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Published: November 30th -0001
Novi Sad Church
This beautiful Catholic church in the middle of Novi Sad has a distinctly Hungarian influence.(Hello Folks - The TravelBlog server crashed and it lost my last 6 entries. I’ve edited and expanded this one, and I’m re-posting it. I’m planning to post a few more, barring further technical difficulties, this week.)
Tonight I am sitting in my newly rented apartment in Belgrade and staring at the quiet walls. After a very full month in Novi Sad, it is nice to have some time alone to reflect on my trip in Serbia so far. I am in the apartment of Milan Petrovic, as the little Cyrillic letters read on the front door, whose grandson has rented me the flat for the month. I think Milan has long since passed, but his little front door placard and his furniture live on. The squat dark green velour armchair that I’m reclining in could serve quite fittingly as the Balkan throne of Archie Bunker. But alas, he’s dead too and there’s just me here with a Tuborg and some electronica music to make the clash of eras complete.
Ah, the Serbs. They are, quite simply, fantastic. I heard a saying about Romanians a while ago that went something like, “The Romanian people are the best because their
government has been the worst.” I think the Serbian variant would be that the Serbs are incredible people because their history has been the worst. It was in Serbia, after all, the Southern Slavs suffered under and ultimately threw off Turkish domination, and then fought bloody conflict after bloody conflict to fend off other greedy empires that were threatened by the existence of a free and independent Southern Slav state. (To be precise, Novi Sad is in the northern Serbian region of Vojvodina, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)
Like many other East Central Europe countries, the Serbs enjoyed a brief spat of freedom between the world wars before they were invaded by the Nazis and plunged into war all over again. After the war, Tito molded the motley bunch of Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks and Slovenes into a unified Yugoslavia by violently suppressing any of their nationalist tendencies, and this region enjoyed some measure of peace for a few decades until his death in 1980. Tito was a dictator, yes, but not in the mold of a Stalin or a Ceausescu; most people here remember the sixties and seventies and most of the eighties as periods of openness,
stability and opportunity. Unlike other Soviet Bloc countries, Yugoslavs could travel wherever they wanted, enjoyed decent jobs and good health care, and had what they thought was a bright future. Many older people here talk about the Tito era with distant smiles and misty eyes. After Tito’s death, however, the country learned of the vast loans he had taken out to make the socialist dream a reality, and soon it suffered the first of several hyperinflations. In the economic chaos that ensued old ethnic hatreds surfaced and the country fell apart into the civil war of the last decade, which is the only frame of reference most Westerners today have for this region.
Sorry for the history lesson, but however I have tried to write this portion of my blog, it has been impossible to avoid. The fact is that people here have lived through some pretty dramatic times, and their history continues to affect their everyday life in ways I’ll describe later.
Life in Novi Sad
So, back to my original point: despite the weight of their history or maybe because of it, the Serbs are some of the most soulful and open people I
have ever met. For starters, my host family in Novi Sad was outstanding. Mira, a 61 year old retired accountant, and her son, Jovica, who just graduated university in history, were incredibly gracious, kind, patient with my stumbling Serbian, and frank about the trials of living in present-day Serbia. Within moments of my arrival, Jovica proudly taught me some trivia of American history (such as the fact that Taft was the last president to have a cow -- named Pauline -- on the premises of the White House) and invited me to his best friend’s bar, “Tennis” (which would be the site of much mayhem as the month wore on). Mira, meanwhile, prepared me the first of many delicious traditional meals, such as sarma (stuffed cabbage rolls), palacinke (crepes), and chorba (thick soup), which were designed to fatten me beyond repair before the month was out. Soon I just called them my domacna majka (host mother) and domacni brat (host brother).
Daily life in Serbia has a languid pace that is alien to the New Yorker in me, but Jovica schooled me well in the art of Balkan timing, which requires that you “hurry slowly”. Take note, would-be travelers,
that there is no such thing as take-away coffee in Novi Sad - Starbucks blessedly has not made any inroads here yet. A person does not drink coffee “on the go” - you sit your butt in a chair and order an espresso or a cappuccino from a waitress. If you do not take the time to do this, says Jovica, you can be guaranteed that “the rest of your day will be shit.” On this note, I must say that, despite some material deprivations, Serbs generally have a higher standard of living in some ways than we do. Relaxing is built into their schedule, they have strong and lifelong personal connections, and since this is a largely rural country, they buy everything from the farmer’s market and their food is entirely natural. Unlike us, they do not have to pay three times the price for an organic tomato. The cuisine here can be heavy, but it is of excellent quality.
Thanks to my newly acquired Balkan timing, I was usually late to my language classes, which started at 9AM. This was far too early for a worn-out foreigner who could barely sleep at night thanks to the unprecedented
heat wave. The classes at Azbukum (“Alphabet”) were excellent, however, and my Serbian has been improving greatly despite myself. Although I speak with many mistakes, I can speak, and I have largely stopped mixing up my Russian with my Serbian. (I do fear, however, that my Serbian is replacing my Russian, yikes. Roman, help!).
