So, how are you supposed to bribe a doctor in Bulgaria to do an operation as expected?

This was the thought going through my head as I was on my bus having fled the and conflict on the outskirts of Skopje, Macedonia in July 2001.

Mission 1: Find cousin who fled her home a day after giving birth, who I hadn’t heard from in months. Outcome: success! All fine and well.

Mission 2: Provide bribe money to doctor so that auntie can have stomach tumour removed that was supposed to have been done properly two years earlier. Progress report: she’s in hospital and awaiting my US$300 contribution for said doctor.

OK, so I’m on my way. Just give me two hours.

This is the final stage of my 2001 Balkan Odyssey, that had seen me ricocheted from Canada to the Balkans to complete the two above missions. During that time, I’ve spent time being an “attraction” at my relative’s village of outcasts located in Bulgaria’s once-forbidden and deadly border zone near Greece, bump into people who know my father in the most unlikely of lucky chances, dealt with unusually nice border officials, entered into a war zone and be deemed “normal” amidst the craziness characteristic of armed conflicts.

Time now to get Mission 2 over and done with before my return to Canada.

Arriving in Sofia after the surprisingly speedy bus trip from Skopje, first stop before going to the hospital where my auntie was waiting was a florist to buy some flowers – one by Sveta Nedelya Square. The attending florist asked me what flowers I’d like and I said “something that represents ‘health’”. Next was the obligatory box of chocolates. No, not for my auntie but to go with the bribe money for the doctor. And it had to be something “fensi” – not Chernomorets, something “western”. So Lindt it was. Next on the shopping list was a nice crisp envelope to place the nice crisp US dollar notes in. Do I get a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a carton of Malboros? Nah, we’re not in the 1980s anymore, plus, this is getting a bit overboard. This doctor really shouldn’t be getting the 300 bucks in the first place, let alone extras. But this, unfortunately, has been part of Balkan life not just in these days of wild capitalism but all throughout time. Favours, connections, gifts – all forms of tribute. They’ve always been important and have been deciding factors in whether something works out well or not.

Entering the hospital, I went to reception, asked where my auntie is by name and was directed to a ward that was clean though certainly had seen better days. Such was the state of not just the Bulgarian public health system but this too was standard all throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe. There was my auntie, all excited to see me, and by her bedside my cousin Anna-Maria. Their faces lit up immediately – I was finally there with the dosh to end the stomach pains.

First thing my auntie did was apologise for the state of the hospital, like as if it was her responsibility. “I’m sure the hospitals in Australia don’t look anything like this dump” she said. My modest reply was “oh no, they’re just the same”. What a hopeless lie! Of course they didn’t look like this. It’s not like wealthy Australia had gone through the economic turmoil that poor Bulgaria had gone through those previous two decades. But while my auntie is in this state, why bog ourselves down with comparisons. She was in pain, so this was not the time to rub in how she had the bad deal when it came to life…

You could say my auntie was doomed from the onset. She had been born in her father’s (my grandfather’s) birthplace in 1944… not within the current borders of Bulgaria but just over it in what is now Greece. When my auntie told me this, I didn’t believe her. She then showed me her ID card where it clearly stated her birthplace, using its Slavic… well, Turkish, name of Karakoy (now Katafyto). What had happened was when her father had finally been caught after going AWOL from the Bulgarian Army during World War II, he was given a choice – either he be sent back to the front line to certain death or he and his wife could opt to return and repopulate his birth village in Greece, then under Bulgarian administration. In 1925, the people of the village, her father included, had decided that they would en masse leave for just over the newly defined border within sight into Bulgaria. In their place came Greek refugees from Asia Minor, victims of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. When the Bulgarian Army took control of the region again in 1941, the plan then was for Bulgarian refugees who had come from Greece to return to their places of origin now part of greater Bulgaria. But few of them wanted to return to villages that had been completed destroyed (as was the case with my grandfather’s birthplace), meaning they needed to start all over again. However, for my grandfather, doing this was better than dying in a war he wanted no part in, especially as it was allied at the time with Nazi Germany. As a reward for returning to his village, my grandfather was appointed the village’s police officer. While there, his wife gave birth of their first child – a girl, i.e. my auntie.

But this new life back in the old place was not to last. Just over a month after my auntie’s birth, the Red Army entered into Bulgaria. The Soviets engineered a Communist-led coup (later officially billed as the September Uprising) toppling the pro-Nazi Bulgarian government. Bulgaria immediately changed sides and withdrew from all territories it had taken over beyond the country’s pre-1941 borders. This included the village that my auntie had just been born in. Given the circumstances, and seeing he was now part of the Bulgarian administrative and security apparatus, my grandfather had no choice but to flee from his birthplace, again, and withdraw to Bulgaria proper. My auntie, a mere few weeks old, was already a refugee.

As there was no one else really to do the job, even though he had been appointed under the previous, now wholly discredited pro-Nazi authorities, my grandfather continued being a police officer, just now his hat had a red star on it. For doing so, and pledging allegiance to the new communist government, my grandfather was roundly rewarded by being assigned a nicely located apartment right in the centre of Nevrokop in the town’s intact and lively Jewish quarter.

Life was fine. But that was to change… spectacularly.

On the evening of 20 April 1947, police officers, her father’s colleagues, smashed into their apartment. This was no friendly visit. The officers started trashing the entire place. Her mother had been ordered to leave the apartment immediately and was very ceremoniously thrown out onto the street for all to see. The reason for her sudden eviction – her husband, the police officer, had been arrested earlier that day after being discovered to have been feeding valuable intel to a clandestine separatist Macedonian “counter-revolutionary” grouping. My auntie, her mother and her newborn younger brother were out on the street now deemed “enemies of the people”. There was no mercy here. My auntie was 2 years old; her brother was barely six months.

With no-one in her family or any of her husband’s relatives in the town willing to be associated with her, no matter how much they wanted to help her, my auntie’s mother had no choice but to flee to the village of outcasts (explained in Part 1) not far from the town for fellow “enemies”. Things then went worse for them when my grandfather made a daring escape, in broad daylight, from the prison camp he was interned, successfully making it over the nearby border into Greece. My auntie, her mother and brother were now, in the eyes of the Bulgarian authorities at the time, the lowest of the low.

It was made very clear to her and her brother that they have no bright future ahead of them in the worker’s paradise. Any dreams of university education? A highly prestigious job? Forget it. They were from now on, and constantly reminded of from the never-ceasing taunts from the other children, kopileta – essentially “bastards” in the old-fashioned sense.

Their father extraordinarily survived his escape and made his way to safety to Australia – “the furthest I could get from Europe” he would say. In a feeble yet necessary attempt to mitigate the negative repercussions he knew his escape will have on the family he left behind in Bulgaria, her father “divorced” their mother by letter, which allowed her to remarry… to the village drunk. Their childhood was absolutely horrifying, having to face the violent wrath of this lowlife of a man. My auntie and her brother (my uncle) were left to fend for themselves.

In her late teens, my auntie met a funny guy, similarly an outcast like her, from a neighbouring village, and soon after married. Given everyone in their region knew of their circumstances and backgrounds, they had nothing to lose and so a clean break would be best for them. They moved to the spa city of Velingrad, where they lived for a few years in the 1960s, and where their two daughters were born. At first, no-one knew about their backgrounds or associations, but eventually, their past caught up on them and were shunned. Then in 1969, the Bulgarian Communist Party made a call for young volunteers to move to the centre of Bulgaria where new lignite-powered thermoelectrical plants had been constructed. Workers were needed in all professions. The young family decided to answer that call and moved there. OK, that’s how the rosy-coloured propaganda at the time depicted their move. The reality was they needed to go further afield to escape their pasts, plus doing something in favour of the Party would do much to exonerate their tainted biographies and gain some positive ticks for providing better prospects for their daughters.

With only basic education – that was all they were allowed to have – they didn’t have much choice on what jobs they could take, but the railways were always desperate for people to work in remote villages, so they took the task of becoming the station masters of their new village of residence. My uncle was a very amicable person and loved talking with everyone, as well as saying jokes and making people laugh – this made him perfect material to become a train conductor. First working on local lines, he quickly climbed the career ladder to work on cross-country lines and soon after was chef de tren on international, multiday lines criss-crossing the Eastern Bloc. His journeys would take his as far as Novosibirsk deep inside Siberia. As he had his own compartment in these epic train journeys, for summer holidays he would also take along his wife and two daughters. Destinations such as (East) Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Leningrad and Moscow, places that my uncle would see regularly on his conductor expeditions, were the best most Bulgarians could possibly go to at the time – they were akin to Paris, Rome and Amsterdam for those in the west. My cousins would come back from these places, where shops were much better stocked that in rural Bulgaria, with items that would make their fellow students envious.

For two decades my auntie was the station mistress for their village, running the operations, from ticket sales to signalling, all by herself. Along with an ample plot of land for growing vegetables and tending to farm animals such as chickens and a pig, and being in a pleasant village where no-one held any grudges against them, their lives in 1970s and 1980 socialist Bulgaria were relatively pleasant. And even though they had been constantly threatened their daughters would also inherit with the same low status as them, none of this actually came about. By the 1970s, the Bulgarian Communist authorities realised it’d be better co-opt these “enemies of the people”, particularly their children, who had been born and lived all their lives in “real socialism”, rather than keep this ever-growing group of people in a resentful and antagonistic state – one that could grow to become a potential fifth column. Both my cousins were able to have full access to higher education – one going to teacher’s college in Plovdiv, the other having the privilege of studying in the capital, Sofia.

That’s not to say that my auntie liked her life under Communist Party rule in Bulgaria. As she told me when I reunited with her in 1997, eight years after the fall of communist rule in Bulgaria, she claimed the biggest mistake the Bulgarian communist leadership made was not following the example set by Tito in neighbouring Yugoslavia – if you didn’t like it, here’s your passport and leave. Why keep anyone against their will who could potentially cause trouble on the inside. Let them go. Given the choice, my auntie would’ve gladly left Bulgaria – as she said repeatedly, if she could she would’ve walked on water all the way to Australia.

The thing is… she did have the chance.

No matter how difficult it was being separated from his children, and the Bulgarian authorities certainly did their best to make it as tough as possible, my grandfather still maintained communication, even in secret from his new family in Australia, as I later discovered. For instance, a few years back while going through my grandfather’s papers and documents, I found a curious receipt from 1956 for a wire transfer to Bulgaria via a US bank for the remarkable sum of US$100 – a huge amount the equivalent of the average monthly wage at the time in Australia. The money was directed to his older brother to go towards his entire extended family in Bulgaria. Whether they actually received the money or not, who knows?

Then in 1971, the impossible happened. From the end of WWII right through to the late 1970s, Australia was in dire need of workers. The result was huge waves of migrants coming from Europe – first Brits and Irish, then displaced persons from Eastern Europe, then swarthier people from the Mediterranean. All throughout this time Australia applied a whites-only immigration policy, the criteria for which gradually lessened over the years as the desperation to populate the country intensified. I have no idea how this happened as my grandfather was a man of many secrets and someone who knew no English, but in the late 1960s he initiated the process to sponsor his daughter and son to migrate to Australia. Unlike now, the Australian side gave permission almost instantly – they were, after all, young, with families, very willing to do hard work and, most importantly, white. It was the Bulgarian authorities that needed greater convincing. Now it wasn’t impossible for Bulgarians to leave Bulgaria then, but close enough. Permission to leave Bulgaria at the time came with some hefty criteria. First of all, my grandfather would’ve had to pay a large amount of hard currency to allow for all this to happen – you could call it a ransom. The other was that the potential emigrants from Bulgaria must not have been privy to state secrets, knowledge or skills of value that Bulgaria could not afford to fall into the hands of the devilish scheming capitalists. Well, given they had been denied higher education, they certainly weren’t in that circle, and seeing they were not really wanted in Bulgaria in the first place, they would be no loss. So in a somewhat surprise move, the central authorities in Sofia provisionally approved their application for exit visas in their first step to be able legally to leave Bulgaria.

However…

Before full approval could be granted, they must first be cleared by the police directorate in the town they grew up in. The person who ultimately held the power to decide whether they could go to Australia or not… just happened to be the same police chief who was the immediate boss of their father’s just before he was arrested. In true provincial Balkan style, he still held a grudge, so out of pure Balkan inat, he denied them their approval. Again, the petty-minded nature of the authorities thwarted them. When my auntie recounted how she was in tears and near-suicidal leaving the police station after being told she was not getting the approval to leave her living nightmare.

My auntie has always been a modest and understanding person… OK, not for the gypsies, who she despises with a passion, but she certainly made her peace with the circumstances resulting from her biological father’s escape. As she also said to me once, she doesn’t blame him for escaping. She knew that he knew beforehand what making such an escape will have on his own family – no-one does this lightly. To make such a daring move must have been prompted by something quite severe that had he not done it, most certainly he would have ended in a death camp like the ones in Belene or Lovech.

Now you’d think that the (unexpected) sudden fall of Communist Party rule in 1989 would have opened a wonderfully new chapter of hope and opportunity for my auntie. Well, that’s how it was all painted in the West at the time and since. Well, think again.

Life in the village continued with business as usual… until the railways were primed for privatisation. Her village was on a quiet feeder line that simply wasn’t profitable enough to entice potential private operators to keep running, and so it was closed down. Gone too then was her railway station she was single-handedly running, leaving her unemployed in her late 50s. That’s it – her working life had ended. From then on it was just tending to her crops and animals in their yard. Her husband also retired from his train conductor role, no longer fit enough to endure the weeks of travel required. But he never let go of his role. In his retirement, he’d still walk around the village and surrounding areas with his train conductor hat to talk to anyone and everyone, especially with the large number of Roma people in the area, whom he treated with utmost respect.

When looking through photo albums with my sister when I was a child, we’d chanced on this old black-and-white photo of a young blonde girl. Shocked, I asked our mother: “who’s this person that looks exactly like my sister?” That was of my auntie at age 14. When my sister finally got to meet our auntie, my sister was so shocked and the first thing she said was “this is how I’m going to look like when I’m older! Wow, I’m lucky!”

