior technological development,
without any spirit. They know
about our historical and spiritual connection
with the Russians and they will never
agree to it. After all, our greatest troubles in
the past hundred and fifty years are coming
from them. They are serving us crises
and pushing us into wars, preventing the
uniting and strengthening of the Serbian
nation. They took away our right to participate
in making a peace agreement with
countries of the fascist block and our enemies,
Croatians. However, Serbs can endure
everything, under the condition that
the nation is renewed. Unfortunately, our
intellectual elite, disoriented within, cannot
lead that process. In my opinion, this
has to be done by the church. Simply, the
liturgy, or the liturgical-parochial community,
must become the greatest authority, as
an ethical and historical community with
enough strength to resist all challenges. A
liturgy is a dialogue between priests and
believers before God, and the Eucharist is
a vow. We must return to St. Sava’s understanding
of vow.”
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78 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

JOVAN ZIVLAK, POET, ABOUT THE VORTEXES BESIEGING US AND DOUBTING UTOPIAS
On the Golden
Beam of
Searching
The world of power is unscrupulous, elusive and demands to subdue everything. The era of great
salvific and emancipating truths has ended. Man is swinging over an abyss, in a performance without
a horizon. Everything reaching us is shocking and related to evil. The circle does not close with
purification, reconciliation with the good forces of life. Culture and art are humiliated, trivialized, fallen
into the hands of barely average spirits and turned into seasonal serial production. We are overtired,
occupied and possessed. However, that in no way means that Man’s chances are null
By: Branislav Matić
He grew up in the plain, a sprout of
a blossom brought from afar. He
searched for free verse and seeing
through distances. He is known as a
modern and authentic poet, a silent rebel,
who knows much more than what he
doesn’t want. Thinking the world means
participating in its constant creation. He
doesn’t like regional narcissism and the
shadows of its provincial politics. In Novi
Sad, a long time ago, he found extreme
concepts of show-biz poetry and doubtful
avant-garde, but chose to patiently build
a high culture of knowledge and his own
artistic position. And he succeeded. On
the tower-belvedere of that edifice, we are
writing the mosaic of Jovan Zivlak (Nakovo,
1947).
Lineage. My ancestors are from Dalmatia,
from a place called Dicmo. They moved
towards Krajina, on the other side of Dinara,
when the Turks retreated deeper into the
inland in the seventeenth and eighteenth
century. My ancestor was perhaps a repatriate
in Krajina, since the border between
the Turks and Venetians often changed after
the siege of Vienna, thanks to the permanent
resistance of Serbian uskoks. As we
were able to reconstruct from scarce legends,
my ancestor came to Resanovce near
Grahovo alone, thus he was named Zivle,
Zivlak, as a lamb that lost its mother.
Road, Signs
Photo:
Guest’s Archive
Jovan Zivlak (Nakovo, 1947), poet, essayist and critic. He graduated
from the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad, Department of
Serbian Language and Literature. He was editor-in-chief of Polja
magazine, head of “Svetovi” Publishing House, now head of “Adresa”.
Initiator and editor of Golden Beam magazine (since 2001).
Founder and director of the International Literary Festival of Novi
Sad (since 2005). President of the Literary Society of Vojvodina
from 2002 to 2010. He published fourteen books of poetry in Serbian
(since 1969) and four books of essays (since 1996). Included
in many Serbian and international anthologies. His books were
translated into French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovakian, Romanian,
Bulgarian, German, Polish and Spanish. Winner of sixteen respectable
Serbian and international awards.
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L I F E , N O V E L S
Brother Dušan,
father Luka, Jovan
Jovan, mother
Milica, brother
Dušan, cousin
Jovan
Jovan in his
youth
With poet Milan
Komnenić
My ancestors from my mother’s side
were highlanders. My mother’s mother
Boja was Čeko, related to Gavrilo Princip,
who was also a Čeko. Their houses
were next to one another and she knew
Gavrilo well, since they played as children
on a wasteland in front of the houses
in Obljaj. Once, in Princip’s Obljaj, after
traveling from Banat, I went through
Gavrilo’s preserved notebook into which
he wrote verses. I was fascinated. That
notebook is no longer there, as a Princip
family member with the same name told
me a few years ago.
My mother Milica was born in Isjek,
and her father was Damjan Bursać. He
spent almost eight years as a soldier of
the black-yellow monarchy, four years in
the army during the Great War. He was
in Vienna, Trieste, Pest, Sofia. As a batman,
he did not directly experience the
horrors of war.
My mother grew up in a big family.
She had six brothers and a sister. Her sister
died as a partisan, one of her brothers
died during the war. Her oldest brother,
an officer, was imprisoned in Bileća as a
supporter of the Cominform.
My father’s father, Jovan, died during
the war; my father Luka, as a cadet at
the Air Force NCO School in Rajlovac,
was a prisoner in a German army camp,
and his brother Sava, first partisan, then
chetnik in Knin, emigrated to the U.S.
As the family scattered around, the old
homeland disappeared.
As a boy, in Nakovo, a village in Banat,
where old customs were destroyed after
the colonization, faith forgotten, families
became provisional, I was almost without
memory. The colonization was a doubleeffect
endeavor: it created a population
of agricultural workers, who would continue
production on the deserted fields
of Banat, and formed a socialist human,
exposed to the forces of modernization,
dominated by the collective, as well as
by technology, the myth of industry and
science. The change was under the flags
of a solid and simplified ideology.
Through distant pictures. The homeland
was a shell, in which I slowly realized
that there were other worlds, different
people. I first lived in a closed
community. The distance was insuperable.
There was a pitted macadam road
to Kikinda. We rarely traveled. Tractors
and a few buses were driving to Kikinda.
Working in the fields, the school as the
place of disciplining, social life between
busy and strict meetings of grown-ups,
afternoon relaxing in the yard of the
kafana, where people drank beer and
competed in bowling. Sundays on the
football field, with passionate and loud
cheering. There were a few telephones
in the village. Speakers on lampposts
broadcasted music, political speeches,
football games, news from the Local Office.
Then came the radio, and later we
discovered television. We watched it on
a single TV set, placed on the Cultural
Center window.
Privacy barely existed. We lived in imposed
intimacy. However, besides socialization
with children, I also discovered
loneliness as a boy. I wandered through
the fields, walked down the canal slopes,
entered shady groves, watched birds, small
restless rodents, amphibians, insects, the
colorful and wild world that conquered
meadows and fields, and it showed itself
to me as unusual and free, lonely and
unsubmissive. Nature became lavishing
in its shapes, in its laws and exceptions,
I saw myself amazed by that rich and ungraspable
mysteriousness of life.
Close distances. I was insatiably curious
as a boy, often confused when
grown-ups wouldn’t give me an answer
to my questions. I felt redundant.
I discovered books in my grandfather’s
house, on a green shelf, arranged by one
of my uncles. A real treasure, from Pushkin,
Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev,
to English and American short stories.
My father’s library was dominated by
Bruno Traven, with his Rebellion of the
Hanged. From there, the voice of righteous
ones woke me up and inspired me
with compassion, sensitivity towards the
despised ones.
We were encouraged to write patriotic
poems in school, but no one was able
to explain me how to write free verse. It
tortured me for several years when I was
a boy. I knew how to use free verse, but
didn’t know what it means.
80 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
81