My classes were full of intriguing international types, and the usual rogue Americans. Let’s see, there was a polyglot Swiss, two fellow students from NYC who quickly became my chums, doctoral candidates from Seattle and Chapel Hill, a US Navy Officer, a hilarious South African, a young and gorgeous Ukrainian boy, a Pole, and even a Cuban! What a motley crew. As you can imagine, we had every manner of intercultural hilarity and miscommunication, and quickly fell apart into our little groups. I soon found myself hanging out a lot with my fellow New Yawkers, Maddie and Craig, who both went to Columbia for undergrad, and are currently in the history department at NYU.
The three of us soon discovered that the Serbs have a love and stamina for partying that far outstrips anything we have seen or could possibly keep up with. We
learned this the hard way at a barbecue on the Danube with Jovica and his friends. At 4AM they were just getting started with the karaoke phase of the evening, and we were gradually passing out on the couch, astonished at their energy.
By the time the gargantuan EXIT festival rolled around in mid-July, though, Craig, Maddie and I had inured ourselves to all-night partying, and we did our Serb friends proud. The EXIT festival occurs each year at the Petrovardin, a gigantic 17th century fortress in Novi Sad that has to be the most incredible setting ever for a four-day concert. The festival hosts big names, and for about 100 euro I saw Robert Plant, Groove Armada, Prodigy, Snoop Dogg, a host of Balkan bands (including Hladno Pivo) and last but definitely not least, the Beastie Boys! I’ve been a fan for 16 years and this was my first BBoys concert, but they were worth the wait. Put bluntly, they kicked ass. After three nights of all-night concert going, I left Novi Sad earlier this week thoroughly exhausted, but satisfied.
“We Do Not Have a Good Image”
Serbs know that they don’t have a good international
reputation, and are eager to show a foreigner that they are not a country of nationalists and war criminals. This does not mean that they don’t get virulently upset at the idea of Kosovo gaining independence, or that they there isn’t debate about whether Ratko Mladic is 1) even in the country or 2) should be sent to the Hague if he is. They have some valid points about how they have been portrayed by Western media, which simplified the civil war into good guys vs. bad guys, the bad guys always being Serbs. Whatever your opinion about contemporary Balkan politics, the Serbs speak compellingly about what it is like to live under a series of hyperinflations, 5 years of sanctions, 3 months of NATO bombing in 1999, and now, largely outside the benefits of the international community.
Jovica, for instance, cannot easily travel. Serbs are required to buy visas for practically everywhere they go, which usually cost about 100 euro. Since there are few well-paying jobs here and the average salary per month is about 200 euro, this makes travel to anywhere outside the Balkans difficult. This is a fact that many young people here resent, since their
parents were able to freely travel all over the world with Yugoslavian passports. Given the growing pains of the Serb economy and the lack of opportunity to go somewhere else, many of them feel stuck.
Jovica is 29, and shared a lot with me about what is has been like for this generation to grow up in Serbia. He remembers his mother having to drive to Hungary for necessities during the 1991-1996 sanctions, and he vividly recalls the 1999 bombing because he was working for the national Novi Sad TV station at the time. His office was bombed (no one was injured) and he was on a ferry crossing the Danube and when one of the bridges was destroyed. (Every bridge in Novi Sad was bombed.)
Since the US led the 1999 bombing and is currently pushing for Kosovo’s independence, you might expect a bit of hostility toward an American traveler here. But there has been none, which I marveled at when my bus rolled past some wrecked buildings in Belgrade or when I saw a picture of the old bridges hanging in a store in Novi Sad. It is still odd to be in a country that
your country bombed in the not-too-distant past, to be sure, but it is not because the locals make me feel uncomfortable about it.
There are some even stranger stories beneath the surface, though, that illustrate the tangled politics of the region and the way it complicates the lives of the young people who live here. Another one of Jovica’s friends related to me the problems of gaining a Croatian passport. Her father is a Croat, her mother a Serb, and now her parents are divorced. She wants to apply for Croatian citizenship through her father, since Croatia is set to enter the EU in 2010. Having a EU passport could make a number of things easier for her, especially if she wants to study abroad (she is 18).
However, in order to gain Croatian citizenship, you must be Catholic. She is Serbian Orthodox. People who aren’t Catholic but want citizenship routinely “pay off” priests in Croatia to enter their names on the register of a given church. Even if she saves up the money for this bribe, she says, she still has another problem. Several devoutly Orthodox members of her family, including her uncle and several cousins, told
her they would never speak to her again if she denies her faith.
It’s a bit strange for me to learn of such an unabashed relationship between church and state in Croatia, a EU candidate, especially since neither Serbia nor Bosnia restrict citizenship to a specific religion. It begins to make a little more sense, though, when you remember people here have defined themselves along religious lines for centuries (with the exception of Tito’s time), and that it’s going to take a while for these distinctions, and the memories of the last war, to fade.
Young people here, though, are understandably impatient; more and more of them are tired of hearing about Kosovo and reject the idea of Ratko Mladic as a maligned war hero. They want the same opportunities other people have, even if that means accepting conditions they consider unfair. Their generation may ultimately propel the country past its post-war/post-Milosevic fallout into a new era.
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