Back in the hospital ward, I discreetly handed the crisp envelope with the crisp US dollar notes to my auntie, who conveniently kept the envelope under her pillow and not in the bedside table lest it be stolen while she’s sleeping. Don’t ask me then what’s the protocol for handing that money over to the doctor – I left that to the professionals to handle.

In any case, Mission 2 had been accomplished! My work here is done. My cousin then told me that we had to go as she wanted to introduce me to someone.

My cousin had had a decade-long mission of her own. We had started corresponding with each other in the 1990s, and as cousins go, we get on very well. But it was apparent from that first letter my cousin had one intention in mind– to leave Bulgaria and live her true life in the West. My family would’ve wanted to help her to come to Australia, and she certainly would emphasise in her letters that she had funds and the independence not to be a burden on us, but she needed a sponsor before anything could happen. Unfortunately, Australia in the 1990s was no longer like the time when my grandfather could sponsor her mother. Australia at the time had a well-established, robust family reunion immigration program, one that certainly saved my grandmother, her children and her mother from political repression and destitution in 1950s Greece. By the 1990s this program had been tightened and only applied to immediate family members. Unless there were no other family, being a granddaughter, a cousin or niece was not close enough anymore, so we couldn’t help. But my cousin, like so many other ambitious Bulgarians at the time, was still determined to find a way out.

My cousin had a big announcement to make to me; one that would explain the “circumstances” why she couldn’t get to see me when I had first arrived in Sofia at the start of this odyssey. We went to a café in the centre of Sofia, where a guy was waiting for us. He was overweight, wearing somewhat flashy, albeit rip-off, brand name clothes for a Bulgarian man, smoking a cigarette, on his mobile phone, and with an air of arrogance and disinterest to him – in other words, a proper гъзар (gazar).

My cousin introduced me to him. His name is Toni. He barely acknowledges me and goes back to talking on his mobile. And so who’s this Toni, I ask my cousin.
- He’s my fiancé, my cousin replies.

Fiancé! This thing? Come on! My cousin can do way better than this peasant. There has to be more to this.

My cousin later revealed Toni certainly did have something worth going after – a US Green Card. Marrying Toni meant she’d be able to migrate to the land of opportunity, which she did soon after. Now would it be a surprise to you if I tell you that this marriage didn’t last too long, and everyone in the family had this unprompted code of silence never to ask about him or the circumstances of this tryst. Some things are best left untold – why worry us.

By this time, having been through a war zone, a village where I was the centre of attention, crazy driving with blind overtaking on steep cliffs, a string of luck on a journey across borders, and plenty more moments that could get me writing for another 10 instalments, I had enough. If a few weeks in the Balkans could get me wanting to escape, then who am I to judge my cousin or even my grandfather for that matter. The summer rain and no smoking in Canada were looking mighty fine by then.

Now I could write something profound, such as that I found something of myself. I certainly had an experience. It put into perspective the privilege I’ve had in my life. I can go in and out of these worlds and, apparently, still be normal. I’ve been told so.

By the way, my cousin Biljana and her family were able to return to their intact home after all hostilities in Macedonia came to climatic end in mid-August 2001, two weeks after I left, with the signing of the Ohrid Accords – a bad peace to prevent an even worse war. They lived in that house until this year. They’ve sold the place to move to an inner-city apartment in Skopje. Who needs such a house in the outskirts of Skopje, especially when both their children have now left Macedonia for good and now live their true lives in Germany. Macedonia may be at peace, but that alone doesn’t provide enough opportunities for the country’s youth, no matter what ethnicity.

25 years later and my auntie is sprightly octogenarian who tends to her vegetables despite the ever devastating droughts from the intensifying summer heat. No surprises but she’s a huge fan of soap operas – The Bold and The Beautiful used to be her favourite, but now it’s the Turkish and Indian ones. Her husband unfortunately died of Covid during the pandemic, leaving the village without its jokester chef de tren. With the train long gone and no future in agriculture, the village has haemorrhaged people – there used to be 200 people there in 2001; now the official registered population is around 70, but all but 5 of them actually live in the village. The remaining five permanent residents are all widows, with my auntie being the youngest! They couldn’t bear living in anywhere else, not even with their adult children in the cities. They all look after each other, like sisters, otherwise they’re on their own.

Oh, and my auntie never got to meet her father, the man whose action to save himself from certain death came at such a huge price to him, his first wife, his children, their familes, his brothers and sisters and their families.

After I arrived back in Canada, I called my cousin to find out how’s her mother. All went well with my auntie’s operation – the tumour was finally removed and she was left with no more stomach pains. The bribe money did it, for which my auntie and cousin will be forever grateful. Of course, my auntie had been instructed post-op to rest and not do any heavy lifting or arduous tasks for a few weeks. But do you expect a Balkan villager to listen? My cousin told me as soon as they returned to the village, the first thing her mother did was move the heavy vats of sauerkraut and other pickled items she had into their basement, and clean the cupboards.

While on the phone, my cousin asked me what it was like to be in Canada again. I said it was fine. Not as exciting as it was on my odyssey. You can’t smoke everywhere and it’s constantly raining, even if it was August. She’ll find out soon enough when she starts her own odyssey in North America. Did I tell her that I was hassled by the customs officials upon my entry and told them about my odyssey? Nah! I didn’t want to tell her because I didn’t want to worry her.

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“What d’ya want to do now?”

That’s what my old friend Misho said to me around midnight on a Saturday night. We’d been at a local kafich, your typical flashy Balkan café where mainly young people go and I was not yet ready to finish the night.

“Let’s get some beers and enjoy the summer night” I said.

Misho, who was the same age, height and build as me, and someone I’ve known since I was a baby, certainly had a way with people, which made him the ideal post deliverer for a village like the one he lived in – the same one where my grandparents lived and where my father grew up. Nothing seemed impossible for Misho, with his charm, whit and affable manner, he was able to source the beers simply by shouting out to summon the proprietor of another, nearby kafich that was closing up. The proprietor obviously had had a long day, but seeing it was Misho who made the public call, he immediately obliged, and out came two more Skopsko beers for us… as well as a table and some chairs. Before I knew it, a few other young people in the village came and joined us. More beers came out. After a few more minutes, Misho felt that it was too quiet, so he insisted for some music. Just throw caution into the wind and who cares if the whole village won’t be sleeping tonight. Misho asked me what I wanted to hear. Very politely to the point of embarrassment, and knowing that Misho won’t take no for an answer, I requested if by any chance they had anything by Turbo folk star Reni, whose songs in Bulgarian and Serbian were top of the charts across the Balkans at the time. If they do, it’s guaranteed I’ll be up dancing. My wish was their command, and with the speakers on full blast, out came the oriental-sounding initial bars of Opasno te volim (I love you dangerously), my favourite song at the time. That was the cue; off I went in my drunken yet merry state into a solo dance in the middle of the village square for all to see… and judge. I was living life! I’m sure the village is still talking about it.

Looking back, I wonder what was I doing? That was so not normal!

Welcome to Part 4 of 2001: A Balkan Odyssey, my oh-so Balkan trip through Bulgaria and Macedonia. Part 1 went into how this trip started with two missions: 1) find my cousin in Macedonia during the armed conflict there, and 2) pay for the bribe money for my auntie in Bulgaria to have a proper operation to have a stomach tumour removed. Normal things. I’m sure you’ve had this happen to you too.

Part 2 was how I was an “attraction” in the somewhat isolated and outcast village where my relatives live near the Greek border in the southwest corner of Bulgaria. Part 3 had me almost flying off a cliff in a car and bus ride of great luck across the border, how there are only two degrees of separation in Macedonia, and completing mission 1 of 2.

Now it was time to get closer to the frontline.

The last part I said how intoxicating the feeling of ethnic/national unity can be for most – everyone of the tribe in complete camaraderie with each other. It’s always described as a “spirit”. You have the “Christmas spirit”, the “Blitz spirit” etc. There certainly was spirit happening alright, and being amongst “my” people, I was fully taken in by this spirit. At this time of armed ethnic conflict in Macedonia, another spirit was also out of the bottle – a sense of free spirit – countering an impending doom that a terribly fatal tragedy could hit at any moment. Now was the time to live life before it gets easily taken away.

It’s always uncanny for me how growing up and living in Australia, even when I was an infant with assimilation-friendly blonde hair and blue eyes, I still didn’t look “Aussie” enough, i.e. of Anglo-Celtic origin. But being in my father’s home village, where everyone has the same blue eyes as me, and all the guys born the same year as me are all the exact same height as me, it was almost too comforting to be in the majority for once. And seeing that I was presenting as part of the majority, even though I certainly didn’t share the same life experience as my ethnic kin in the village, I certainly did get swept up in their same spirit. One big difference though was I was not a Macedonian citizen at the time, and so I never had to military service, nor was there a true threat, unlike for all those equally aged and heighted guys, that I could be called to be sent to the frontline to fight the Albanian terrorists, to use the Macedonian term (they were “rebels” in the western media). In that case, here I wasn’t the “normal” one.

Having spent far longer than expected in Bulgaria, and with my auntie in Bulgaria due to have her long-awaited stomach tumour operation any time now, my time in Macedonia was limited, so as much as I loved dancing solo in the village square at midnight to Turbo folk hits in my grandparent’s village, I needed to get to Skopje to check in with my auntie there and with my cousins, including Biljana who had fled her house at the start of the armed conflict.

• Even the pop stars get recruited to sing for the cause. Kristina Arnaudova with her 2001 war-time hit Dzvonete chekori herojski (Toll Heroic Marching Steps). Plenty of bravado imagery.

Back then it usually took about 3 hours by bus to get from Kochani to the capital Skopje, factoring in stops to pick up passengers and the mandatory cigarette break along the way. A trip I’ve done many times, but this time it was going to be different, for part of the route would get perilously close to one of the frontlines.

As we were passing Macedonia’s main international airport, about 20 minutes’ drive out to the east of Skopje, the feeling inside the bus turned into an aboding fear. All eyes were focused on our right-hand side to the looming “black mountains” – Skopska Crna Gora/Karadak – otherwise, where the war was. The main road entering Skopje is two kilometres of Arachinovo, an Albanian-populated village where the heaviest fighting had occurred. Well, the village had previously been mixed ethnic Albanian/Macedonian until the ethnic Albanian forces ethnically forced their Macedonian neighbours out at the beginning of that year. 25 years later and despite peace accords, hardly any of those ethnic Macedonians have dared return to reclaim their homes, out of pure intimidation.

As we were approaching Skopje, in the distance, right by where Arachinovo is nestled under the imposing mountains, we could all see a plume of smoke rising. That fear in the bus turned to a dead silence in the bus, only broken by the sobbing of one of the passengers. Was I crazy for even trying to get into Skopje? That was the first time I saw with my own eyes the war I’d been reporting about for months before. Too transfixed on this plume of smoke and wondering whether we’ll be seeing any of the Mil Mi-24 “Dragonfly” armed helicopters or the Sukhoi Su-25 jets flying about (these were purchased from Ukraine, much to the protest of the West; these aircraft were later gifted back to Ukraine in their current war), I didn’t notice that the bus was speeding faster than usual. Actually, so too were all the cars in this area within firing range. I had mixed feelings: glad that the driver was getting us out of there as quick as possible, but also dread of his, and our, need to do so, while also having at the back of my mind a cavalcade of images flash by of bus and car accidents in the Balkans, often with speeding as the cause. No need to worry about that now – just get us the hell out of here!

Not long after, we were all safe and sound (just) at the bus station in Skopje. My cousin Deni and Biljana’s husband Bobi were there waiting for me… primarily to make sure that I don’t end up taking a taxi with the “wrong” company. You see, the war fully entrenched sectarianism in otherwise multiethnic Skopje. Locals there knew which areas, and services, were “theirs”, going as far as which taxi company to use. The walls that separated the communities were imaginary, not physical. People from Northern Ireland or Bosnia and Herzegovina – you know what I mean.

I almost didn’t recognise Deni and Bobo in the sea of men in military fatigues as they too were dressed in them. I’d never seen them dressed like that before, but they had a new calling in their lives. They both had joined the newly formed Macedonian paramilitaries, one with the “Tigers”, the other with the “Lions”, and as they were to tell me, they spent their days going to the frontline and engaging in fighting, and most evenings they would go back to my auntie’s house and to what was otherwise ordinary, everyday family living. This was their new normal.

For my cousin Deni, this was the first time in his adult life that he had some sort of purpose, for he was part of the “lost” generation. Born into a prosperous Yugoslavia, he and many others born in the early 1970s had what could be best described as a “normal” childhood. By the time they were teenagers in the 1980s, their homeland declining economically and fast, but still there was some hope that it’ll all end up fixed by the time they finish school. Nope, that wasn’t the case. All those years of education preparing this generation for adult life working in a self-managed socialist Yugoslavia was all for nothing – that country and system were practically gone by the time of their graduations. Then for the guys there was that other threat – military service in the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). Like all other Yugoslav boys, Deni grew up hearing the legendary stories and learning how proud it was to be in the JNA; however, by the time he was due to enter its ranks, it was now deadly. One of the first casualties in the 1990s Balkan Wars was 19-year-old Macedonian JNA conscript Sasho Geshovski. A crowd of angry protestors in Split, Croatia also tried to lynch Svetancho Nakov, also a Macedonian, who was on his way to rescue Geshovski. Soon after, once full-scale fighting started, conscription to the JNA meant being sent to the Vukovar front, becoming cannon fodder and certain death. Reports were coming back at the time that the lucky ones who escaped the front could find refuge in Vienna where the South African embassy apparently had its doors wide open to them and could fast-track their migration in a last-ditched attempt to boost the number of Whites. The whole of Yugoslav Macedonia started to hide its conscript-age young men, Deni included. For months on end he didn’t see the outside of his home. Macedonia declared its reluctant independence from Yugoslavia in late 1991 and the JNA withdrew from Macedonia in an orderly manner. By that time, Deni was over 20 years old and totally unprepared for the new beast of nationalist-driven capitalism that had been unleashed. He and many others his age had pretty much given up on life by then, only to fill their unemployed existence with heavy smoking, heavy drinking, heavy gambling… and heavy mental health issues to scar them for life.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom for Deni. The year before the war, Deni married a woman, also called Biljana (there are a lot of Biljanas in Macedonia) – a wonderfully chatty person, but if there’s anything that makes her stand out, it’s her highly perceptive nature. She would always cut through the rubbish and see things for what they really are. Like her husband, she was also part of the lost generation, chain smoker and all, but it always seems the women are forced into being more resourceful. If anything was happening in the neighbourhood, Biljana was always the first to know. Any time I want to find out what’s the buzz or vibe on the Macedonian street, I always ask Biljana for the lowdown.