L I F E , N O V E L S
With Russian
writer Eduard
Limonov
With poet and
philosopher Jean-
Pierre Faye
I read school poets and later, in the
village library, as well as the City Library
in Kikinda, I found numerous answers in
the examples of great poets. I was feverish
while reading Rimbaud, Baudelaire,
Eliot, Pound, Pasternak, Saint-John Perse,
Rene Char… Later I became seriously engaged
in studying our poets. Late Dučić,
surrealists, Crnjanski, Vasiljev. I shared
my discoveries about art with my brother
Dušan, who chose sculpture, without
anyone teaching him about it in the village
community. He later graduated at the
Academy of Arts in Belgrade, and now
lives in Paris.
My youth was wired: I listened to the
Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Troggs, The
Hollies… I became a kind of a social rebel:
sixty-eight shook me.
The plain. It meant everything to me.
The foggy and endless landscape was all
I knew. Silhouettes, contours of groves,
lonely houses, high edifices, mills; I
watched the world that outlined the near
and hid the distant one I was only about
Echoes
The other should not be apsolutized. However, a person who
understands art, who is able to talk, is necessary for literature.
There is no perfect reader, because a reader is, before all, from
the writer’s point of view, a picture of an encounter of different visions
and understanding of art. You must be sensitive and skillful
to achieve such a position. I could say that I have the privilege to
talk with extraordinary and friendly people about my new texts.
My most intent reader is my wife Jovanka Nikolić, also writer, who
has been helping me immensely for four decades now.
to meet. My imagination burned while
I strained to see events hidden behind a
multitude of names marking village areas,
to anticipate the wondrous meanings of
distance, its relations with words; I invented
histories that revealed the plain as an
area full of human stories. It was a boyish
romanticism, which made the world mysterious
and attractive.
However, I later saw the plain as a cultural
emblem in many poems of poets
from Novi Sad. It was a mark of literary
conservatism, pathetic regionalism, which
I rejected.
Arrival. Novi Sad was not my choice. I
was forced to it, because I didn’t succeed
in enrolling in dramaturgy or philosophy
in Belgrade.
I read modern dramas at the time:
Becket, Ionesco, Genet, Brecht, Sartre… I
often visited the Kikinda theater, watched
plays, talked, cooperated a bit. It seemed
to me then that the theater is a powerful
media of modern art. I showed that affinity
towards theater later in Novi Sad as an
occasional theater critic, and in the seventies
I founded the festival of experimental
theater Small Theater – Off Theater at the
Youth Tribune.
I came to Novi Sad with illusions, as well
as a kind of realistic irony. I didn’t hope to
meet Laza Kostić or Zmaj, let alone a romantic
aesthetician or philosopher. It was
not a city inclined to high culture, although
in many ways it was one of the leading cultural
centers in Yugoslavia. I was greeted
by the famous poetic show-biz, from Antić
82 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

to Zubac, a few official and confused journalists,
shadows of omnipresent provincial
politics, representatives of the local neoavant-garde,
dominant in magazines, papers
and tribunes at the time. I had my own
interpretation of the avant-garde, I rejected
its assimilation with politics, I especially rejected
its dialectic exclusivity of art as art
and their way of perceiving poetry. When
you have such extreme concepts in a small
city, from popular lyrics, fatal in its selflove,
to the neo-avant-garde, supported by
local descendants of communist favorites,
which, in the name of progress, rejects you
and throws you into scrap, there is nothing
else to do but to patiently and almost
furtively build your artistic position. At the
same time, you cannot be certain whether
your life project will have an opportunity
to be realized.
Overgrowing the city. I was editor in the
Youth Tribune, then in Polja and “Svetovi”
Publishing House. I didn’t choose bohemia
as a way of life, which was more a grimace
than culture, and there was too much of
it in Novi Sad; or politics, which was then
especially interested in controlling art and
disciplining artists; or avant-garde enlightenment,
which revolutionized art in order
to cancel it. I chose caution, thinking as an
artistic and social emancipation, doubting
utopias and their kind violence, hiding regional
narcissism and reducing entire reality
to a measure of a few banally enlightening
ideologists of the Party.
At the Tribune, in Polja, “Svetovi”, we
created a large culture of knowledge, understanding
new thinking and art, from
structuralism and poststructuralism to
postmodernism. Novi Sad was a place
where many new books were published:
from Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Compagnon,
to Rene Girard, Paul Veyne, Jacques
Le Goff and many others; philosophers
and writers came from all parts of Yugoslavia,
France, Russia… It continued with
the actual International Literary Festival of
Novi Sad, which I founded ten years ago
in the Literary Society of Vojvodina. There
we have the elite of European and Serbian
poetry, specially published in the magazine
Golden Beam.
All this was spiced with tensions, conflicts,
disturbances, but the fact is that Novi
Sad, after a long time, now has the elite
of philosophers, critics, poets, from Dragan
Prol, Alpar Lošonac, Damir Smiljanić,
Vladimir Gvozden, to Zoran Đerić and
others.
I experienced moments of my romantic
self-enlightenment in friendly conversations
with late poet Milan Dunđerski,
as well as in many encounters with poet
Miodrag Pavlović, philosophers Milan
Damjanović and Nikola Milošević, poet
Ljubiša Jocić, philosophers Danko Grlić
and Ivan Froht, orientalist Dušan Pajin,
germanist Srdan Bogosavljević…
This world. There are only presentations
and constructions of worlds, which
change and oppose one another. The mysterious
bio-cosmic world is incomprehensible
to us. As Wittgenstein would say: we
don’t even know how a dog could feel like.
With poet
Stevan Raičković
With writer
Milorad Pavić
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
83

L I F E , N O V E L S
84 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Ours is the social world, it touches us
most, the world of human groups and
communities, which either accept or reject
us. Forces of different wills and natures
rule that world. What is most important
to us is taken away from us with
a force exceeding our own. The world is
ruthless, our fascinations are naive and
compensational in relation to, I believe,
the general violence besieging us from all
sides. Power is imposed instead of truth,
goodness, happiness… Human power is
none the less destructive than the one in
the laws of nature. Compassion, emotions,
myths of love save us from ruthlessness
devouring everything.
Before an abyss. The époque of great
salvific and emancipative truths has ended.
A human is before an abyss. Before
an abyss of a cosmic catastrophe, in the
form of exhausted potentials of the earth,
or because of the unpredictable and fatal
cosmic incident, or (in a better case)
anthropological, humanist apocalypse.
However, that doesn’t mean that their
chances are null. Instead of great truths
in the form of religious or secular utopias,
we have small, locals myths about
salvation. The general pattern has many
names. The production of those small
myths is endless. It creates possibilities
for saving lost meaning, as well as the
general decline of human ambitions to
understand the world.
The world of power is unscrupulous,
elusive, constantly increasing its request
to have everything subdued, to supervise
and fatally control the human population.
On its side are worlds of consumption,
production, entertainment, calculating
with nature, time, satisfaction, provisory
measuring success in a general meaningless
competition… while on its margins
are thinking and art, which, with a measure
of resistance, attempt to understand
this horizonless presentation.
European shadows. Europe is a large
treasury of culture, as well as a great master
of evil, as Paul Celan would put it. It
unites, integrates, at the same time disciplining
small states and participating in
educational and military campaigns in
the second and third world. The wisdom
of Europe is the wisdom of the market,
and where the market doesn’t function,
leveling is done by force, European and
Atlantic. Europe is bureaucratic.
In the past, intellectuals contemplated
on Europe and encouraged its critical
spirit. Sartre, Camus, Cioran, Foucault,
Habermas, Heinrich Bell… There are no
such people today. When the old, coldwar
Europe was torn down, there was a
multitude of them. Now the job is probably
completed and they are redundant.
I cannot estimate whether Europe
used to be better in the past, but I hope
it will produce culture and art worth remembering.
Choosing between united Europe and
the Europe of nations, I’d choose the second.
Europe of cultures and languages,
not one culture and one language, which
is where this continent is probably heading
to.
In the ocean of evil. It is hard to resist
the impression that we are in an ocean of
evil. Everything reaching us is shocking
and related to evil. The circle doesn’t close
with purification. The idealistic ancient
ecstasy, which liberates and reconciles us
with the forces of good, is missing.
We will open the newspapers tomorrow,
unless we gave up on everything, and
encounter a new flood of evil, its restless
invention. We see beheaded journalists on
television and YouTube shown by fanatics;
every day we watch pictures of massacres,
catastrophes, animalistic devouring, together
with sophisticated pornographic
Gerard Cartier,
Jovan Zivlak, Paol
Kejneg, Matthew
Sweeney
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
85

L I F E , N O V E L S
With wife
Jovanka Nikolić,
John Harty and
Neil McDevitt
presentations of pseudo-ethical stars,
politicians and rich people.
Degradation. About ten years ago,
after the approval of his friends to have
their verses written on napkins, Michel
Deguy cried that they shouldn’t allow the
degradation of poetry. Market forces had
a large impact on degrading literature,
its trivialization, bringing it down to the
area of production and fashion. Literature
is becoming a field of applying the
simplest patterns, accepting to be pure
entertainment, a current event. It simulates
conversation, a special form of cognition,
accepts the principles of utilization
and consumption, and exhausts itself
in the production of trivial splendor. That
is dominant.
In circumstances in which market
economy is lurking us on every corner,
diversity is canceled. As Alain Kirby
said, intellectually-wise, the world has
narrowed, not expanded in the past decade.
The ideology of globalized market
economy is present in the place where
Lyotard saw the dusk of great stories, as
the single and omnipotent regulator of
the entire social activity – monopolistic,
comprehensive, omni-explainable, omnistructuring…
Bridges, influences. That is vague.
There are many books, authors, voices
from other regions and genres, social incentives.
Literature is not a controllable
chemical element.
I appreciated rebels, nonconformists,
marginalists, as well as central personalities
of an époque. I was fascinated by
Pyrrho, because he denied everything,
even reality; Diogenes, who despised social
conventions; Catullus, the great poet;
Baudelaire, the rebel; Pound, the poet
with great misconceptions; Crnjanski…
I liked winter, respected it as an author
of the Pannonian landscape; echoes
of voices reflecting from the meadow
slopes; I respected my mother’s father,
who believed in life, patience and enduring;
my dog killed by the village hunters
– that upset me for all times…
Revelations and repetitions. Travels
are often polemic. You argue with what
was established as a cliché, try to discover
a different, deeper reality. You deny prejudice,
fears from the unknown, knowledge
and beauty which do not exist.
However, travels are not revelations any
more. Everything is already seen and you
will never be in a position of our famous
travelogue writers Dučić or Velimirović,
who were discovering a different reality.
The world repeats and you cannot resist
the impression that the images you are
seeing were already seen and that reality
is almost the same everywhere.
Music
My music is ecstatic, Dionysian. I don’t have time for light,
simple, entertaining music. I like reflection in music, weight, darkness.
Sometimes music irritates me, torments me, because it is
requesting, asks a lot from us. One should be prepared, open for
music. I listened to Scriabin, Arvo Part and Rene Aubry recently, a
seemingly light and ironic composer.
Of course, there are other kinds of music that evoke important
social events or pictures of the culture I am related to, testifying
about my boyhood and youth emotions, which echo in my
soul like a plucked out word or sentence of a past life, the life of
the community I belong to.
Strength for writing. We are overtired,
occupied, possessed. It is not possible to
write in such a state. Writing requests
openness, freedom, internal will to accept
the world, to feel it and receive it with all
its controversies. Both the external world
and the one you are creating. Being ready
to feel the shiver of a leaf, to sympathize
and be motionless in order to dive into an
event. In order for that to be possible, you
must be strong to free yourself from the
agonies of everyday life.
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SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
87

P A L E T T E
REGARDING THIS YEAR’S EXHIBITION OF SERGEI APARIN IN MONTREUX, SWITZERLAND
Fortification
in a Storm
The world of power is unscrupulous, elusive and demands to subdue everything. The era of great salvific
and emancipating truths has ended. Man is swinging over an abyss, in a performance without a horizon.
Everything reaching us is shocking and related to evil. The circle does not close with purification,
reconciliation with the good forces of life. Culture and art are humiliated, trivialized, fallen into the
hands of barely average spirits and turned into seasonal serial production. We are overtired, occupied
and possessed. However, that in no way means that Man’s chances are null
By:
Slobodan
Despot
It resembles a shower of meteors coming
from nowhere, suddenly lighting
up the sky. However, the world of
Sergei Aparin was not unknown to the
Swiss audience. Twenty-odd years ago,
he was one of the shiniest stars in the
constellation late Etienne Shatton gathered
in his Museum of Fantastic Art located
in the Gruyères castle. The place itself
was magical, and Etienne’s fraternity
elevated it to the fourth dimension, the
one we perceive only in dreams. The curator-enthusiast
gave his guests subjects
they willingly illustrated – most often the
castle itself. Thus we discovered how its
medieval walls are reflected in the amazing
visions of Patrick Woodroffe, Juri
Siomash, Isabelle Plante and others.
At the time, Aparin was a newly-arrived
citizen of Belgrade, its suburb Zemun,
to be exact, on the other side of the
river. The Russian moved to Yugoslavia
in the most difficult moment, in 1991, at
the beginning of the forced breakdown
88 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

of the country. He later formed a unique
group of painters, dream hunters, with
his neighbors Željko Tonšić and Mladen
Đurović, in the old Austro-Hungarian
town who forces people to daydream.
Despite completely different styles, palettes
and worlds, these three extraordinary
artists built together a fortress far
from the whirlpools of time. In the times
of tragedies and uncertainty, as well as
poverty, in which art suffers most, they
defended amazing complexity and consistency.
The strength of their aesthetic
credo – timelessness and perfection – is
certainly not unfamiliar to their longterm
success. However, their fateful relation
with the host of the upper chambers
of the Gruyères castle should not
be neglected. Ignoring cultural obstacles,
worsened by the political crisis, Chatton
preserved one of the rare true centers of
exchange and dialogue between the east
and the west of Europe.
Pilgrims often climbed to Gruyères
at the time, to dive into the unique surrounding,
the visual songs, the bath of
the youth of imagination, whose gates
conserved the monsters of H. R. Giger,
like guards from nightmares. At the
end of this paved path, behind Woodroffe’s
Shield of Mars and Shield of Venus,
among the massive attic beams, a circle
of devotees celebrated a timeless cult, in
which ancient sights mixed with diodes
and gear wheels of the age of space.
Fantastic art resembled Catharism
and Gruyères was its palace. This is
where universal art lived, proclaimed a
religious cult by some, popular art whose
fame spontaneously spread among the
audience. Its opponents, however, made
their first task to hide the irrefutable
and uncomfortable fact that the painters
there, unlike many other famous
contemporaries, can actually paint. They
eternalized the technique of renaissance
masters, showing great knowledge they
refreshed the entire visual heritage of
modern art, reviving the eternal symbols
of our civilization. In brief, they personified
tradition in the most contemporary
forms. The living, organic tradition, not
transferred with philosophical tractates,
but with skill, spirit of the craft, silent
compound of work and dream.
IN THE BRANCHES OF TIME
Among all those windows open towards
other worlds, the precise forms
and warm lights of Sergei Aparin stood
out not only with their recognizable patina,
but also with the atmosphere that
destroyed borders between genres and
smoothed his devastating virtuousness.
Strange opposites united in his works: all
pervaded with deep Slavic nostalgia, yet
joyful, laughingly serious, tectonically
“Three Little
Bridges”, a triptych
“Woman
and Man from
Chateau Gryeres
(Loco Laudato)”, a
diptych
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
89

P A L E T T E
Sergei Aparin
in his studio in
Zemun
“Night. Sicily”
airy. He carried Gruyères, as well as the
entire archipelago of the old cities of Fribourg
and the surrounding Heights, into
a purely Aparin-like uchronia, in which
these famous medieval monuments
broke off from their earthly roots and
sailed towards a weightless world. There’s
Romont in a galley with sails and wheels.
There’s Morat at night, flooded with horrible
flying creatures. There’s Fribourg
at dawn, crossed with a kind of a watch
mechanism, on walls diving into black
waters, who knows how deep. There is
perhaps also the conductor of the entire
phantasmagoria: the watchmaker from
Biography
Sergei Aparin was born in 1961 in the Russian city of Voronezh.
He graduated from the Institute of Arts in 1981 in his
hometown. During the following ten years (1981-1991), he
painted and exhibited at group exhibitions in St. Petersburg,
Kiev and Moscow. In 1991, he moved to the capital of Serbia. He
left a deep trace in contemporary Serbian painting, and gained
a reputation of a great master in international proportions. He
exhibited throughout Europe and in North America. More information
about him and reproductions of his paintings may be
found at: www.aparin.com.
Zug, wearing a mask without a face and
Pierrot costume, showing the city-clock
to the audience.
The river of time accompanies the
mentioning of nostalgia. Time – we’ll
speak about it further – is the main dimension
of Aparin’s work. Time dissolves
space and time reconciles opposites. It
seems to me that his diptych Woman and
Man in the Gruyères Castle (1997), the
hybrid and unhidden homage to Flemish
portraits by Van der Weyden, Van Eyck
or Robert Campin, best summarizes the
Aparinian cosmogony of the time. The
left hemisphere: a woman, whose ears became
trees with a cow on the top of her
skull. The right hemisphere: a man, serious,
with a gear wheel between his fingers
and the Gruyères castle on his forehead
turned into a clock. On the left, Mother
Nature, primordial, congenital, indolent.
On the right, Man, worried, hieratic, technician
and master of time. Above them
– as in most of the “Swiss” works – the
inscription Loco laudato: “cited in the approved
place”, a Latin expression implying
a blessing of a higher instance. Sud-
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SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
91