Leaving the bus station in a taxi from the “right” company in the company of my cousin and cousin-in-law, life in Skopje to me appeared normal, despite the war happening not far away. The only apparent differences were the same as what I saw when entering Macedonia – more guys in military fatigues, plus this song on constant rotation. Life went on regardless and people were not going to let the nonstop news, war songs or people in uniform get in their way. They were determined to still be normal.

The destination was my auntie’s place on the very edge of Skopje backing out to the main railway line into and out of the city. Her place had also become the permanent refuge for the young families of her two adult children. Just as we made our final turn onto the street where they lived, there too was a new sign of the war – a sentry post made of sandbags. Now this scared me. This was a visible sign of the war on what’s always been for me a peaceful, if very shabby, street no-one except locals and Skopje bus drivers know exists. They were preparing for potential street battles in the neighbourhood. This was not normal.

At my auntie’s house was my cousin Biljana, the one who I was to find. After months of not knowing of her whereabouts, I finally saw her in person – mission accomplished! Just as our grandmother described, Biljana was fine. She gave me a brief overview of what had happened to her in the past few months since leaving behind her place near the frontline. She was glad to have been in our grandparents’ village with her newborn baby girl and her infant son away from the fighting, but she had to leave the village after the mosquitoes there were devouring her children alive. Trust me, the Kochani mosquitoes, who live in the region’s expansive rice paddies, have the uncanny ability to suss out the DNA of their prey and go only for fresh meat, which basically means anyone who’s not a direct descendant of someone born in the region.

Talking with my auntie, I asked her whether she knew that my father (her brother) had been trying to call her for months now. She didn’t know, but then again, as what my grandmother said, she hadn’t been able to pay the telephone bill for ages, so they most likely had cut them off. That figured.

A few days later, Deni was able to take a day off from his paramilitary duties, giving him and Biljana the opportunity take me to this great new pizzeria on a terrace of the brutalist GTC shopping mall in the centre of Skopje. It did a molto bene pizza Magarita. Surprisingly for a work day, it was peaceful and calm in central Skopje, only for that to be suddenly interrupted by a giant commotion. Everyone at the pizzeria and along the GTC balcony stood up to see where all this noise from coming from. Is it a protest… or something more dangerous than that? The yells and screams were coming from way of the Macedonian parliament building in part view to us. We could see that a whole load of buses had arrived. Pouring out of them were lots of elderly people, most carrying well-stuffed bags, obviously possessions. They were angry. This was not normal.

Wanting to find out what was going on, a person from a table near us shouted down to someone walking past asking if they knew what was going on?

- “Yes, they’re people who’ve just been kicked out of their homes near Tetovo”.

They’d been ethnically cleansed that very day. Buses arrived in their villages, they were given a few minutes to gather whatever they could and forced onto buses to ferry them to “safety”. While on board, the mainly elderly passengers demanded the drivers to drop them off in front of the parliament building they can show the politicians their anger. You can’t continue eating pizza when a situation like that is happening nearby. That’s not normal.

No-one of note was at parliament except security, so some of the grannies then made their way down the road to take out their anger elsewhere. Their targets were anything related to the West, who they claimed was supporting the Albanian insurgents who had ethnically cleansed them from their home villages. The grannies headed to the McDonald’s down the street and started attacking it with their bags and walking sticks. They barely could manage breaking the glass window. If the circumstances were tragic, it would’ve been comical. This incident at Skopje McDonald’s still made it to the CNN international news that evening, though the angle they took on this was, to put it mildly, rather different.

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Most evenings were spent, as per usual for summery July in Macedonia, in the yard in front of my auntie’s house. Bobi would come back from the frontline and give us a dire report from the fighting. All very dramatic. Years later, the perceptive Biljana told me that Bobi was never anywhere near the frontline and almost all of the gallant war stories he told us were more fiction and embellishment than anything else. Credit to him for being such a storyteller.

We’d be sitting there, talking about old times, all while smoking and having some Skopsko beers. But just like that, our conversation would be cut off: tat, tat, tat, tat, tat – the sound of gunfire coming from Arachinovo, only five kilometres away. The first time I heard the gunfire, I ducked. That made everyone laugh. But soon enough, I started getting used to the sound, or so I thought.

My cousin Anna-Maria in Bulgaria had emailed me. It’s happening! Her mother (my auntie) has arrived in Sofia and will be having her long-awaited operation to remove her stomach tumour as soon as possible. We’ll need to get the bribe money ready for the doctor before the operation can be performed. Finally! And even better, I now have the perfect excuse to get out of this pressure cooker punctured by the sound of machine guns. The early-morning bus to Sofia awaits. Even though the initial part of the route fully skirted the frontline, I didn’t care; I wanted out.

My final evening in Skopje with my auntie and cousins. Deni gave me a farewell gift – a special edition t-shirt sporting a cartoon of a Macedonian Tiger paramilitary soldier crushing a black eagle i.e. the Albanian symbol. Blagodaram Deni. I didn’t know how to accept such a gift, but my face screamed “awkward”. Definitely of its time. A few years back I tried searching to see if I still had it – no, it’s disappeared, just like that paramilitary formation.

Back to sitting in the yard and smoking with the family. An eery silence descended upon us. This was not normal for us not to have something to say. The calm even had perceptive Biljana unusually quiet.

Then it happened – a huge blast… and another… and another. This wasn’t gunfire. It was mortar fire. Loud! Close!

And that was it. Back to silence. All my cousins were still casually smoking away as if nothing had happened.

Perceptive Biljana then broke the silence. She looked directly at me and said…

- Look at you! You’re trembling!

I honestly thought I was just as calm as they were. I mean, we’re all in this together, we’re part of the same tribe. But no, perceptive Biljana was right. I noticed my hand was shaking uncontrollably as I was bringing my cigarette to my mouth to inhale.

- See, you’re still normal. Not like us. We’re crazy! All these sounds of war are not normal but we’re now used to it. It doesn’t scare us. That’s not normal. We shouldn’t be used to this but we’re no longer human. You’re still human. And lucky, you can leave this hellhole and stay normal.

Yet again, perceptive Biljana was right.

Early the next day, I set off to Sofia by bus. There was hardly anyone on the bus – probably no more than 10 of us. First stop was Kumanovo, one of Macedonia’s larger towns, with a mixed Macedonian/Albanian/Serbian population. The fighting had not reached Kumanovo, thankfully, but the neighbouring Albanian-populated Lipkovo region in the “black mountains”, the scene of heavy battles, was in full view. Kumanovo had been left without tap water because of the fighting in Lipkovo had caused major damage to the water system feeding the town from the reservoirs high in the black mountains, though the rumour going round then was Kumanovo’s water supply had been poisoned.

To get to Kumanovo meant fully skirting the war zone. Here are some shots of what it looked like.

It looks quite normal; deceptively peaceful.

Kumanovo was looking very shabby. Given the water situation, and the ethnic tensions in such a mixed town, Kumanovo looked almost abandoned. At the bus station, we weren’t even allowed off for a cigarette! I quickly sneaked in a photo. The bus driver noticed and instructed me no more photos.

Quick, let’s get to the border. I want to get out of here. This is not fun. I want to be normal while I still can!

About two hours later and we’re at the Macedonian/Bulgarian border. One final bit of crazy. The first time I crossed this border, in 1997, I waited 5 hours. This time, not only were all the Macedonian border officials wearing military fatigues too, but the passport and customs processing on both sides was so efficient, it took us a record-breaking 15 minutes from arrival on the Macedonian side to departure from the Bulgarian side. Unbelievable! The armed conflict brought in professionalism. Why can’t we have that as “normal”?

Done! I was out of the crazy place. But was I still normal? I mean, next stop was Sofia where I had to provide a hefty amount of US dollars so as to pay off a doctor to do their job properly. Is that normal?

Coming up in the final instalment of 2001: A Balkan Odyssey, find out how to bribe a doctor in Bulgaria, and I discover my cousin succeeded in accomplishing her own personal mission. Normal?

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So I was supposed to be on a very important and family-pressured mission. You know, that usual thing where you have to find a family member who’s been made a refugee, or to use that conveniently worded term “internally displaced person” to hide the fact that you can still be a refugee in your own country. But I had been distracted by being an “attraction” in the village where my uncle, auntie, cousins and their families live in the once-forbidden border zone close to Bulgaria’s border with Greece. That was covered in Part 2. OK, I admit… needing to get away from Siika, a woman on her own mission, was also an incentive.

Having spent too much of my time in the village, partly in avoiding the inevitable trauma, I still needed to get to Macedonia quick smart. The reports coming from there were not good. I had for months beforehand been constantly reporting via a radio program to the Macedonian community in Adelaide, Australia of the armed ethnic conflict that had erupted in their homeland that year. People being ethnically cleansed from once mixed villages, security officers being captured and burnt alive, ethnic-based riots in Macedonian cities where Albanian and Muslim-owned business were attacked by mobs… it all sounded, ominously, too familiar. This is how the then-recent wars to the north in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo started too. Up to then, Macedonia, potentially the biggest powder keg of them all, had avoided any ethnic-based armed conflicts, though there had been a few incidents throughout the 1990s that could have been the spark for one. Macedonians were quite proud of this restraint, to the point of arrogance (guilty as charged!), though the reality is that had greater outside powers wanted a war, they could have set one off at any time regardless of what the locals have to say or do. As my parents would say, never say it can’t happen here – and that for them also included peaceful and wealthy Australia, their country of residence.

Getting from the village to the Bulgarian/Macedonian border was not a problem. My cousin relishes every chance to get out of the village and speed around blind corners on the tight mountain roads characteristic of the Pirin mountains, all while his Whitesnake-fan wife screams at him to drive safer. Frankly, not a good mix. That my cousin’s battered Audi had a giant crack across the windscreen, as well as a weird sticker on the side window written in Hungarian that appears to be some parking permit, didn’t phase us in the slightest. The car was loaded with some other friends who’d come along the ride to bid me farewell. And we are not going to apologise, except perhaps for our impending hearing problems, for having Sofi Marinova’s Вълшебен танц and Despina Vandi’s Ανάβεις Φωτιές on at full blast and repeat for the whole way.

True to form, while my cousin and his reckless driving showed he had no qualms spinning us with him off a cliff and to our fiery deaths, he was deeply concerned to the point of anxiety about how I’ll make it from the other side of the border to my father’s home village outside of Kochani where his parents, i.e. my grandparents, lived. If it wasn’t for the expensive green card insurance needed to be purchased at the border, he would’ve loved to have taken me all the way as there were plenty more blind corners and rockfalls to dodge, plus he’d be able to pick up a sack or two of high quality rice grown in the area. My cousin had nothing to worry about; I’d travelled in the area before. The plan was to catch one of the many waiting taxis on the Macedonian side to the nearby town of Delchevo and from there catch one of the regular buses to Kochani, about 1.5 hours at most down the road. Simple!

My grandparents knew I was coming – I had given them a quick call the day before to tell them I’ll be at their place tomorrow. “We’ll be here. Where else?” said my grandmother. Strange… I could call them from Bulgaria but all attempts over the past few months for my father to phone them from Australia only ended up with that dreaded drone tone.

“Are you sure you’ll be OK?” my cousin asked me for the 100^th time as we pulled up to the Bulgarian side of the border with Macedonia. “I’ll be fine… wait, look over there!” as I was pointing to a bus also waiting to cross the border. It was an Avto Atom bus! Now what pray tell is an Avto Atom bus? Avto Atom just happens to be the name of the formerly self-managed bus enterprise cooperative based in Kochani. Practically every major town, and some of the larger villages, in Yugoslavia had their own self-managed bus co-op; the bigger the place, the bigger the enterprise. They had names like Lasta Beograd, Nish Express, Jugoturist Kumanovo, Transcop Bitola… or most often [town name]-Trans. But Kochani’s had the best name of them all. Many of these bus companies still exist today, though for most their operations have dwindled. Some didn’t survive privatisation, and whenever that happened, that was usually devastation for public transport for the home town. Delchevo, for instance, during the pandemic saw its local bus enterprise go bankrupt, leading to the closure of its bus station and the end of any bus service to and from the town. Avto Atom Kochani, by the way, is currently up for sale, so if you’re interested, make an offer!

What an amazing coincidence! The Avto Atom bus must be returning to Kochani, so it’s heading exactly where I have to go. I pointed this out to my cousin, and so he said “well, what you’re waiting for? Go to the driver and ask him if you can hitch a ride.” Which is exactly what I did. The driver had taken a group of Macedonian tourists to Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast, and he was on his way back to pick up another group. I agreed that I’d pay him the normal price for a ticket – at the time: 100 denars (US$2). All I have to do is wait for him on the Macedonian side of the border. Deal!

My cousin was massively relieved. I said goodbye to my cousin, his wife and entourage. They reversed back into Bulgaria with the two songs still on loop.

After having gone through Bulgarian border control and customs without incident (phew!), it was then a short walk up to the Macedonian side of the border, where in the border control booth was a woman with the most piercing blue eyes. Macedonian border officials always find it intriguing that I have a middle name (because Macedonians don’t) and that it’s Nick, which to them is “Nitsk”. My name should have been Nikola, in honour of my grandfather, but at the time in Australia that was one of the most popular female names (albeit spelt Nicola), and so the compromise with Nick – a tale I always have to say when crossing borders in the Balkans. I mention “Nick Nolte” to the guards and then all is fine.

The woman, whose name is Aneta, asks me the usual questions: where have you been? (in Bulgaria with cousins); where are you heading? (to Kochani to see my grandparents). “Ah, Kochani. To eat frogs!” That’s the usual thing. Macedonians associate Kochani with three things: rice, being the tidiest town in Macedonia, and the local delicacy – frog legs. Mind you, I’ve been going to visit Kochani all my life, and have even lived in the area… and never once have I seen frog legs on the menu, served by anyone or grilled at the many events I’ve been to there, so no idea where this one comes from. “How are you going to get to Kochani?” asked Aneta showing the same deep level of concern my cousin displayed. I told her an Avto Atom bus is about to cross the border and I’ve made an arrangement with the driver. Aneta was pleased: “I’m so relieved. But if there’s any problems, don’t you worry. We’ll sort something out for you. We’ll make sure that your grandmother doesn’t worry about you.” I couldn’t believe it – a Macedonian border guard being so kind and thoughtful?! Normally people in the Balkans fear the often boorish border officials, who are most notorious for being the most corrupt of public servants in the region. I seriously couldn’t believe my luck. What’s happening?

After having a wonderful chat with Aneta, who I was to encounter a number of times over the years later crossing this border point and would always make me coffee, I went to position myself at a prominent spot right by a duty-free shop (djuti-fri-shop in Macedonian). Just as I plonked my bags down… clink! Oh no, the bottle of Bulgarian vodka I bought as a present for my alcoholic grandfather (yes, I know, I’m an enabler) had shattered. Now he’d appreciate a good vodka from Bulgaria as they do a better job of it than what’s available in Macedonia, and no point getting any rakija as my grandfather has a whole basement full of the stuff… shhh! Don’t tell anyone! I was sad that the bottle broke… and so too were some of the Macedonians in the duty-free shop nearby for me. Oh well, breaking glass has always been a sign of good luck in Macedonia, so long as it wasn’t a mirror.

After a few anxious minutes wondering whether the driver had gone off without me, the Avto Atom bus finally came into sight as it made its way through the border. I started waving frantically and the driver saw me and stopped.

Deal in place. Off we went. I was in the country at war.

And that a war was happening was first apparent by the apparel. Lots of army fatigues. Whether it be trousers, t-shirts or jackets, it seemed every guy under 40 had at least one item on with army fatigues. You were not someone unless you had camouflage. Pretty much all the young guys, all of whom had done military service, had been called up to do refresher reserves, so things were being prepared for something bigger. Yet another one of the those ominous familiarities of recent events further north.

As a two-hour drive to Kochani was ahead of us, it was the perfect time to find out from the driver, Trajcho, about the latest. He said what was obvious – the mood was tense. No-one really knew what was happening, but thank god that none of the fighting had spread from the concentrated areas in Macedonia’s northwest. Not that it was likely for the fighting to spread: eastern Macedonia is solidly ethnic Macedonian, with small communities of Turkish-speaking Roma, as well as ethnic Turks (Merhaba Atidje Muratova of Honeyland and DJ Ahmet!). You could count the number of Albanians in this part of Macedonia with your fingers, and the beef in this conflict was just between Albanians and Macedonians… so far.

What Trajcho did say was a positive is that there’s a sense of camaraderie and community amongst people, so people have been kind to each other. This was something I was to observe constantly during this time in Macedonia. Normally, Macedonians can be a bit rough and unpleasant to each other, especially if they’re strangers. We are alert and suspicious most of the time – a product of many centuries and many instances of betrayal and wrongdoing. Macedonians even have a number of songs, such as this popular track that calls for all traitors to be damned. And who is the traitor? Often, it’s one’s own sibling or someone considered otherwise to be a close friend. Looking at how many of Macedonia’s heroes ended up being shot, betrayal has played an oversize role. But not now. It was as if all the opium poppies that can be found in Macedonia’s countryside in abundance had been burnt and the wafting aroma had made everyone so blissful and euphoric. But that’s what had happened – the intoxicating and just as addictive essence of national unity. That’s why you get Brits who were born decades after WWII go on about the Blitz spirit in such glowing terms, totally airbrushing or, more likely, ignorant of the then horrible circumstances. Or how a Ukrainian friend of mine told me how “wonderful” that the war in his homeland has brought everyone together. A lovely feeling, and I know it, but to achieve this unity means rallying around a common enemy, a sentiment that needs constant refuelling, and that fuel ends up being raw hate. The thing is that the society that forms the common enemy is also experiencing the same euphoria of unity, fuelled by a hate for their common enemy – your community.

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Just as we go through Delchevo, a man starts waving at the bus. The bus driver suddenly stops. “It’s a friend of mine” Trajcho tells me. Fair enough. The more the merrier. The man gets on, says hi to Trajcho and then looks at me. I’ve seen that look on his face before, and always in the Kochani area. It’s often because I look like my father. “You look like someone I know. You don’t live in Kochani, don’t you?” he asks me.
- No, I’m from Australia
- But you look like someone I know. Someone from Kochani
- You probably know my father
- Who’s your father?
- Do you know Mile Nasev?

Yeah, government names rarely work with people not only in Macedonia but all throughout the Balkans. Surnames, particularly in eastern Macedonia, only truly became permanent when the communists started maintaining proper records of people in the 1950s, and most villages, even most families, will have more than one person in them with the exact same name. Nicknames then are the most important identifiers.

- What’s your father’s nickname?
- Džajkata

And that was it, the lightbulb moment!

- Your Džajkata’s son?! Oh my god, you look just like your father! Trajcho, didn’t you recognise him? It’s Džajkata’s son. How’s your father. I used to play in the same football team as him. You know why he’s called Džajkata?

Yes, I know why. In his younger years, my father was the best footballer player in the village, and so he was nicknamed after Yugoslavia’s then best footballer, Dragan Džajić. My father displayed the same flair on the football pitch as, and even bore a physical resemblance with, the Red Star left-winger – also my father’s favourite position. However, my grandfather thought my father spent too much time playing football and not enough time studying, so his football career came to a thunderous and embarrassing end when once his father came onto the field wielding a stick ready to chase my father off mid-match in front of the whole village.

So this old friend of my father’s was Vancho, who was overjoyed by our chance meeting. “I saw your father last year when he visited. How’s your father in Adelaide?”

Trajcho’s ears pricked up. Excitedly, he asked me “Adelaide? Now I know your father! So do you know Milica? Milica Ivanova? Goran’s wife. Their son is Dragan.”
Of course I know them! Milica is one of my mother’s closest friends. Dragan is my brother’s best friend. Goran works with my father.

Small world! Well, it’s only two degrees of separation when it comes to Macedonians, especially when it’s people from the same region. We’re all practically related.

I knew that Milica had worked in accounts before the family migrated to Australia, but I didn’t know it was for Avto Atom. Trajcho and Milica had known each other from kindergarten. They used to be neighbours.

Having all of us worked out who we were, we had a great old chat on the trip to Kochani. Lots of politics, stuff about mutual friends, crazy old stories back from the “good ol’ days” – the usual stuff.

In what seemed like a wink, the rice fields of Kochani appeared in front of us. As we were closing in on the bus stop known locally as fabrikata (“the factory”, even though the factory it refers to was long gone), Vancho pointed out and yelled “look, there’s your dedo Koljo waiting for you on the side of the road”. He was in the Slav squat along with one of my second cousins. I said my farewells to Vancho and promised to let my father know that we met, and then I had the 100 denars ready to give to Trajcho. No, he was offended: “What the hell are you doing that for? Buy yourself something good with that money. Get going! Your grandfather’s waiting for you!” How about it – a free ride!

OK, so now to face the music. A short walk through the dusty unpaved streets of the village to a modest house close to the river near the main square of the village –my grandparents’ place. My grandmother was thrilled to see me. Though overjoyed to see my grandparents that the mass of relatives who had come to see me, and having had such a great journey that day, I had to calm myself and bring up the elephant in the room. After the usual pleasantries, and dutifully accepting my grandmother’s offer to eat lunch (which happens late around 3 pm in Macedonia), I psyched myself up for the worst and finally asked for the details we (and you) want to know…

- Babo, where’s Biljana and her family? How is she?

Not even looking up from the oven over which she was preparing my lunch, she just said “she’s fine”.

This was way too casual.

- So where are they? What’s happened to them. We haven’t heard from them in months?

My grandmother began the story.

So after they left their house, near the frontline at the time, they went to my auntie’s (her mother’s) house at the other, then safer, side of Skopje. But then they could hear the mortar and gun fire from the new frontline only kilometres from there. The constant noise of war scared the children, so they had spent most of the past few months in the village with my grandparents far from harm’s way. They had actually returned to my auntie’s house only a few days before. Her husband, who had a new military role, could go with a police escort to go and check on their home, which was untouched, thankfully, though they were scared that looters or robbers will come and steal their belongings. Otherwise, all was fine. They were lucky as they were relatively untouched… unlike many others.

My grandmother then innocently asked how come we didn’t know?

- Well, my father has been trying to call for months, but the lines seem cut.
- Yes, well, your auntie hadn’t paid her phone bill for ages so they probably restricted any international access to her.

As I was to find out later, there was another reason.

So my cousin was fine after all that, though a little shell-shocked and concerned about whether they’ll ever return to their home.

Still, I was a bit annoyed. We’d been worried sick for her, thinking the worst had happened. We have friends in Australia – refugees from Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina; Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Yugoslavs, whatever; who had been forced to move twice and suffered immensely because of it, so we know what the trauma and despair of losing your home looks like.

So I bravely confronted my formidable grandmother (wish me luck!)

- So why didn’t anyone tell us that Biljana was all fine?

The answer?

- We didn’t want to tell you because we didn’t want to worry you.

Yes, that response again. Eyeroll. Facepalm.

Crazy, I know. But if this is crazy, then I haven’t experienced anything yet. I soon see what how wars make people go truly crazy. But will I join in with the craziness? That’s in Part 4 when I get much closer to the frontline than I expected…

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I left off Part 1 of this Odyssey in the Balkans with how I was in the village where my uncle and all his offspring lived – a place of untrustworthy misfits during Communist Party rule in Bulgaria’s forbidden southern border zone. When I was there, the village was with water for only one hour a day, and the locals saw me as a curious atraktsiya, to use the term my cousin’s wife (a huge Whitesnake fan, I must mention – très Bulgarian) described me.

OK, last time I didn’t say how come I was the “attraction” but I did give some background as to why I would draw such attention. In one word – isolation. As the village had been cut off as a result of politics, geography and economics, but ultimately all to do with the nearby border, it wasn’t the type of place where any foreigners, whether related to anyone in the village or not, did, or could, venture. So for many in the village, I was the first foreigner they had ever met… and especially someone from the mythical, and wealthy, west. I was a living being of the near-aliens they had first seen before 1989 on banned western films and TV shows on smuggled VHS tapes, or the occasional western TV show or news footage shown on government TV, and then later on soap operas, comedies (Friends!) and MTV music video clips. Does that make me a Chandler, a Ross or a Joey? I dressed differently from them, behaved differently and seen things that they could only dream about. Even the seemingly small things were amplified – apparently I walked differently (much faster) and even ate differently (messier and much less bread). It was an innocent curiosity that, as we would witness soon enough, I caught at its tail end.

This fascination and curiosity weren’t always that innocent though. My cousin did warn me straight off that one particular girl in the village will be very keen to meet me. Let’s call her Siika (not her real name, privacy and all – you owe me!). Lo and behold, he was right. Siika knew what she wanted and was determined to get it. She considered herself too big and too good for this one-horse town. She wanted out! And her ingenious and original plan to achieve her true destiny – marry a rich foreigner.

Wherever I was, so was Siika. First off, she launched her charm offensive – the googly eyes, the feigned interest in everything I had to say, the put-on laugh at every half-baked and totally unfunny joke I’d say. Sorry to say Siika but none of those rookie tactics worked, no matter how hard you tried. It was too much. I then started to avoid her, which was a hard task as she was practically part of the furniture at my cousin’s café (she, like most of the other twentysomethings in the village, was unemployed). Siika eventually got the picture. But she wasn’t going to give up, so one time she just blurted it out to me: “Let’s get married. You don’t have to love me, but I’ll make it worth your while. I’ll pay you back.” Her bold move caught me by surprise, but instinct has a way of instantly providing the best rebuttal in such gotcha situations. I told her I couldn’t marry her, adding something soppy of the sort as “I believe in true love and the sanctity of marriage” blah blah. Hey, anything to get her off my back. With her best opportunity in ages thwarted, she was, to put it mildly, not happy with me.

Things were to supposed to have been different for the village by then, but over decade after the end of the Cold War, the Greek border twenty kilometres to the south was still closed. During communist times, the village was in the closely monitored border zone straddling the highly volatile fault line separating the west and NATO on one side (Greece) and the east and Warsaw Pact on the other (Bulgaria). If World War III had broken out, this would have been one of the flashpoints for that brief moment before nuclear annihilation. It wasn’t just the prospect of the end of the world that made the border fatal. Prior to 1989, anyone approaching it without special permission on the Bulgarian side, let alone attempt to cross it, would be arrested or, as did happen on occasion, shot dead. I only found out recently of the fate of the man, a local Turk, who shared the prison cell with my grandfather in 1948. Many years of maltreatment and torture in the communist-era Bulgarian prison system left this Turkish man crippled and could only walk using crutches. The final straw for him happened in the mid-1980s when the Bulgarian Communist Party embarked on a last-ditch nationalist populism campaign – the “Revival Process” forcing all of Bulgaria’s Turks to adopt “Bulgarian” names, him included. With nothing to lose, the old Turkish man decided to limp his way towards the border intending to escape to Turkey. Needless to say, he didn’t make it across the border, for even frail old men were not spared the unforgiving aim of the border guard’s rifle.