П А Л Е Т А / П А Л И Т Р А / P A L E T T E
denly the painting becomes a fragment
of a text. The Holy Testament, approved,
meaning blessed… isn’t the ultimate
wink addressed to God? Or the enraged
demiurge, the artist himself, whom art
gives infinite power? Be as it may, Aparin
of the “classic” era consciously imagines
his painting as a language, whose keys
are not directly accessible.
PURIFICATION AT LAKE GENEVA
Twenty years later, Aparin returns
to Romandy to write the second part
of his tractate. The works exhibited in
Montreux are very far from the ones we
know. If it weren’t for the recognizable
stroke of the brush, one would think of
self-denial. Symbolism, omnipresent in
the Gruyères series is almost absent in
the Lavaux series or at least its most representative
corpus. As if he wanted to be
free from rules – including protections –
of his ordinary genre, Aparin entered the
daring search of the very basis of his art.
The most visible testimony of it is the
change of light: mystical shadows gave
way to the great Provencal sun of Lake
Geneva. Then comes the space: disappearance
of the landscapes from dreams
and entrance of recognizable geography.
Finally the shocking reduction of determinants
of time. The alchemist of clocks
receded from the Dali-like watches and
historical shortcuts. His chronological
collisions now fit into the proportions
of ordinary human life, the assimilation
of tuberous and black silhouettes of old
winegrowers into careless figures of contemporary
consumer society.
Did Aparin surrender to the Lake
“fiacca”? He wouldn’t be the first who
92 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

succumbed to it. Great writer and traveler
Paul Morand, who spent the last
part of his life in this region, compared
the landscape of Lake Geneva with the
most thrilling achievements of human
spirit, such as the Taj Mahal. Byron and
Shelly literally defined the aesthetics
of romanticism while sailing Lake Geneva,
enthralled by the horrific beauty
of the Alpine peaks. In his contemplation
of the measure and over-measure
of modern civilization, Ramuz proclaimed
the area as the measure of harmonious
integration between man and
his environment. Recently, the saving
of Lavaux vineyards from the invasion
of concrete caused severe battles, into
which the famous ecologist and philanthropist
Franz Weber invested his body
and soul, including a physical confrontation.
Why was this area finally enlisted
under the protection of UNESCO,
although it is located in one of the most
developed and most densely populated
areas in the world, if not due to its obvious,
original and unquestioning beauty?
The beauty originates, as nowhere else,
from the exemplary cooperation and
balance between Mother Nature and
man – the architect of Time. A painter
who came from afar had to be pretty
audacious to dare to give his contribution
to the rich iconography of Lake
Geneva and Lavaux. From Bozione to
Hodler, the continuous metamorphosis
of the eternal, yet constantly changing
waters had a hypnotic effect on the eye
of artists, pushing them towards celebration
of light and color. The enchanting
glittering, framed with rhythmical
and almost abstract shapes of the vineyard
terraces and paths, disarms your
“The Observer”
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
93

P A L E T T E
“Pilgrim street.
Sfumato”
“October.
Pushkin”
“The Runaway”
“My Lighthouse”
“The Watermill”
mind in a way. It rocks you, so to say,
into hedonism. Thus impressionist and
agnostic elements growingly emerge in
Aparin’s works. At the final outcome of
this research, a simple shadow of leaves
on a wall takes mystical sensuality and
reminds of the mannerism of the Nabi
school. The air and sea motifs of painters
find an appropriate theater in the
Lake Geneva area. Although the new
geographical frame implies introducing
a new palette and experimental techniques,
the main subjects remain in their
most subtle form. A simple strand across
a water abyss is sufficient to introduce us
into mystery. The vineyard paths, merged
with the blueness of the sky, seem to
turn the cobble into cascades: could the
most reliable surfaces be merely fluid illusions?
Old-time workers-wage earners
dive out from the memory of a recent
past, solid as rocks. A documentary processing
of a black and white portrait emphasizes
the cruelty of their life. They are
there, very close, two generations before
us, although their civilization is as alien
to us as Atlantis. A simple encounter of
color and black and white cause us vertigo
over that abyss. Aparin no longer
needs clocks or gear wheels to depict the
tyranny of time.
ART WITHOUT EPITHETS
Progress or breakup? The answer is
obvious and such obviousness helps us
notice a linguistic misunderstanding. The
concept of “fantastic art”, usually related
to Aparin’s works, is in fact just a pleonasm.
From the moment depiction of
reality implies the sight and hand of an
artist, it belongs to fantastic art, whatever
genre it otherwise belongs. Sergei Aparin’s
Lake Geneva phase therefore more
resembles maturing than reversal. It testifies
about art freed from its epithets to
concentrate on the essence.
I visited Aparin once in his studio in
Zemun, bathing in light. I saw sketches,
variations, even white canvases waiting
for the first stroke of the brush. I admired
the remarkable plastic work on
materials, on the subject of horse’s head.
I also noticed palettes of dark shades.
Then it burst before my eyes: this aerial
painter levitates above his own technique
and matter. Whether symbolic
or empiric, oneiric or naturalistic, his
work is an expression of a wondrous
gift and rare ideal. Whatever he does in
the future, Aparin’s eyes will always look
upwards, towards great masters and towards
the skies.
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SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
95

W I N N E R
96 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

MARINA MALJKOVIĆ, COACH OF THE SERBIAN WOMEN’S BASKETBALL NATIONAL
TEAM, EUROPEAN CHAMPIONS
Doing Your
Best and More
She grew up in a famous coach family, lived in many countries. She was attracted by acting,
photography, languages. People noticed how deep she was in basketball only after she took her Belgrade
team to the First League. Later she climbed to the European throne with the Serbian women’s national
team. She knows how to renew her own inner balance and invokes the best in people. She is happy to
know her country and because people understand the basis of the feat of the team she is leading. She
lives the spirit of kafanas and old songs. Honor is a nice term among Serbs, which describes them clearly
By: Aleksa Komet, Dejan Bulajić
She was permeated with the impressions
about the world as an elixir ever
since she was little, feeling that in the
multitude of challenges stands the one tailored
exactly to her needs. She anticipated,
although she never talked about it, that she
must be ready when her moment comes. She
knew that she would recognize it and not
allow it to pass her by.
– Considering that I lived in many
countries and that we often changed our
place of residence, I was full of impressions
about different things. It seemed to
me that everything is at the reach of the
hand, so my interests kept changing: I
was attracted by acting, photography, languages
were always challenging. Besides
all that, I was always into basketball, but
I couldn’t even assume that it would become
my direction in life. Some things
simply happen beyond our expectations.
If one said that it was logical that someone
in the family would become infected with
basketball, everyone would first think of
my brother. However, he took a different
path, while something happened to me
and permanently related me to this sport.
Children who grow up in sports families
sometimes feel tired because of the intensity
of living. This, however, was not the case
with Marina.
– It would be an easier way, but it’s not
me. Looking from the side, life in such
families seems easy and careless. I admit
that my parents did everything so that my
brother and I would have such a feeling,
but, at the same time, there were reflexes
burdening me. Each time we would move,
I would feel strongly nostalgic for Belgrade.
Perhaps my parents felt it, so they
often brought us here and persistently
insisted that we keep in touch with close
friends, our culture and language. I am
grateful for it today. The rhythm of frequent
moving house and from places you
have just got used to is strenuous, but it
finally determines some features of your
character features and makes you get accustomed
to changes as something inevitable
in life.
Entering the area of professional coaching
determined a direction which quickly led
to success, with triumphs coming one after
another.
– It really is an unusual story. I almost
didn’t know what defeat looks like. From
the moment I set the objective to enter the
First League with six girls in “Ušće”, to “He-
Photo:
Guest’s archive
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
97