During Ottoman times, the course south along the Mesta river (the central feature of Kapka Kassabova’s Elixir) heading to the Aegean Sea was the region’s natural trade route. The border finalised after World War I cut that route. With the Cold War over for over a decade then, the border should have been reopened. The road to the border had already been renovated, and new passport control booths and customs hall constructed, all in preparation for this eventuality. But seeing that the EU was stumping the funds, an environmental impact assessment had to be done… which found the area immediately before the border to be a migration path for brown bears. The Dutch in particular insisted this path could not be disturbed. Weighing the options, a technically complex and expensive tunnel needed to be built. This would add years to the project and require more EU funds to achieve. The locals would just have to wait.

How do you think this tunnel plan in favour of the bears went with the local population?

Not good.

In 1998 brown bears were declared a protected species in Bulgaria and the ancient tradition of forcing them to dance for people’s entertainment became illegal. This being Bulgaria, the law was not thoroughly applied. I still saw one dancing bear in Gotse Delchev in 2003 and it wasn’t until 2007 that the last dancing bear was finally rescued. A sanctuary in the nearby village of Belitsa (also the former site of a uranium mine) was set up for these bears, with Brigit Bardot’s animal welfare fund being one of the prime sponsors. Word had it that each bear had a monthly upkeep stipend of 250 euros – more than the average monthly local wage at the time. And so, the destitute locals were not impressed that the bears, who they deemed to be merciless predators, were getting more money and attention than they were. Many locals half-jokingly suggested at the time that it’d be better if they all dressed as bears to elicit greater western sympathy for their plight.

The tunnel was completed, eventually, and the border opened in 2005. This allowed Greeks foremost to come over to this isolated corner of Bulgaria to buy fresh produce and avail themselves to services at much lower prices than back home. Dentists in particular did a roaring trade! Soon after came the Greek businessmen to open sweatshops to employ locals at much lower wages and in worse working conditions than in Greece.

But there was a far more resounding event before that…

In April 2001, the Bulgarian and Greek foreign ministers ceremoniously walked hand-in-hand across the main border crossing between the two countries at Kulata/Promachonas – signifying the end of visa requirements for Bulgarian citizens for short stays in the EU. Around the same time, the European Commission declared Bulgaria and Romania would be joining the EU by 2007 (the EU has learnt its lesson since then and no longer announces set deadline years for the entry of any new member states). Soon after, programmes were launched permitting Bulgarian and Romanian citizens greater access to work opportunities in EU countries. This came in the form of self-employment visas in the UK or, in greater numbers, low-skill and often dangerous jobs in the booming construction industry in Spain and Portugal, often attracting the army of older unemployed men in Bulgaria’s destitute villages. What this mean was the isolation of the past was gone! Bulgarians (and Romanians) of all socio-economic backgrounds could be found all throughout western Europe and beyond. And the impact was quick. Come 2004, when I was back in the village for Christmas, I was no longer the only foreigner in the village. Some who had left the village to work in the EU married partners in their new country of employment. Everyone in the village enthusiastically informed me there’s an Englishwoman in the village (married to a villager working in England, of course), and I got to meet the Portuguese wife of the cousin of my cousin… in my cousin’s house. No longer was I an atraksiya.

The signs of isolation did linger in other ways. While in the village, posters started appearing that Bulgarian Roma singing sensation Sofi Marinova was to have a “koncert” that Thursday evening in the nearby town. Great news for me as I was a big Sofi fan. It was also a great opportunity for some downtime for my cousin, just as big a Sofi fan as me, who, when not working for the local electricity company in the emergency maintenance unit, was also running the “Australia” café. This was our opportunity to have a proper night out. It was settled – we had to go!

The “koncert” was actually a live performance at a local restaurant. My cousin and our group of friends had a brilliant table (merci Cousin!). The house band started the show with some Greek music – very popular in the region as they could, and often, listen to Greek radio. Off the band fired with Vasilis Karras’ classic 1992 zeibekiko number Den pao pouthena. Now, I too am a big fan of Greek music and dance, and if there’s something that’ll get me up onto the dansing, then it’s a zeibekiko. Kef and merak won over me, and so, off I whirled myself to become the true atraksiya. The crowd was amazed! They all started clapping for me (out of tune) and shouting out opa! Thankfully no-one attempted to break a plate (a complete no-no in Greece), and this was before the time paper napkins would be thrown on the dance floor (now a common feature in Greek and Bulgarian nightclubs – safer than plates). But what surprised me by all this was despite being a mere 20 kilometres from the Greek border, the people here treated the dance I was doing, something very Greek, as exotica from some faraway country. To a great degree, it was through the lens of a cliché not much different from how western tourists see Greece. The atraksiya was more Zorba the Greek than me enjoying myself. Despite many of them having listened to many a Greek song in their lives, none of them could dance a zeibekiko, which then meant they didn’t truly understand the whole point of these specific Greek songs and dance: to release dertia (a Turkish-origin Greek word meaning “pains” or “anxieties”) in a personal fight against a cruel world. This proved the nearby border was more than some imaginary line; it was also state of mind.

Fast forward to 2026: Bulgaria and Greece are both in the Schengen zone, have the euro as their currency and are military allies. At the border itself past the bear tunnel, the passport control booths and the custom hall are now empty. With border checks gone, people just drive through, with just a sign to greet them. The previously stark economic differences between both sides are now almost all gone, thanks to Bulgaria’s modest economic growth but more so to the massive drop in Greece’s standard of living post-2010 economic crisis. The Greeks no longer go north to shop in Bulgaria, except for cheaper booze and petrol, while Bulgarians now head south to Greece to holiday and dance zeibekiko. Still, go to the Staro bure/To palaio varelaki (Old Barrel) taverna in Gotse Delchev not even 30 minutes drive from the Greek border and the decor is kitschy Greek.

By the way, Siika also had to be at the Sofi Marinova concert (stalking much!), but she brought a friend along. No, not a new suitor of hers – a special friend, also from the village and, as always, dressed fully in white I had seen him before; where else but at my cousin’s café… and apparently the look on my face was so priceless that my group of friends in the village all laughed. They knew what was going on in my mind when I first saw him. With his exaggerated feminine mannerisms and demeanour, anyone could tell straight away he was gay. As I asked with that shocked look on my face: “Who is that? Azis?” I was surprised there was an openly gay guy in the village. Now, I had grown up being fed tales that unlike in the decadent west where I grew up in, there were no gays whatsoever in the Balkans. Seriously? I should’ve known better going by track record – for example, my father would also convincingly claim there were such things as Macedonian dodo birds. But this was the first time I saw someone obviously gay in a rural Balkan setting. Later I was told he was the person who had the most sex in the village: the local guys would prefer “letting off steam” with him as there was no threat of him getting pregnant. The code (until recently) was that if you get a girl pregnant, you marry her. Condoms? “Real men” never used them, despite the risks.

Things have changed immensely since then, mostly for the better, for straight people. Can’t say the same for everyone else. While at the time there was a muted hush talking about people who were not entirely straight, the discourse since then has become much more polarised in Bulgaria, as witnessed with the yearly stand-off in Sofia between the LGBT+ and family-values parades.

By the way, if you’re wondering, Siika did eventually find the man she wanted. Result! Last I heard of her was that she ended up in Italy and into the arms of an elderly and wealthy benefactor. Still, my cousins joke with me how Siika for me was the “one who got away”.

Two weeks into my stay in the village and still just water for an hour a day. Frustrations were growing. I mean, how long does it take to fix a pipe? But more to the point, how naïve of me to ask such silly questions. The locals knew better, even the children. This is how the conversation I had revealing how the locals saw things panned out…

- Do you see that village over there [pointing at the distance]?
- Yes
- And that village and that village [more pointing]?
- Yes
- They all have water. They’re on the same water system as our village.
- OK
- Our village and the neighbouring don’t have water because we’re being punished
- Punished? For what?
- For voting for the “wrong” party.

At the 1999 local elections, the village voted for the mayorship the then-recently legalised Macedonian party OMO Ilinden. In the last instalment I explained how the village came to be populated by “politically unreliable” people during Communist Party rule, many of whom were, or the descendants of those, tainted in relation to the Macedonian Question. As a result, most of the villagers did not identify as Bulgarians but as ethnic Macedonians. This was made quite clear to me when I was in the village the previous time, in 1997, where I was proudly shown the Macedonian sunburst symbol on the façade of the newly built chapel at the edge of the village. OMO Ilinden, which represents the country’s small community of people who identify as Macedonians distinct from Bulgarians, had been banned just like most other ethnic-, religious- or regional-based parties in Bulgaria, though the paradox is how can a party be banned for representing an ethnic minority that supposedly doesn’t exist. However, to tick some European Commission boxes in its efforts in its EU accession bid to display that the country is a robust democracy and respects ethnic and cultural minorities, the Bulgarian constitutional court eventually allowed OMO Ilinden to be legally registered. Disclaimer: my uncle is a member of this party. Once permitted to participate at the 1999 local elections, the OMO Ilinden candidate decisively won the mayorship for the village. The problems started soon after. Using the well-tuned punitive tricks from the recent past, the villagers felt that turning off the water, ostensibly for “repairs”, was the main tactic to teach them there are repercussions for not voting the “correct” way. Pretty much as soon as it had been legalised, OMO Ilinden was promptly banned again (and remains so, despite numerous European Court of Human Rights judgements ordering Bulgaria otherwise). At the following local elections in 2003, the incumbent OMO Ilinden mayor stood as an independent, but the villagers had learnt their lesson and went back to voting how they should. That’s the power of not having water.

And what do the villagers consider themselves to be now? Most of the people who identified ethnically as Macedonians were either refugees or the offspring of refugee parents born in what is now Greece just over the southern border – most of them have now either passed away or are very elderly. The overwhelming majority of villagers now are at least second-generation born within the current borders of Bulgaria, and predominantly identify as Bulgarian. They see themselves no different from people who live in other side of the country. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who still identify as ethnic Macedonians – there are, but nowhere near as many nor blatantly as before. It’s rare to see a Macedonian flag flying in a front yard in the village anymore. The current state of the Macedonian sunburst on the chapel mirrors that of the village’s current Macedonian identity – where it once was quite obvious, now it has been given a whitewash obscuring it to an extent that you’ll hardly notice it unless someone points it out to you. Try finding the sunburst in the picture of the chapel below. My cousins now proudly hurl the Bulgarian flag on national holidays from the balcony of their house. Their father doesn’t approve, but his children are adults and they can make their own decisions. They’re from different generations. They’re no longer untouchables like before.

The border determines the fortunes of the village. It was the border that transformed most of the villagers and their ancestors into outcasts in the first place; it was the border that isolated the village and region when the traditional trade route south connecting them to the world was cut off; it was the border during the Cold War under extreme surveillance that entrenched that isolation; and now that the border has largely disappeared, more physically if not mentally, that has released the village to the outside world. The outside world… that reminds me of something…

Wait!

Biljana!

I almost forgot about my cousin Biljana, over on the other side of the other nearby border.

What am I doing here basking in the attention of being an attraction? Finding her and her family after all was one of the two reasons why I’m on this Balkan odyssey. Stiga! I need to get over the border into Macedonia post-haste. No more distractions. It’s time to enter a country at war…

p.s. There are so many more stories, characters and history about this village to tell. I’ll have to come back to it in future posts.

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It’s the end of July 2001. I’ve arrived back to Vancouver, Canada, in a thud. I had been briefly based here, if you could call it that, and in true Vancouver summer style, it was pouring with rain and a temperature of 14­ degrees Celsius. Yes, the Vancouverians on the plane didn’t expect anything less after their return from sunny Europe.

Going through Customs, of course I had to be stopped. The usual interrogation questions start.

- Where have you been?
- I’ve been in Bulgaria and Macedonia via London
- How long were you there for?
- Most of this month.
- What was the purpose of your trip?
- I had to find my relatives who had been ethnically cleansed in the war there, and then I had to make arrangements so that my auntie can have an operation to have a tumour removed from her stomach.

You know – the usual.

Already I could see the red lights flashing in the heads of the Canadian customs officials. I mean, how many times have they heard those excuses? OK, I wasn’t being 100% honest here… but I was no idiot to be blatant enough to tell them that the “arrangements” were actually having to provide bribe money – because THAT’S the suspicious bit.

Before I knew it, my huge backpack was being ripped wide opened and all its contents spilling out to be thoroughly inspected. OK, little naïve me was wondering at first why this was all happening. After all, I had been telling, granted, mostly the truth. But then it dawned on me. A step back, a small dose of empathy and getting out of my Balkan box, I took stock of what I had declared. That’s when it occurred to me… wow, my story must sound mighty dodgy… and that’s when it dawned on me: they think I’ve done a drug run. That’s why they’re checking all my stuff with a fine-tooth comb. Looking back, I don’t blame them!

So I let them go do their intense search knowing very well that they’re not going to find anything spicy. Let’s consider it training for them.

After what seemed an eternity, the Canadian customs officials realised based on my relatively relaxed demeanour that I was being honest and so they stopped. And you have to appreciate the sincerity of the Canadians – they apologised (of course, they’re Canadian) and flat out admitted to me that my story did honestly sound too far-fetched to be true. I said that I wish it had been like that.

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So here’s what happened to me in 25 years ago in July 2001…

In my final instalment of Tales from Ethnic Radio, I detailed my final six months presenting a Macedonian radio program in Australia. I had left the program in June 2001 to pursue an opportunity to be based in Vancouver, Canada, taking elderly North Americans on guided trips around the world. During those preceding six months, I had been reporting about the armed conflict that had broken out in Macedonia. This conflict had a personal element for me – the last time I had heard from my cousin Biljana and her family was when in March 2001, a day after returning home from hospital where she had given birth to her second child, she and her family decided that they needed to escape the enroaching frontline, grabbed a few sentimental items, locked the door on their house and fled… and that no-one in my family in Australia heard from them after that.

It was now late June 2001. I had been in Vancouver for two weeks, totally bewildered at what I had put myself in. Also, I couldn’t believe that you couldn’t smoke in nightclubs, which was a major red-line for me at the time, and let’s not talk about the puritanical Canadian drinking laws. The tour company had told me that they needed at least another month to decide whether to take me on, which was a bit of a kick to the teeth, and so I was at a bind. Did I really want to be in smoke-free Canadian suburbia for the next month waiting for what seemed like something that was not going to happen?

Meanwhile, my parents were frantically contacting me from Australia reminding me that for more than 3 months we haven’t heard anything from Biljana and her family. Likewise, we hadn’t received any letters from the relatives in Macedonia and every time we’d make a phone call, we’d be greeted with silence. So my mother wondered would it be possible if I can just pop over to Macedonia and go find her? Because it’s just easy like that.

At the same time, my Bulgarian cousin Anna-Maria was also frantically contacting me. Yet again she needed my help, except this time it wasn’t for me to help her migrate to Australia. Her mother (my auntie) needed to leave her village in nowhere, central Bulgaria and go to Sofia for another operation. “Another operation?” I asked my cousin in shock. “I didn’t know that she had any operation beforehand”. Her response: “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you”.

“So what’s the situation and how can I help?” I asked.

What had happened is that two years before, my auntie had some stomach pains. Now, in true Balkan villager style, she soldiered on totally ignoring the pains until she couldn’t even stand up anymore. Having been forced to fend for herself pretty much all her life, which in turn made her into the fiercely independent and stoic woman she is, she wasn’t going to let a little, or severe, pain defeat her – who else would feed her chickens, the pig, tend to her constantly juicy tomatoes… Still, the pains did get the better of her, so off she went, reluctantly and with much muttering, to the doctor’s. No, this was more serious. Off then to a specialist, who found that my auntie had been lumbering around with a huge stomach tumour, possibly for years! An operation was necessary. My auntie, just as naïve as me, had full faith in the Bulgarian health system and dutifully turned up for her operation, went under anaesthesia and came out the other side all fine… or so she thought.

Not long afterwards, the stomach pains returned. This time it must have been something different. Perhaps she just ate something off or strained herself when grabbing the jars she uses for pickling each winter from the top shelf. No, the pains persisted. So, two years later (!) she went to another doctor, who too referred her to a specialist and found that she had a stomach tumour… the same one as before! It just hadn’t been removed.

What? She was in hospital two years before to have the tumour removed. Why was it still there?

Well, at the time (and still to a major degree) to make sure that an operation was done in Bulgaria (and wider Balkans), let alone properly, it was the practice to, let’s say, augment the doctor’s wages with a little more money. Healthcare professionals in Bulgaria and all throughout central and eastern Europe were, and still are, heavily underpaid and overworked, particularly in the crumbling public health system in provincial areas. During communist times, health was considered a “caring” profession, so it was very much the domain of women, and subsequently not as well remunerated as more male-dominated fields. That legacy continues to a degree, and with such prospects, it’s no surprise that many of the region’s doctors, nurses and specialists have been lured to higher paying roles and better working and living conditions on offer in western Europe (particularly Germany). The hospital in the depressed post-industrial apocalypse of a town near my auntie’s village looks from the outside it was set on fire and closed ages ago. But no, it’s operating… barely.

My cousin Anna-Maria, who is an amazingly shrewd and astute person, was living in capital Sofia at the time, where much of Bulgaria’s best health facilities were (and still are) located. Using her wide network of carefully cultivated contacts, she was able to get her mother admitted to one of Bulgaria’s most reliable hospitals to have the operation done properly this time. There was just one catch – she needed an extra US$300 to have it done properly. Anna-Maria did not have that type of money on her, so she pleaded with me whether I could get my parents to fund this. I answered her prayers and said I can provide the dosh and even hand it to her personally. I knew there was no point asking my parents, even though they had more means to stump up the bribe money. But there were two things from the past that would’ve made my parents weary. First, my mother was not impressed when in 1988, in the dying years of communism, Anna-Maria wrote an angry letter to our grandfather in Australia demanding that he immediately send over US$200 so that she could buy digital calculator from Corecom, the chain of stores in communist Bulgaria where rare and much-prized western goods of all sorts could be purchased for hard currency only (Anna-Maria ended the letter stating “I know you got the money"!”). One to hold a grudge, my mother never forgot that. The second aspect: when in 1991 my grandparents cabled US$500 via a bank in Bulgaria to my uncle, the money (conveniently) disappeared. Had they not got their Australian bank to trace the payment on time, then with the payment deemed “unclaimed”, the Bulgarian bank would’ve taken the money for itself. Dodgy! I personally going to Bulgaria with the cash was the only way that this transaction at the time could be done successfully.

And so I went. I got on the first flight I could to Sofia from Vancouver, which meant flying via London Gatwick, spending the night nearby at a friend of a friend’s place and then flying on the British Airways (BA) flight the next day to Sofia.

That BA flight to Sofia was… interesting. It was clear that an overwhelming majority of the passengers were Bulgarian. Even though it was summer, this was at a time before Bulgaria was considered a reliable holiday destination for British tourists or the home to many foreigners seeking cheap properties and lower living costs. With no inflight entertainment for the three-hour flight, the BA flight attendants knew how to keep the Bulgarians occupied – ply them with free booze. That drinks trolley was going up and down that aisle like you wouldn’t believe, so those flight attendants certainly worked their shift that flight. Now, unlike the eastern European stereotype many people to the west of Vienna hold, Bulgarians (and Balkan people in general) actually don’t usually drink to excess – which is considered very poor form if you do in public (that changes behind doors away from prying eyes and public judgement). So the mood in the plane was very congenial; everyone was having a wonderful time chatting amongst themselves. When in Rome, or Sofia for that matter, I got into the spirit and started talking with the two women behind me. They were Bulgarians who had migrated to the USA — one lived in Portland, Oregon and the other in Seattle, Washington. And with me flying in from Vancouver, British Columbia, we made up the rainy West Coast trifecta. After chatting for a bit, the two women said “you’re fun; we’re sitting next to you” and so they moved to my row. They sensed that I hadn’t spoken in Bulgarian for a while, so they filled me in with the latest Bulgarian slang. One term they taught me was pich, meaning “good-looking person”, to which I asked if there’s a female form for this (cheeky!). Let’s just say that if you know, you know… hehe.

Arriving into Sofia, I immediately contacted my cousin Anna-Maria excited to be seeing her. However, a bombshell – she regretfully informed me that due to “circumstances”, I couldn’t stay with her, so I had to quickly find someone else to stay that evening, which I did – a cheap and cheerful hotel near the centre of Sofia above a mehana (a traditional Bulgarian tavern). Fine, they had the chalga music playing into the early hours, but with my jet lag, it didn’t matter.

My auntie’s operation had been delayed by a few days, or weeks, or a month. Who knows? In any case, I was a free agent. What to do then while I wait? With my cousin Anna Maria unavailable, I decided to call my cousin in the southwest of Bulgaria, the region where our grandfather came from, just to say hi. He had no idea I was in Bulgaria. Now, I wasn’t expecting anything but in true Balkan hospitality-style, the first thing he instructed me to do is come down and visit them immediately. No ifs, no buts. And so I did!

Off to the Sofia bus station, where bought the ticket for the 4 pm bus to Gotse Delchev. At the time, Sofia’s main central “bus station” was symbolic of its transition to capitalism – a ramshackle and very dusty patch across the road from Sofia’s 1970s soc-mod railway station, full of old western buses bought cheaply on the second-hand market from Germany, often still with the German signage on them. That bus with “Hauptbahnhof” on its destination display is actually going to Pernik.

My cousin and his family, including my uncle and auntie, warmly greeted me when I arrived in Gotse Delchev, which of course meant that a shot of their homemade rakia was waiting for me. They hadn’t seem me for four years, so there was much to catch up on. My cousin, who shares the same name as our joint grandfather, immediately apologised to me that because of the nature of his work with the electricity company, plus running the most successful café in the village (named “Australia” in honour of our grandfather) he couldn’t do the typical Bulgarian hosting thing by controlling every aspect of my stay. Instead, he seconded me to some of the other twenty-somethings in the village, most of them unemployed, who gladly and enthusiastically ushered me into their tightknit group as if I’d lived in the village all my life like them. I was now part of the village fabric and dynamic. Mind you, a lot of the time was spent smoking cigarettes and gossiping… but not all the time. But I had a role immediately carved out for me, one that would garner me a lot of attention. As what my cousin’s wife told me, I’m an atraktsiya – an “attraction”. How come? Well, first some history.

The village where my uncle and his entire immediate family lived in had nothing to do with any ancestral. My uncle (and his sister – the one with the stomach tumour) had ended up in this village located less than a kilometre from the main town they had been born in, by no fault of their own. After my grandfather, a police officer for the communist authorities at the time, had been arrested in 1947, during the height of Stalinist oppressions in the early years of Bulgarian communism, for having passed on intel to an illegal Macedonian irredentist grouping, his wife and two infant children were very ceremoniously kicked out of their nicely located and appointed apartment in what had been the town’s prosperous but now emptied Jewish quarter. They were to serve as an example to everyone in town to know what are the consequences of operating outside the confines deemed acceptable for the new “dictatorship of the proletariat”. By virtue of their father’s actions, these infants were labelled “enemies of the people”, a title that was to hang over them for the next few decades. Fearing retribution by association, none of their relatives could help these people, so my grandfather’s (first) wife had no choice but to go to this neighbouring village, which essentially was a dumping ground for people deemed politically unreliable by the communist authorities. I should heavily point out that these “enemy” labels were often not placed on these people on truly ideological grounds – these were more often convenient covers for people to get back on personal foes usually based on petty grudges often dating from previous generations – the main reason why my grandfather refused to go back to Bulgaria even after the fall of the communism. It’s part and parcel of the social politics that make up life in Balkan provincial towns. The reason why this village became the dumping ground was that it was located just inside the granichna zona, the forbidden “border zone” straddling Bulgaria’s sensitive southern border with capitalist adversaries Greece and Turkey (and the main topic for Kapka Kassabova’s award-winning book Border). People living within the “border zone” were under greater surveillance, had their ID documents specifically denoted so they could be identified immediately as worthy of greater suspicion, and had to deal with arbitrary nighttime curfews and other restrictions on movement more so than other Bulgarian citizens. The added bonus for the authorities was that this village of outcasts was located within walking distance of the big town, they they could come in and do the degrading menial work such “enemies” were deemed solely fit to do, and return to their hovels that counted as their places of residence in the village before dusk. As the main (but not sole) cause for the “enemy” status for many of the villagers was the Macedonian Question, and having been treated poorly by the central Bulgarian authorities, the village in the region quickly became known as the “Macedonian village” – a reflection of the widespread espousal of a separate Macedonian identity of the villagers contrary to the mainstream policy (to this day) of modern Bulgaria, which sees Slavic-speaking Macedonians as ethnic Bulgarians.

This was an issue in 2001, where Bulgaria had now become supposedly a “free” country.

One everyday problem I was, erm, privileged (??) to experience in the village in 2001 was that it was under rezhim – the Bulgarian term for the rationing of services. In this case, water had been cut off to the village (and the neighbouring one) for 23 hours a day. Apparently, that dreaded of all communist-era and also French-origin terms was happening – remont, i.e. “repairs”, though it always seems that these are protracted, designed to be as inconvenient as possible and, if at all completed, shoddily done, rendering them functionally unnecessary. Again, a cover for other, usually more sinister, reasons.

The hour when water would turn on would happen very arbitarily, but once water would be turned on, believe me, word spread quicker than a viral meme, and immediately everyone would rush home, have a shower and fill up as many tubs with water that they could. It certainly trained me to behave the exact same way when anything remotely resembling such a rezhim occurs in my building in London.

As to what was the real reason for this rezhim, along with many of the other aspects of life in this village I was to observe and partake in, they’re in Part 2: how the villagers and what they deemed an atraktsiya were set to change immensely very soon after, plus local vs national politics, music, dreams, faith, attitudes, brown bears, nightlife… and the only gay in the village!

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You need a particular kind of confidence to build a hotel across a river and call the result a bridge. Hotel Vrbak, standing on Gazi Isa-bey Isaković Square right in the centre of the city of Novi Pazar, Serbia, does precisely this and has been since 24 July 1976, when it was officially opened as one of the more emblematic pieces of orientalist architecture not just in the city but also in the whole of socialist Yugoslavia. It is not merely a hotel that happens to be near a landmark; by virtue of its unusual design, scale and position right in the centre of the city, it functions as a landmark itself – the sort of building that gives a town’s centre its visual and symbolic shorthand.

The credit, or the blame depending on one’s taste in concrete lanterns, belongs to local architect Tomislav Milovanović.

Literally the “new market” in the “administrative district”

It is worth pausing on where, exactly, Novi Pazar sits. The town is the largest and effectively the capital of Sandžak, a historical region straddling south-western Serbia and northeastern Montenegro, that takes its name from the old Ottoman term for “administrative district”. Sandžak’s population on paper is ethnically mixed due to the legacy of the numerous ethnic labels doled out to the local population over the decades, but an overwhelming majority has the local Sandžak form of what used to be officially called Serbo-Croatian as their native language (Albanians form a majority in the very south of Sandžak around Gusinje in Montenegro) and the only main distinguisher (if anyone is really looking for one) is whether the Sandžaklije are (at least nominally) Muslim or Orthodox Christian. Going from the northwest to the southeast, Sandžak transitions from majority Orthodox Christian to majority Muslim population. Novi Pazar, located in the very east of Sandžak, is 80% Muslim, and is the cultural centre for Slavic Muslims in Serbia.