W I N N E R
mofarm” and “Partizan”, victories and titles
came one after another. Even the objectives
of the national team were multiply surpassed
at the very beginning, because our
plan was to become one of the best teams
only in a few years. It sometimes scares me,
but also motivates me to achieve even more.
I consciously took that path and I am happy
for every challenge awaiting me.
MYSTERIES OF LONGEVITY
The strength of her character was best expressed
in collective sports, always burdened
by the specific features of those participating
in it.
– The first objective you set before you
is to win something and then to repeat
the same success. It is a kind of mystery of
longevity. Basketball sets strict conditions,
which are not always related to sport. I
have a group of twelve girls and the same
number of different characters. My task
is to recognize them, to take out the best
from them and make them believe in what
I request from them. Whether my team
will resemble my wishes and ideas is up
to me. That makes the gold we won at the
European Championship even more precious,
because we showed that we can do
it, with the strength of our spirit, will and
talent. We now have a new objective – to
repeat our success and perhaps even make
a step further, because challenges will not
be the same, just like we are not the same
anymore. It is up to me to strengthen
those girls, enriched with a wonderful experience,
into a fighting unit, ready to go
from the beginning and fight till the end
with the same vigor.
Coaches know well how requesting working
in a sports team is.
– It is so intensive that you simply have
to try to rest along the way. My principle of
working is such that sometimes even colleagues
from male basketball are astonished
by the intensity of my trainings. I consider
it normal, but I also understand my need,
as well as the need of my players, to take a
break. Wherever I work, I find myself time
and a place to rest, which is something I
advise them to do as well. Without that, the
exhaustion would be unbearable. I cannot
imagine my working week without at least
one day break. If I’m in Serbia, it is often
a trip out of Belgrade, going into nature,
to recharges my batteries. You simply have
to find a retreat, perhaps even be alone, to
keep yourself in balance. Without that, you
cannot last long.
Working with girls is very specific and
creates an additional burden.
– Luckily, I can speak about it according
to my clear personal experience, since
I also worked with seniors in “Ušće”. For
me it was incomparably easier than working
with women. They are simply more requesting,
with specificities about which I
could talk for days. Sometimes I joke, but it
is actually very serious, and say that I will
rest when I move to male basketball.
We can expect it in the future.
– I have no problem with that. My only
task is to kick out Sonja, Jelena, Ana and
other players from my head and transfer to
the male story. That’s all. I consider myself a
98 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

professional able to cope with such a challenge
and it’s only a matter of time when
it will happen.
THAT’S MY FATHER, BOŽIDAR
Someone might assume that father
Božidar, famous basketball coach, was seriously
involved in Marina’s career. However,
surprisingly, it is not so.
– In the true sense of the word, he discovered
how deep I was in basketball only
when I entered First League with “Ušće”.
He was surprised and not very thrilled
with my decision to become a coach too.
He, of course, didn’t agree, wanting mainly
to protect me from all negative impulses
of this job. However, with only one
unwavering sentence, I made clear how
determined I was to stay in it. The profile
of my character is such that it doesn’t
allow external influences, while his character
is such that he can recognize and
respect the reality of others’ decisions, so
there were no further misunderstandings.
The first and last time he was at one of my
games was in 2007, when we won the Cup
in Subotica, my first trophy. However, I
know that he suffers during all my matches.
For the finals, when we won European
gold, he smoked so many cigarettes, although
he’s not a smoker, and trembled
from anxiety so much, that even his old
friends couldn’t recognize him. At the
end he started crying, because he knows
how I felt better than anyone. That’s my
father, Božidar.
However, there is no sleeping on laurels.
– When we won European gold, I asked
myself: what now? How to give something
new to Serbian basketball? The answer was
in the decision to start from the beginning,
from the very basics, so I established
the Movement for Women’s Basketball
with my friends, with the main aim to give
girls an opportunity to train basketball for
free, to gain first experiences and perhaps
discover their talent. Through all this, they
will also gain healthy living habits, which
is perhaps most important. All this is already
functioning well in Belgrade, and
now it will begin spreading throughout
Serbia. I am proud to be part of something
like that, because I am amazed with the intelligence
of our children, their agility and
readiness to adjust in difficult situations.
I spent a large part of my life abroad and,
believe me, I didn’t often come upon similar
examples in the world. I am happy to
know my country and feel its needs. I try
to give it my sincere feelings and my most
daring wishes.
My Country
– Needless to say how close I am to my country. I am fully
aware that I can do something good for it through my work and
be assured that there is no obstacle that could keep me from giving
my best on that way. The feeling that I have succeeded in it
is inexpressible. I have already experienced the famous balcony,
which only the best have climbed, experienced seven thousand
people in “Pionir” at a women’s basketball game, which was almost
unthinkable until recently. Thousands of our people came
to support and greet us at the finals in Budapest. That is a huge
satisfaction and fulfillment of the deepest wishes in the life of a
sportsman or coach!
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99

W I N N E R
How much is that appreciated?
– The fact that many people understand
the essence of our success means a lot to
me. We won European gold not only because
we were good, but mainly because of
a big heart and our willingness to leave the
last drop of our strength on the court. It’s
not only a question of sports motivation,
but also of human ethics. You either have
it or not. The wish to sacrifice yourself for
something and someone, without sparing
yourself. I wish many people would look up
to our female basketball players, because it
is a fact that numerous people among us are
not doing enough neither for themselves,
nor for their country. Without that, you
cannot achieve what you are expecting, let
alone think about any higher achievements.
ISN’T THAT LOVE?
Marina is also curious about life outside
of sports, but doesn’t have enough time for all
her wishes.
– I was captured by theater in my school
days and I enjoy watching plays, but, unfortunately,
my obligations are preventing
me from doing it more often. The love for
scene arts exists in my family, because my
brother is in the movie industry, while I’m
enchanted by theater. I have to say I’m sorry
we don’t show more appreciation for our actors.
They are our real treasure and I know
how much they are respected in the world.
We, unfortunately, remember them only
when they leave us, which often happened
recently, so I wish they would finally get the
place they deserve. Poetry is something I
also enjoy. Its emotions, harmony and sincerity
it expresses. I like to discover it in the
world that surrounds me, whatever it’s like.
Kafana table, the sound of strained cords
and a bit of bohemian spirit in the soul…
– It makes me happy. I love kafanas and
the spirit that can only be found in them,
even in old, poor inns. Sometimes I wish
to challenge the musicians with songs that
Lika in My Heart
– It is an integral part of the story of my life. It lives within me
as the homeland of my family, and there is no mystery in it, because
I was raised to love and respect what is mine. I spent a big
part of my childhood in Lika. I love those people, I like to have
them beside me, to see them at different meetings we organize.
That will last for a long time.
cannot be heard anymore, I could even
compete with them with the number of
songs I know. Sometimes people ask me
whether kafana songs can describe me.
Even if they can, it’s not one, two or three
songs, but much more. It is a reflection
of my being, the wish to surrender to the
emotions kafanas invoke and enjoy it, sincerely
and uninhibited. Of course, when I
have time for such things.
While we are discovering her, it becomes
clear that Marina, besides all her opponents,
will always remain the greatest challenge to
herself.
– People in France cannot believe the
degree of my dedication to work. I tried to
explain them that I don’t need a controller,
monitoring the amount of my work,
because there are other criteria that mean
more to me. The attitude about the seriousness
and responsibility of what I am doing
is deeply rooted in me. When I’m aware that
I have given my best, I’m calm and relaxed.
This is what I ask from my players: to give
their best and try a step further, and then,
even if we don’t succeed, I will congratulate
them. Being honorable in your work means
giving honor to your life. Honor is a nice
term among us Serbs and very clearly describes
who we are and the way we are.
The Olympic Games are ahead of us.
– Many people are unrealistic in their
expectations, after the successes we have
achieved up to now. It is a feature of our
character and we will try to fight it. You
know, my girls are like children going to
Rio with experienced champions. Thanks
God, we have them on our side, starting
with a fantastic tennis player, who is a role
model to all of us, brilliant shooters, athletes,
water polo players and many others.
My task is to return the team to the level
we have been at the beginning. To give
our best without burdens, but also without
complexes. I know that we won’t be embarrassed,
because we have a big heart, but I
don’t even want to start the story about
medals and similar things, because it can
easily become frivolous.
Those who condemn themselves to walking
towards the heights, have difficult steps
and strained breath in their chest ahead.
But…
– Isn’t that the meaning and point of
life? Isn’t that the purpose of our existence?
Finally… isn’t that love?
100 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
101

В Е З Е / С В Я З Ь / C O N N E C T I O N S
102 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

160 th ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF THE FAMOUS SCIENTIST
Tesla’s
Time Machine
This artistic spectacle in Knez Mihailova Street was donated by the company “Telekom
Serbia” to the delighted Belgradians and guests of the capital. With image and sound,
4D technology the most important moments in life and discoveries of this great science were evoked.
Virtual Nikola Tesla himself addressed the Belgradians from the wall of the Institute “Cervantes”.
This fusion of high technology and art inspire young scientists to continue following Tesla’s
steps through knowledge and innovation
intention of the inventor is
basically to save lives. Whether
it tames forces, perfects de-
“The
vices, or provides new comfort and ease,
he contributes to the safety of our existence.”
With these wise words, the virtual
Nikola Tesla addressed the gathered citizens
of Belgrade from the facade of the
Institute “Cervantes” in Knez Mihailova
Street, which served as the set design in
the project called “Tesla’s Time Machine”.
This artistic spectacle in Knez Mihailova
Street was donated by the company “Telekom
Serbia” to the citizens of Belgrade
and its visitors in earl May, celebrating
160 th godišnjice anniversary of the birth
of famous scientists.
“Tesla’s Time Machine”, with image and
sound, managed to evoke the most important
moments in life and discoveries of the
brilliant inventor. In a unique multimedia
spectacle, Nikola Tesla leads us, with his
own words, through his own scientific
creation, as well as through the process of
giving birth to an idea, which then turns
into invention. His entire life, from early
childhood, in which he learned the basics
of logical thinking from the father,
through migration abroad, to the first inventions
and major development projects,
is shown in this innovative 4D projection.
– Nikola Tesla has left an indelible
mark in science, and this art project pays
homage to this great man who gave us
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
103

C O N N E C T I O N S
the legacy of his revolutionary discoveries.
In accordance with our core activity,
“Telekom Serbia” seeks to promote in this
way timeless scientific achievements in
this field, as well as the contributions of
our scientists who, through their actions,
indebted the entire world – says Predrag
Ćulibrk, General Manager of the company.
“Telekom Serbia” is continuously committed
to the promotion of science, and
the goal of the project “Tesla’s Time Machine”
is to provide support to innovation,
through a combination of modern technology
and art, and give inspiration to
new, future scientists.
– Thanks to his advanced ideas, Tesla
has provided us with global connectivity,
modern way of life and communication
between people, and these are the visions
that “Telekom Serbia” shares with great
Nikola Tesla – Ćulibrk added.
Even the place where the projection
was displayed – Knez Mihailova Street, in
front of the building of Serbian Academy
of Sciences and Arts – carries a certain
symbolism, because during his only visit
to Belgrade in 1892, Tesla stayed in the
hotel “Imperial” which was located not far
from there, between the current Faculty
of Philosophy and Kapetan Miša’s Building..
Although he did not stay long either
in Belgrade or in Serbia, he always emphasized
his Serbian origin and was proud of
his roots, his mother Georgina and father
Milutin, an Orthodox priest. On one occasion
he said: “I have, as you see and hear,
remained a Serb, even overseas where I do
experiments. You should also be that, and
with your knowledge and work you should
raise the glory of Serbia in the world. There
is something in me that can also be a deception,
as often happens with young enthusiastic
people, but if I am lucky to realize
at least some of my ideals, it will be for
the benefit of all mankind. If my hopes are
fulfilled, my sweetest thought will be this –
that this is a work of a Serb.”
THE VISIONARY PROJECT
OF “TELEKOM SRBIJA”
Thousands of people watched the premiere
of this multimedia spectacle in Knez
Mihailova Street, as well as live broadcast
via “Facebook”, “YouTube” and portal
“Mondo”. The interest in this event was
growing by the hour, both at the place of
the event, and on social networks. During
the three days of screenings, Belgradians
and its visitors had the unique opportuni-
104 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

ty to enjoy the multimedia spectacle created
from 4D mapping. This new graphics
technology brings to life static objects by
means of animation and sound, creating
a unique feeling of monolithic buildings
growing into a picturesque canvas on
which to depict digitally shaped collages.
Aleksandar Protić, the Director of the
Tesla Memorial, as a great expert in life
and work of this genius, provided the scientific
basis for the realization of “Tesla’s
Time Machine”.
– The visionary project of “Telekom
Serbia” wants to bring the memory of
Nikola Tesla close to our contemporaries
precisely by using technologies that are
part of his legacy. The cutting-edge technology
was used as an instrument that
intends to create much more far-reaching
impact: educational, memorial and
inspirational. Nikola Tesla is not only a
synonym for creativity, innovation and
invention, but also for reconciliation and
for the continuous struggle for justice
and freedom. Telecommunications, from
Tesla’s perspective, are only one form of
communication that is to connect people
and serve their individual and collective
maturing – Aleksandar Protić points out.
In his book Nikola Tesla’s Road of Peace,
Protić says that “Tesla is one of the few
scientists who dedicated himself to the realization
of peace in a very tangible way,
developing inventions that could prevent
wars. In this way, he offered to mankind,
today unfortunately almost forgotten, ideal
of a scientist who feels and knows that
true scientific progress could never, and
must not be separated from the good and
the beautiful. This is the most precious
Tesla’s message to mankind. If it is understood
in its unique depth and power, and
if it becomes an integral part of the education
of young people, mankind may be
ready to make seven miles steps.”
After Belgrade, in the upcoming period,
“Tesla’s Time Machine”, will continue
its journey in Novi Sad and Niš. s
Supporting Science
With its socially responsible activities, the company “Telekom
Serbia” supports science, on the one hand nurturing promoting
the image and legacy of our scientists, and on the other hand
by investing in young generations and innovative projects. “The
Virtual Museum of Nikola Tesla”, “Mihajlo Pupin Virtual Museum”,
and “mts Android competition” are just some of the projects with
which “Telekom Serbia” promotes the development of thought
and scientific approach in finding answers to contemporary
challenges.
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
105

С Л А В И Ј А / С Л А В И Я / S L A V I J A
106 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

THE SIXTH “DAYS OF SLAVIC LITERACY AND CULTURE” IN RUMA
Codes of
Intimacy
Old
Slavs should re-strengthen the awareness of the unity of their own cultures and common cultural
roots. And gatherings of this kind provide a true support for this and raise hopes for better days.
The Municipality of Ruma and the local City Library “Atanasije Stojković” will continue to
provide their full contribution to this. This year, the topics were Slavic mythology, Russian avant-garde,
Dragiša Vasić and “The Brothers Karamazov”, and all this was augmented by band “Zvonica” from
Omsk, which nurtures musical traditions of Siberian Cossacks
By: Mile Vajagić
For years, the “Days of Slavic Literacy
and Culture” have been standing
out among the cultural events
in Srem, for their quality. They are held
traditionally every year at the end of May
in Ruma, and are dedicated to promotion
of culture, art and philosophy of all
Slavic peoples. Special emphasis is placed
on literary production in twelve Slavic
countries.
This year’s event, from 20 to 27 May,
also had several sub-sections, and those
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
107