Now Novi Pazar has a bit of a reputation on two accounts. Mention “Novi Pazar” to people in ex-Yugoslavia who lived through the chaotic 1990s and the first thing that’ll come to their minds is “jeans”. As Yugoslavia broke apart and international sanctions strangled the Serbian economy under Slobodan Milošević, Novi Pazar’s illicit jeans business took off, with hundreds of small factories turning out counterfeit Levi’s and other branded denim. Word has it that the workmanship of these counterfeits was of such good quality that representatives of the original brands themselves were impressed, and Levi’s eventually offered its licence to a handful of the town’s manufacturers. Novi Pazar earned itself the nickname “Jeans Valley”, and by most local accounts, the trade did more than turn a profit but it is credited with keeping the town on its feet through what were otherwise the hardest years Serbia, and particularly Sandžak, had ever faced economically. This was a continuation of Novi Pazar’s time-honoured mercantile and entrepreneurial spirit – after all, Novi Pazar does mean “new market”. Located at a crossroads, Novi Pazar has been instrumental for trade within the Balkans and beyond, with many of the more prosperous members of the Rumeli (Balkan) communities in Turkey quick to point out (and very proud of) their Sandžak roots. Testament to this is the number of business in areas such as Bayrampaşa in Istanbul with “Yeni Pazar” (the Turkish name for Novi Pazar) in their names.

The second, and somewhat more modern, reputation with Novi Pazar and its immediate vicinity is that the inhabitants are amongst the most piously Muslim in the entire Balkans – to a degree that other Balkan Muslims sometimes find too overt and even uncomfortable, but then again, being a minority and feeling the need to emphasise one’s identity in adversity tends to cultivate such behaviour. While it is still very much possible for nominal Muslims in Novi Pazar to lead very secular lives, it’s in Novi Pazar more so than anywhere else in Muslim-populated parts of the Balkans that you’ll see the more visible signs of Islam incorporated into everyday life. These include the large number of local halal skara joints (clearly pointing out that not only there’s no pork in the čevapčići but also no alcohol available) to rows of Islamic fashion boutiques with names such as “Mekka” and “Dubai” and even the female models used in the advertising having their faces blurred. No other place in the Balkans has as many women in full Gulf-style hijab as Novi Pazar, and it was also here in 2016 when for the first time I saw who would have had to have been a local inhabitant wearing a niqab. Granted, plenty of niqabs can also be seen worn in cities in Bosnia, particularly Sarajevo, but that’s usually by the visibly large number of Gulf Arab women – mainly tourists but also some are resident.

This all matters here because it means socialist Yugoslavia built this showcase 1970s hotel – a Category B establishment meant to impress, in a country then straddling both East and West, in a majority-Muslim town whose community had, across the socialist period, faced its own share of political, economic and cultural pressure, whether warranted or not. The Vrbak’s oriental flourishes were not, in other words, an exotic borrowing applied to a blank canvas. They were being built in the town most entitled to have produced that vocabulary in the first place, by an architect working for a state that was, as others have claimed, at best ambivalent about what to do with that inheritance. Though this was an intrinsic part of socialist architecture and culture in general, where the underlying cultural doctrine pioneered by Lenin and made policy in the USSR under Stalin was “socialist in content, national in form”. Similar architecture where “Ottoman/Muslim” forms the “national” element can also be seen in other Muslim-majority parts of ex-Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, the most famous being the National Library of Kosovo designed by Andrija Mutnjaković.

A hotel on the ruins of another, and a river underneath it!

The Vrbak did not arrive on empty ground. It replaced an earlier hotel of the same name, built between the two world wars by Novi Pazar entrepreneur Ranko Ivković. The original hotel was, by the standards of the day, quietly remarkable: it was rated Category B, the only hotel in the entire area to hold that distinction. Though, how about this – the hotel came with its own private hydroelectric plant! Granted, it was a modest 5 kW affair, built purely to keep the hotel’s bright lights on. Ivković, apparently unsatisfied with lighting only his own establishment, promptly went on to build a much larger plant, the 100 kW Sandžak station, also in the town centre, which went into operation on 8 November 1931. One suspects a man who builds himself a hydroelectric plant is not a man easily talked out of ambitious projects.

The old Vrbak was demolished after WWII. Its replacement, the one that stands today and carrying the old name forward, went up in the mid-1970s and opened in grand style on 24 July 1976.

Venice, by way of the Balkans

Milovanović’s stated aim was to forge a deep connection between the building and its surroundings, and he leaned toward an oriental register to do it, though he was careful to note, in his own account, that the result was meant to be only associatively oriental, not a literal reproduction of it. His reference point, curiously, was not local. During a graduation trip to Italy in 1957, he found himself drawn to Venice and, above all, to the Doge’s Palace, with its dense ornamentation and its happy disregard for stylistic consistency. That incoherence, it seems, is exactly what he brought home to the Hotel Vrbak.

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Milovanović’s instinct to reach for an oriental register at all was, in the Yugoslavia of the 1970s, a somewhat loaded one. The state had spent the post-war decades trying to build an architecture aesthetic of its own that, in uniting six republics under a single socialist roof, deliberately aimed at a Yugoslav identity independent of the colonial and religious-adjacent influence from former imperialist occupiers, whether they be Byzantine, Venetian, Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian. Against that official anti-historicism, a handful of architects went the other way, treating these “colonial” influences not as baggage to be discarded but as part of the “national”. However, whereas Austro-Hungarian and Venetian influences could be considered “acceptable” on account of their central European nature, there was always an underlying unease when it came to “non-European” and, therefore perceptively, “backward” Ottoman and (to a lesser degree) Byzantine motifs. One Yugoslav architect who forged ahead with creating a modern identity for Bosnia based on its vernacular Ottoman heritage was Zagreb-born but Sarajevo-resident Juraj Neidhardt. As well, Yugoslav hotel architecture more broadly developed as its own strand of modernism, strongly shaped by place, with a close attachment to landscape and to locally sourced materials. The Vrbak, going up in Novi Pazar in the mid-1970s with its lanterns, fountain and nod to a beg’s ceiling rosette, belongs squarely in that second, more “contrarian” tradition.

The result is a building split into two parts joined by a walkway, its riverside accommodation block given a polygonal, polychrome façade, its corners deliberately emphasised, its lobby capped with a domed lantern, and its hall fitted with a central fountain – a nod, as per the architect, to the oriental cult of water, alongside greenery meant to recall the city’s gardens. The effect he was after was not historical accuracy but a sense of the liveliness of an oriental kasaba (casbah) or, more so, a han (caravansarai).

The single-storey restaurant wing is arranged as a bridge across the Raška river, linking the old fortress on the right bank with a modernist plateau on the left, visually stitching together two very different centuries. The rhomboid accommodation block sits on the pedestrian square and connects to it via a first-floor passerelle. Large arched supports, visible from the inside, carry the restaurant wing over the water and also bear a sixteen-metre cantilevered terrace.

As to the result of this, opinions are mixed. Some experts absolutely adore the entire nature of this architecture, while others have dismissed it as “kitschy”, “camp” and an “eyesore”.

An Austrian, a wooden rosette… and a great deal of driving

Once the shell was up, Milovanović and the director of the catering company Lipa, the hotel’s investor, took themselves on a tour of Yugoslavia’s entire Adriatic coast from Istria in the north to Ulcinj in the south, scouting contractors capable of executing an interior that could not simply be ordered from a catalogue. What impressed them most was the circular pool at Hotel Adriatik in Primošten, Croatia, fitted with a retractable glass dome by Austrian engineer Josef Stadler. Milovanović contacted Stadler and commissioned a dome for the Vrbak’s lobby, built to the most current technical methods of the time.

The idea for that dome – as a decorative ceiling rather than a purely structural feature – came from something much closer to home: a carved wooden rosette that had once formed part of the ceiling in the main hall of an old beg’s house in Novi Pazar. A second, smaller rosette-lantern now covers the circular staircase leading from the pedestrian zone into the restaurant section. Because of the unique nature of the hotel, so much of the interior was not suited for mass-produced fittings, and therefore the architect ended up personally involved in the individual details for the interior, with factories across Yugoslavia manufacturing bespoke items for the hotel’s fit-out.

When I visited Novi Pazar for the first time in 2016 and then again in 2017, I made it a point to stay at Hotel Vrbak, and it certainly excelled all expectations. Walking past the portirnica, the security reception desk out front untouched since Tito’s time, and entering the interior main hall of the hotel immediately transported me back to the Yugoslavia of my childhood. Most of the original furnishings, right down to the glass jewels and wooden balustrades, were still there and in pristine condition – symbolising the hotel not only being a physical bridge between the old fort and the new city centre but also between happier times and an uncertain present.

By the numbers, then and now

The original Vrbak was built as a Category B hotel across 4000 square metres, offering 125 beds in single and double rooms and suites, with a restaurant section seating around 600 across a café, restaurant, banquet hall, aperitif bar and tea room.

Since 2019 the hotel has belonged to the ND Tourism Group and has been fully renovated. It now offers 59 rooms across three floors in four categories: single, double, double deluxe and suites, along with two function rooms – the Crystal and the Golden, a conference hall, and two restaurants: Trg Isa Bega and O La La Vrbak. It continues, as it has for decades, to host weddings, celebrations, business forums and conferences – a building conceived as a piece of civic theatre that has, somewhat improbably, kept the job. And this was proven recently when local star Elma Sinanović, one of the best voices of Balkan Turbo folk since the 1990s, chose to film one of her latest video clips inside the Hotel Vrbak. Judging by the images in this clip (below), despite the change of ownership and the extensive renovations, the original “Yugoslav” atmosphere is intact.

To experience an atmosphere unlike anywhere else in Europe, where the Slavic, Balkan, Yugoslav Socialist, Muslim and Orthodox all come together, then Novi Pazar is your place. Be sure to pick up a pair a decent, locally made jeans, and do what so many people in region do when driving through and have the local mantije. And where to stay? Where else but the Hotel Vrbak (no, I haven’t been paid to say this). Srećna 50. godišnjica!

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“Beauty never brought me anything good in my life, and while I lived abroad, it only brought me dangerous moments, because all kinds of people imposed themselves on me and surrounded me”

So said Olivera Katarina, the celebrated yet controversial Yugoslav and Serbian actress and singer who died on 21 July 2026 aged 86.

Born Olivera Petrović but initially known to world audiences as Olivera Vučo, she was not only one of Yugoslavia’s most iconic sex symbols but the great Salvador Dalí went as far to claim that she was the most beautiful woman in the world ever – she was “the only woman before whom he knelt”, which happened after one of her concerts in Paris, as he was enthralled by her beauty and voice

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Olivera Katarina explained how she came to adopting her later stage name:

“I was very attached to my mother Katarina. When she became seriously ill, I was 28 years old; she was already bedridden, but she asked me to buy a TV so that she could watch the New Year’s show that I was going to appear in. I brought a TV and we watched the show together on 31 December. Four days later, she died. I lost my voice from grief. I couldn’t even speak, so I had to write to my loved ones on pieces of paper when I had something to say. That lasted for a while, but later I realised that life goes on. Out of love for my mother, I added her name to mine and that’s how I became Olivera Katarina and continued my career.”

Olivera Katarina (then Vučo) made her biggest splash as the enchanting lead in Aleksandar Petrović’s 1967 film Skupljači Perja (The Feather Collectors), otherwise known as I Even Met Happy Gypsies. Considered one of the best films of the Crni talas (Black Wave) of Yugoslav cinema, the film went on the win the Palme d’Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival, bringing worldwide fame to Olivera Katarina. Still to this day, no reference to Olivera Katarina in ex-Yugoslavia ever goes without mentioning how she sold out a record-breaking 72 shows at the Paris Olympia.

For much of the 1970s and 1980s, Olivera Katarina was a singing artist capitalising on the “Gypsy Romance” mystique first introduced to audiences by Skupljači Perja role. The lush performances from her many TV specials with Romani songs during this period are considered classics. My childhood favourite was this one, Androvera (Red Apple), where she spends most of the time throwing a red apple in the air and catching it. As can be seen, hardly an actual Roma person is part of her ensemble of backing performers, and that’s despite socialist Yugoslavia’s much vaunted and actual genuine efforts at Roma emancipation.

With her dark, you could say stereotype, features, plus her gypsy-heavy repertoire, most of ex-Yugoslavia and the world were convinced that she was Roma, when in fact, like all of her fellow actor colleagues in Skupljači Perja, she definitely wasn’t – a fact she was to make quite clear later in life.

With her health failing and her trademark beauty fading, by the 1990s Olivera Katarina transitioned to a recluse making bombastic statements in support of Serbian nationalism and social conservatism. “I’m praying for the saviour of the Serbian soul” was a headline from an early 1990s article about her, and here she appears on Serbian TV claiming the Croats once attempted to poison her.

She did come out of her self-imposed isolation in 2005 to collaborate with Marina Abramovic in Balkan Epic. However, for much of the past three decades, as much as her Paris Olympia stint is mentioned, so too without fail would her constant financial problems be raised, usually by Olivera Katarina herself. She famously once sold off all of the furniture in her rented apartment so as to pay off her outstanding bills. Amongst her friends, she was known to be a proud woman who never wanted to ask for help from them (it was a different matter when it came to the government).

The outpouring of grief from the media and public in Serbia and, to a slightly lesser extent, the wider Yugosphere, over Olivera Katarina’s death has been somewhat surprising, given she had been out of the media limelight for the past few years and, in some quarters, almost completely forgotten – to the point that many were surprised she was still alive. Rather curiously, even though the Serbian tabloids would report that she was an opponent of LGBT+ pride marches in Serbia, I’ve been seeing many Serbian gay men post tearful eulogies for her. What can I say? Such is the power of nostalgia and celebrity deaths.

Maybe it’s best here to use the traditional Macedonian saying when someone has died – Bog da ja prosti (May God forgive her).

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2026 World Cup grand finale on today, so I’d like to share a bittersweet World Cup memory.

Every World Cup fan has a favourite tournament of all time, and just like with favourite songs of all time, this invariably happens to be the one that happens around our late teens.

No exception for me – the 1990 World Cup has been my most favourite.

The broadcast in Australia would start just after midnight, so my siblings and I would be in full excitement waiting to see the matches way past our bedtimes. It was a party for us. I recall that Cathay Pacific was one of the main sponsors and they’d have these 5-second ads on SBS-TV.