S L A V I J A
an event was important not only for Ruma
or Srem, but also for our country. Ruma is
a good place for such an important event
because it has a beautiful cultural and civic
tradition, although the city itself is not older
than 400 years.
HOPE AND CULTURAL HORIZONS
Vocal group
“Zvonica” from
Omsk, Russia
Photo:
“Foto Star”
who love culture enjoyed the film, music,
literary and philosophical achievements of
Slavic peoples.
The participants were prominent representatives
of the academic community
and experts in the rich Slavic cultural heritage.
The topics were Slavic mythology,
Russian avant-garde, and there were reminders
of some unjustly forgotten names
of Slovenian Slavic. Thus, prof. Dr. Milo
Lompar spoke about the topic of “Dragiša
Vasić and Russian literature”. Great attention
was attracted by the lecture “The
Brothers Karamazov” by prof. Dr. Dragan
Stojanović. Special topic was devoted to
Sergei Yesenin, one of the most important
Slavic poets from the first quarter of the
20 th century, and his poetry and personality
were presented by prof. Dr. Miodrag J.
Sibinović.
– The intention of the organizers was to
position even more strongly this event on
Serbian and Slavic cultural map this year,
and to enhance promotion of their city
and municipality – says Želјko Stojanović,
Director of the City Library “Atanasije
Stojković”, the institution that is the founder
of this event. – When, six years ago, we
decided to launch the “Days of Slavic Literacy
and Culture”, we thought that such
Novel
The literary contest of Ruma City Library “Atanasije Stojković”
for the first and previously unpublished novel has been announced
recently. Last year, twenty three novels were submitted
at the contest, and this year, in all likelihood, the interest will be
even greater. The library is obliged to publish the winning novel
and cede to the author a certain number of copies of the book.
The contest is open until the end of September.
– Events such as the “Days of Slavic Literacy
and Culture” bring back hope that
culture can expect to have much better
days. We must be looking forward to everything
that pushes the boundaries of our
knowledge and raises our spiritual horizon
on a higher level. If we give up on the basis
of our tradition and culture, then we have
no future other than that of mere consumers
– said literary critic Mileta Aćimović
Ivkov at the opening ceremony.
Marija Stojčević, Deputy Mayor of
Ruma, said that the “Days of Slavic Literacy
and Culture” are the pride of this city
and the region:
– Appreciating the true cultural values,
we will continue to support culture and its
elevation to a higher level. I am sure that in
the coming years this event will draw the
attention of true cultural public.
All participants emphasized that the
Slavs themselves needs to rediscover their
deep codes of closeness and togetherness,
their unique culture and common cultural
roots. And gatherings of this kind contribute
most directly to this.
This year, the “Days of Slavic Literacy
and Culture” were attended by guests
from abroad. The opening ceremony was
adorned by Russian band “Zvonica” m
Omsk, which nurtures the musical tradition
of the Siberian Cossacks. Last summer,
the ensemble of folk dances and songs
“Branko Radičević” from Ruma performed
in Orel, in the European part of Russia, at
the International Folklore Festival “Eagle
Mosaic”. Contacts were established
then, which led to this nice performance
of “Zvonica” in Ruma. In addition to the
“Days of Slavic Literacy and Culture”,
“Zvonica” also had concerts in the Russian
Cultural Center in Belgrade, in Sremska
Mitrovica, Hrtkovci and Putinci. For
guests from Omsk, which is five thousand
kilometers away from Ruma, a city tour
and visit to monasteries of Fruška Gora
were organized. s
108 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

INSTITUTION STUDENTS’
RESORT “BELGRADE”
Business Unit “Radojka Lakić” on Avala
Build on the foundations of a building from the late 1930’s, it is at the
same time the seat of the Institution of Students’ resort “Belgrade”. It
is located on the most beautiful part of the mountain of Avala, on the
outskirts of the capital of Serbia. After it was demolishes in 1999, during
the aggression of the North Atlantic Pact against Serbia, the entire building
was restored gradually. Today it is one of the most modern students’ resorts
in this part of Europe. It provides excellent accommodation, food and the
entire range of other services to students, as well as third party users.
It consists of two parts:
New building “Avala”
On a surface area of 5.357 square meters, it has 158 beds. It has a
restaurant with 200 seats, a conference room with 150 seats, seminar room
with 2x30 seats, and summer garden with 200 seats.
Annex
Its capacity is 73 beds in double and triple rooms. It has a restaurant
with 180 seats.
General Ždanova 201, 11226 Belgrade
011 3907 946 • 011 3907 947 • recepcija.avala@usob.rs • www.usob.rs

З Д Р А В Љ Е / З Д О Р О В Ь Е / H E A L T H
110 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

NEW AMENITIES IN “MERKUR’S” SPA CENTER “ROMAN WELL”
The Primeval
Power of
Water
Hydro-massage therapy, symbolically named “Shower 7”, is a treatment with water jets produced by
the seven jets above the patient. Beneficial effects are numerous, from deep massage to improving
circulation, detoxifying and skin renewal
Spa Center “Roman
Well” is a central spa facility,
“Merkur’s”
dedicated to all the guests
and residents of Vrnjačka Banja. The largest
and officially the best Medicinal Spa
Center in the Balkans, brings together in
its offer the cutting-edge equipment with
superior medicine and centuries-old tradition
of treatment with Vrnjačka mineral
water.
Continuous development and improvement
of spa services has been the
guiding principle of “Merkur’s” management
in the last decade, when the concept
of wellness has been conceived as an element
of healthcare program. This spring,
the Spa Center “Roman Well” was again
enriched with new amenities.
Starting from the idea that water is
the source of life and the basis of health,
essential to everyone and anytime, the
novelty introduced by the Spa Center
“Roman Well” a novelty in Spa Center
Combining
Special effects are achieved by combining
hydro-massage with compatible
treatments that exist at the “Lili” Massage
Center within the Spa Center. Increasing
the effects of treatment and absorption
of nutrients, it perfectly combines with
peels, packs and mineral mud baths.
“Roman Well” is a hydro-massage therapy,
symbolically “Shower 7”.
“Shower 7” is the treatment with jets
of water produced by the seven macro
and micro jets placed above the patient.
The patient is lying on the bed so that the
water covers his whole body, namely the
body is at all times shrouded in thin and
warm jets of water. The power of water
works like rain, with optimum pressure
and appropriate temperature, it relaxes
the muscles, and has relaxing effect on the
nervous system.
Water jets also act as a deep tissue
massage, which improves blood circulation
and detoxifies the body, creating a
high level of muscle and whole body relaxation.
Mechanical action is based on the hydrostatic
pressure which encourages the
lymphatic and venous circulation. The increased
blood flow during hydro-massage
enables a much better supply of the skin
and subcutaneous tissue with nutritious
elements and oxygen, which accelerates
cell renewal and development, and results
in good and healthy look of the skin.
More intensive use of hydro-massage
contributes also reduces cellulite. It stimulates
the formation of collagen in cells,
which leads to increased skin elasticity
and reduction of wrinkles. It improves
skin hydration. s
SERBIA • N O 55 • 2016
111

C E N T E R S
CAMP OF THE INSTITUTE OF SPORT NEAR KLADOVO
New Upswing
of “Karataš”
It was formerly used for accommodation of the builders of Hydro
Power Plant “Đerdap I”, then as a youth volunteer brigade village.
Today, under the management of the Institute for Sport and Sports
Medicine of Serbia, with strong support from the government,
“Karataš” has been developing into a modern sports center, one
of the leaders in the South Slavic region. In addition to what is
necessary for the preparation of top athletes, it will make available
everything that the users of the Institute in Belgrade have, from the
sports medical examinations to psychological and motor testing
112 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

Youth camps throughout Serbia were
once a favorite gathering place of
students during school trips, scouts
and various sports and recreational clubs.
Today, most of them are devastated and
abandoned. One of the few that survived,
but whose fate was highly uncertain until
two years ago, is certainly Youth Camp
“Karataš” at the outskirts of Kladovo.
Built in the sixties, “Karataš” was used
for accommodation of the builders of
Hydro Power Plant “Đerdap 1 and later
for the participants of youth work camps,
working on development and protection
of the Danube coastal areas from the
dam to Kladovo. Over time, the camp has
grown into a sports center for the preparation
of junior teams. However, the crisis
of the 1990’s, and long-term neglect and
lack of investment in maintenance, led to
deterioration of the entire infrastructure
and all facilities of the camp.
With the decision of the Government
from 2014, sports camp “Karataš” was given
to the use of the Institute for Sport and
Sports Medicine of the Republic of Serbia.
This marks a new era in the development
of this camp.
Under the management of the Institute,
Sports Camp “Karataš” slowly puts on its
new clothes. With the full support of the
Government of Serbia, and the significant
funds allocated by the Ministry of Youth
and Sports and the Institute, the first phase
of reconstruction of the camp was completed
in 2014. A new accommodation pavilion
and a gym with a stretch hall were
built, while two sports courts and a 1,200
meters jogging track were rebuilt.
Preparations are underway for the second
phase of the reconstruction, within
which two more accommodation pavilions
will be built and four sports co-
Heritage Within Reach
From “Karataš” one can visit the Tabula Traiana, with which
the famous Roman emperor perpetuated the construction of the
road from Belgrade through the Iron Gate, to the place where in
the second century he built the famous bridge on the Danube.
There is the Diana Zanes fortress, erected on the bank of the Danube
during the reign of Emperor Trajan. At the site Glamija there
are remains of two forts from the 4 th and the end of the 6 th century.
Let us also mention Fetislam fortress, the Church of St. George
in Kladovo, the Monastery of the Holy Trinity, Manastirica, Đerdap
Archaeological Museum and many other attractions.
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C E N T E R S
urts refurbished. In the next three to
four years, when the reconstruction of
facilities is completed, the Sports Camp
“Karataš” will shine brightly. It will be a
modern sports center, the best one in the
South Slavic region. This center will be
able to provide everything necessary for
accommodation and preparation of not
only top athletes, but also junior teams
and amateurs.
BIG PLANS, AWARENESS
OF THE SIGNIFICANCE
All services that are available to athletes
in the complex of the Institute in
Belgrade will be available to everyone
who staying in “Karataš”. Athletes will be
able to undergo sports and medical examinations,
psychological and motor testing,
and these services will be provided by top
experts of the Institute with years of experience.
Interestingly, the camp is located near
the Danube, along cycling route “Euro-
Velo 6”, which extends from the Atlantic
to the Black Sea and runs through the
Iron Gate. That is why there is increasing
number of foreign tourists who pass
through Serbia by bicycle and want to
stay for a while in “Karataš”.
Athletes and tourists staying in “Karataš”
will also have at their disposal a rich
tourist offer of this region, complemented
by a host of archaeological sites and natural
and cultural monuments.
Pursuant to the new Law on Sports
from February 2016, the Institute for
Sport and Sports Medicine of the Republic
of Serbia received the status of a national
training center. This way, the Institute
acquired the exclusive right to, within
its capacities, enable top athletes and
young talents to have continuous training
and preparation, both in the complex of
the Institute in Belgrade, and at the Sports
Camp “Karataš”.
Government has big plans for “Karataš”,
just like the Ministry and the Institute.
There is a clear awareness that investment
in “Karataš” is actually an investment in
the future of sport in Serbia. Hence the
persistent effort to implement these plans,
step by step. s
114 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

J U B I L E E
SIXTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF BELGRADE BUSINESS SCHOOL
Tradition
that Obliges
With the ceremony that will take place on 29 June 2016, which will gather a number of reputable domestic
and foreign guests, the School will celebrate its Great Jubilee. More than 120,000 students has graduated
from it thus far, and are now working successfully in various sectors of the economy and the state
By: Prof. Dr. Đuro Đurović
With the realization of the policy
of continuous improvement of
the quality of education and
implementation of the process for the implementation
of quality system standards
in this jubilee year, the management and
all employees in the best possible way are
showing not only their loyalty to tradition,
but also a strategy for further development
of schools, improvement of the
image and marking this significant anniversary.
Resisting the numerous pressures
and negative influences from some sections
of society, in which devaluation of
the real values and the education system is
evident, Belgrade Business School invests
great effort and manages to position itself
on the educational map of Serbia as the
unsurpassable leader in the region in the
field of applied vocational education.
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J U B I L E E
Since its inception, 60 years ago, to date,
it has been successfully linking and coordinating
higher education in the field of business
education with modern requirements
of economy and society, always giving new
answers to old questions. Focusing on domestic
and global trends in the multidisciplinary
field of science, the School keeps
promoting the concept of applied studies
and dual education, developing skills and
abilities of students required for practical
work. Recognizing the importance of practical
knowledge and experience for further
professional development of its students,
and the need for their professional advancement
during the studies, the School has been
building a dual system, thus developing a
fruitful cooperation with successful companies
and enterprises. In this way, it allows its
students to have professional practice, fully
efficiently directing them for their future
professional career and fully prepares them
for the labor market. On this road and to
this end, cooperation was establish, among
others, with leading financial institutions
such as the National Bank of Serbia and the
Belgrade Stock Exchange, where in April of
this year, ninety of our students attended
and successfully completed the interactive
educational course “Technical and Fundamental
analysis with simulation of trading”,
where they obtained certificates of education
in stock exchange operations in Serbia.
This and all other activities in teaching
and in student internships, contribute fully
to the raising of the level of professional
qualifications of students and, of course, the
reputation of Belgrade Business School, as a
leader in business education.
THE POWER OF FEEDBACK
In line with its tradition, the School
continues keeping pace with European
Honor
Aware of the fact that visual identity is important for improvement
of the overall quality, it is necessary to refurbish the facade
and area in front of the School, as well as the teachers’ room,
which will bear the name of the former director of the College of
Economics (the precursor of Belgrade Business School), Professor
Nebojša Potkonjak, as the most deserving for the construction
of the impressive buildings of the existing school building in the
city center. Also, as a sign of gratitude and respect towards the
late professor and director, we will also mount a commemorative
plaque in the lobby of the building.
trends, contemporary tendencies and
changes, and has been successfully putting
on a professional path of business education
a large number of students. A special
confirmation of the quality of its work is
the fact that over 120,000 graduates of this
school has work, and is still successfully
working today in Serbia and achieving
outstanding business results. In addition,
12,000 students who are now studying at
the School within seven study programs
of undergraduate studies and three study
programs of specialist studies, show unabated
interest and intellectual curiosity
to complete their study exactly at Belgrade
Business School. In line with this is also the
power of feedback we receive from the labor
market, from companies and organizations
that employ our students, as exceptional
staff, which makes us proud.
The year behind us was marked by numerous
events, among other things a series
of public lectures by prominent professors
and experts from the country and abroad,
as well as the round table organized by
our school. Attendance at the lectures and
round tables testify about the significance,
heterogeneity and relevance of or topics,
and students’ interest confirms this. Also,
in April this year the School was the logistical
and technical support to the European
Association of Institutions in Higher
Education (EURASHE), which organized
its 26 th annual conference entitled “Centers
of cooperation striving for excellence: professional
higher education and the world
of work”. The conference was attended by
150 representatives of vocational schools
from Europe and about 70 representatives
of vocational colleges in Serbia. Eight of
our female students, with teachers of English
and IT, presented the School in the
best possible way and received recognition
from the organizers and participants
for their work. It is therefore not surprising
that the generation enrolled 2015/2016
academic year is the best for success in the
history of this School. Grade point average
of students enrolled in the past year is 3.53
which means that very good students are
studying in our school.
FOR CLEAN AND BRIGHT IMAGE
Respecting tradition and fostering the already
built values, we turn to the future and
in this regard, special emphasis is placed on
116 SRBIJA • BROJ 55 • 2016.

teaching-educational process, extending
the concept also to the Master vocational
studies, for which we have submitted an
application and we expect accreditation for
the next school year.
Also, we have been preparing for accreditation
of specialized studies in Marketing
Management and Public Administration,
as well as for re-accreditation of
existing programs. In addition to this, we
have been expanding cooperation with
academic institutions in our country in
order to provide our students, who have
such abilities and interests, with the possibility
to continue their studies at one of
the faculties, as well as the agreement on
business-technical cooperation with the
Academy of Novi Sad, where our students
from the study program Public administration
(our vocational lawyers) would
continue their studies at the fourth year
of the Faculty of Law, an accredited unit
in Belgrade. We will continue to deepen
and expand the existing international
cooperation we have developed with a
number of educational institutions from
Germany, Russia, China, Italy, Austria,
Macedonia (...) in order to implement,
according to our capabilities, good quality
educational concepts of developed
educational systems. I emphasize that our
vocational economists can, also under
the agreement on cooperation, continue
their studies at the Faculty of Economics
– UTMS Skopje, where a number of our
students have already successfully completed
their studies.
In addition to the aforementioned
events, activities and aspirations, we
should also mention the friendly and completely
legitimate approach to the material
and financial values of the school. This is
reflected in the streamlining of operations
and cost savings that have been achieved
in the last two years, in order to ensure
stable and efficient education system that
will, in the long term, be competitive in the
market and maintain its leading position.
We must stress the duty and obligation of
compliance with high ethical standards by
the teachers and all employees of Belgrade
Business School, because academic integrity
must be the first rule of business and
activities of the School. We owe it to the
society as serious and responsible people,
and I personally owe this to all the staff,
because I promised during the elections
to maintain pure and bright image of Belgrade
Business School!
I take this opportunity to congratulate
to all employees and students this great
and important jubilee, with the desire for
the School to continue its successful work
and celebrate many more jubilees. s
(The author is the Director
of Belgrade Business School –
College of Vocational Studies)
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