The 1990 World Cup was also the last time that I truly felt any affection for the then dysfunctional Yugoslavia, the homeland of my father. From Australia I was cheering on the Yugoslav team in a passion that I hadn’t felt for in years.

But even the team’s politics-driven internal dynamics were a reflection of why by then I had been falling out with Yugoslavia.

As a child, I truly loved my father’s homeland. I fully identified with it, and I cannot begin to explain what joy it was to see a picture of an always smiling Tito whenever opening the textbooks we’d get from Yugoslavia.

The most proud I was for Yugoslavia was when it hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics. That opening ceremony was the best and you can’t convince me otherwise! But I felt that something was wrong. It’s crazy to say, and this spins ex-Yugoslavs out whenever I tell them this, but I remember watching the closing ceremony and had a premonition – that this was the beginning of the end. Even looking back, that’s pretty heavy for a child to have such a feeling.

Unfortunately, that premonition turned out to be true.

With post-Tito Yugoslavia becoming increasingly centralised, it seemed to many of Yugoslavia’s minor ethnicities that everything was being homogenised into a Serbo-Croatian-based “Yugoslav” monoculture, a product of which was that people who had Serbo-Croatian as their primary language were getting all the advantages.

That also seemed the case with the 1990 Yugoslav team.

Its first group match against the UAE saw Europe’s player of the year Darko Panchev, a Macedonian, score two goals for Yugoslavia. The Kobra (as Panchev was nicknamed) was biting!

So what happened to Panchev for the rest of the 1990 World Cup?

He was on the bench the whole time! Yes, they didn’t get him to play at all, even when it mattered most.

But I didn’t give up hope for my Yugoslav team. Perhaps they were just saving him?

Yugoslavia made it all the way to the quarter finals, where it faced Argentina. Again, no Panchev. For the whole time during the match, I was shouting at the screen “get Panchev on the field!” But no, even when it went to penalties, Europe’s highest goalscorer that year was not called up… and Yugoslavia lost.

I was for certain that the reason that they didn’t get Panchev to play was that the Serbs and Croats who were running Yugoslavia at the time didn’t want a “Macedonian peasant” to take away the glory from the players of their ethnic kin.

This for me was a reflection of the patronising attitudes of the other Yugoslav republics towards Macedonia, and it made me want out. That was the final straw – my love for and connection to SFR Yugoslavia were gone.

In the decades that have passed, I’ve re-evaluated my relation to the Yugoslavia of my childhood. I now focus on the many positive aspects from that time, which are easy to find considering what an unmitigated disaster it has been for most of ex-Yugoslavia ever since. It does make me thing though that had we not let ethnic-based competition get the better of us and, therefore, got Panchev on the field when Yugoslavia needed him most, then we wouldn’t be where we are now – lost.

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These are all actual examples of sentences I’ve seen in texts from various southeast European countries. Sounds a bit weird, right?

It’s because all the words in quotation marks in Southern Slavic languages are what are either “pseudo-anglicisms” or “false friends”

A “pseudo-anglicism” is “a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning”.

Pseudo-anglicisms exist in many languages. German and Japanese are the world cup winners for these, and true to form, they turned their weirdo fake English words into an export commodity (you’ll see).

A “false friend” is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning.

The problem with these words, as the examples show, is that they sound quite odd when translated on face-value back into English.

So what do these examples actually mean?

Oldtajmer (i.e. “old-timer”) is a “classic car” (generally) and a “vintage car” (more specific) and not American slang for an “old person”. A veteran car (around 20-30 years old) is known as “jangtajmer” (youngtimer). Both terms are German pseudo-Anglicisms. Actually, as the European classic car scene is now so centred in German-speaking countries, even some UK car enthusiasts have adopted the German “oldtimer” and “youngtimer” terms.

Evergrin (i.e. “evergreen”) is a “golden-oldie” or “classic” song or film and not a tree that keeps its green leaves in winter. This one is also from German.

Rekorder (i.e. “recorder”) is a record-holder, i.e. someone who holds a record (a best-ever performance, especially in a particular sport) and not a woodwind musical instrument or recording device.

Golman (i.e. “goal man”) is a “goalkeeper” or “goalie” and not a man who is focused on goals. This is an indigenous Yugoslav pseudo-anglicism.

Mobing (i.e. “mobbing”) does not mean “to crowd around someone or into a place in an unruly way” but translates generally as “bullying”. It was Swedish psychologist Heinz Leymann who coined the term “mobbing” specific for gang bullying in the workplace, and some psychologists in the Anglosphere are advocating the term’s usage. Otherwise, most English speakers know this as “workplace bullying”.

Strip in ex-Yugoslavia does not mean someone disrobing or a tape. Instead, it’s “comics” or “animation” (coming from “comic strip”). But watch out because “striptiz” (i.e. striptease”) means what it means in ex-Yugoslavia as it does in English.

Kasting (i.e. “casting”) actually means “audition”, where otherwise the casting is done. The word gained greater prominence in the early 2000s when pop-idol shows (otherwise known as “kasting-shou”) started in the Balkans. Related to this is the simultaneous phenomenon of “rijaliti” i.e. “reality”, meaning solely “reality TV show”. And we know how much “rijaliti” there is on these “reality” shows.

Bulgarian has its own false friends and pseudo-Anglicisms. Here are four for you…

Дансинг (”Dansing” i.e. Dancing)
When groovy Bulgarian hoofers say they want to take you to the “dancing”, they mean the “dance floor”. Interestingly, when Dancing with the Stars was on Bulgarian TV, it was called Денсинг старс (“Densing Stars” i.e. Dancing Stars) to avoid any confusion.

Джендър (“Djender” i.e. Gender)
Strictly speaking, “gender” should only be used in Bulgarian as an adjective just like you would in the original English (i.e. “джендър идентичност” – “gender identity”). However, in colloquial Bulgarian speech and on social media, “gender” has transformed into a pejorative term initially for “transgender person” but now has expanded to denigrate anyone who does not conform to the strict gender roles in force in mainstream Balkan society (similar to “queer” in English).

Лейбър (”Leyber” i.e. Labour)
A term widely used by Bulgarians in the UK for what otherwise is a “labourer”. How come the final “-er” fell off is not clear but it could be a slight corruption of how Bulgarians hear and interpret the way many English people pronounce “labourer” (“lay-buh-ruh” or “lay-bruh”).

Бус (“bus”, rhymes with “puss”)
You’re at a bus station in Bulgaria on the way to some provincial town. Your “bus” is apparently already at the platform waiting for you. But when you arrive at the departing bay, all you can see is a van or a minibus. Well, that’s your “bus” because that’s what the word means in Bulgarian. If you were expecting a bigger vehicle fitting 50 people, then that’s an “avtobus” or colloquially “reis” (pronounced like “race”).

But let’s go further afield and go into a Russian shop. Count the false friends…

Last weekend, I had a major craving for сырки (”syrki”) – frozen curd snacks, usually coated in chocolate, and highly addictive food of the gods. These Eastern European sweet snacks are perfect for hot weather. So off I made a beeline to the nearby “ex-Soviet” shop to grab a few.

Delicious! Chocolate-covered syrki. Like mini-cheesecakes.

It was a pleasant day to go walking, which was no problem as there is no паркинг (“parking” – car park or parking lot) to take a машина (“mashina” – a car, not a machine) there. The shop has loads of продукты (“produkty” – “products” but meaning “groceries”) even папмерсы (“pampersy” – the generic name for “disposable diapers/nappies” in many languages) and скотч (“scotch” – no, not whiskey but adhesive tape).

Going to the counter to pay, the cashier will always ask if you need a пакет (“paket” – no, not a packet or package but a plastic shopping bag). However, as a regular shopper who’s в курсе (“v kurse” – literally “on course” but meaning “in the know”), I brought my own шоппер (“shopper” – a tote bag). At least they didn’t try to ап-сейл (“apseyl” i.e. “upsale”). And it was a bit hard to hear what the shopkeeper had to say as the latest Russian бэнгер (“banger” – a hit song) was playing loudly.

A “shopper” or a “packet”?

That made sense, didn’t it?

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An event in March 2026 commemorating 50 years of Macedonian radio programming in Adelaide was what prompted me to write these tales. I didn’t expect that it would go for five instalments, but given the nature of how my memory’s going, it’s best that I record it now before I forget to think about it. What was intended to be a memoir of personal experiences ended up exploring how our tight-knit community and the issues within it was a microcosm reflecting the bigger ones in the “homeland” most of our members had to flee.

Part 1 covered what ethnic radio (to use the term applied then) in Australia was all about in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as touch on how the various radio programs from the different former Yugoslav ethnic groups certainly fanned the flames of extreme nationalism. Part 2 was about how I joined the Macedonian radio team and scared the establishment of sorts with the hardcore turbo folk songs I’d regularly play, plus explain the complexity of how the community’s overall loyalty to Yugoslav Macedonia did not extend to Yugoslavia as a whole. Part 3 went into the problems that come when a standardised language is an unwanted and unwelcomed compromise. Part 4 was dedicated to the amazing people who made the programs with me, and how Macedonians are the best neutral parties to arbitrate in intra-Balkan relations.

So for my final instalment, let’s get into the massive transform in technology with the advent of the internet… and what happens when the “homeland” finally succumbs to armed “ethnic” conflict.

I was involved the program from 1994 to 2001 – a time when technology advanced in leaps and bounds riding on the wave of this new-fangled worldwide web, changing the very nature of receiving and reporting news and entertainment. We went from analogue to digital like that!

In 1994, we used to receive the “latest” news – meaning anything major that’s happened in the past week – by fax from a news agency in Skopje, Macedonia. On a good day, it’d take about 30 minutes for the waves of paper with partly illegible text to gush out of that noisy machine. We’d also receive a weekly 20-minute news bulletin, Radio Biljana, specifically recorded for Macedonians abroad and naturally with a name like that, the Macedonian folk song Biljana platno beleshe, played on a keyboard, was its call-sign. To receive it, we had to call Radio Skopje (an expensive international call) and record it to tape by placing the telephone receiver on a phone microphone connected to a tape recorder. Hi-tech! Sometimes we had to call back later as Biljana (yes, that was the name of the person in charge of these calls at Radio Skopje) would be on the line with the Macedonians of Detroit, Vienna, Dortmund or Lugano. Once we’d get a spot and everything was set up, we’d have to leave the studio during the analogue and real-time recording lest our smokers’ coughs would get caught in the recording – perfect time for a smoke break! This smoko gave us time to share what community goss we had. I mean, it was big news when Dimche had bought that third house no-one was supposed to know about, especially as he claimed he was on the pension – suspo!

The other source of news for us (genuine and, at times, gossip) would be the two main Macedonian newspapers in Australia – the Australian Macedonian Weekly and Today Denes. Now, you’d think that just reading articles from the newspapers, which any of our listeners could buy at their local newsagency (newsstand for you North Americans, newsagent’s for the rest) would be a waste of time. Well, given that most of our listeners, though native speakers, couldn’t read Macedonian, the newspapers were not much use for them, so reading the articles for them was providing accessibility.

By 2001, I was receiving the news straight off the internet and recordings on mp3 files via links and torrents. Instead of pre-records, I’d just present the show live, with me behind the desk doing everything (see photo above). That freed my Thursday evenings, and I would also be able to get the news hot off the press just minutes before going to air.

The internet and all the other new ways of communication it introduced was a gamechanger. I remember the first time I got a work email address – that was in 1999. To test it off, I sent an email to a cousin of mine in Bulgaria, who replied within minutes. Until then, apart from those international calls that cost an arm and a leg, the only economical way I could communicate with my relatives in the Balkans from Australia was writing letters. Given the disarray postal services in the Balkans were during the 1990s, to receive a reply to a letter within 6 months was a miracle. So to go from months to mere minutes of being easily informed of what was happening with the family on either side of the world certainly changed the dynamics of our relations. No longer were we near clueless of each other’s daily lives.

I owe a lot to this letter-writing. Because of my interest in and enthusiasm for languages, by the time I was a teenager I was designated the family’s letter-writer for correspondence with relatives in the Balkans – a task more like a second job when we started receiving near daily letters from distant relatives, often tenuously connected to my grandfather, from all over the world after having fled either the chaos of Bulgaria’s post-1989 transition or the chaos of Yugoslavia’s disintegration. Good, old-fashioned writing with pen to paper, bad handwriting or not, certainly hones in the language skills. And with no Google Translate or AI to rely on to give instant prompts or write whole texts for you, it was all grit involved… and much trial and error – if I didn’t know a word or how to conjugate an improper verb, I had to get out the dictionary and look it up. This was how I truly learnt to communicate in my additional languages.

The internet also made music and audio recordings far more accessible. The first mp3 I downloaded was the Bulgarian chalga hit Ogan momiche (“Fire Girl”) by Kamelia (Novak Djokovic’s favourite singer, by the way). The Macedonian services of the BBC World Service and Germany’s Deutsche Welle had their current affairs features available for downloading and broadcasting on mp3 too. As a result, our radio programs became more diverse and professional.

These factors would become vital when things started to go downhill in Macedonia at the start of 2001. A war was on the horizon…

As the news was coming of numerous police stations being attacked in Albanian-majority populated parts of northwest Macedonia, the fear that the 1998-9 conflict in neighbouring Kosovo would spill over to Macedonia was becoming a reality.

We’ve seen this happen before – give otherwise young unemployed males a masculine-related purpose such as being “heroes” and they’ll embrace it. But what happens when the fighting comes to an end, especially when fighting is the only thing that has given them something “meaningful” in their otherwise sad lives? For some who are unable to readjust to peace times, and when no other options are provided to them, then continuing the fight is the only thing left for them to do.

Albanians had genuine grievances in Macedonia and their status as a minority meant that they were not in the prime position to gain benefit from the system. But considering that there were a number of government ministers who were ethnic Albanians, could it be honestly said that the Macedonian government these ministers were part of was repressing the Albanians, as claimed as the rationale for the armed conflict, to a point that innocent peoples’ lives were worthy of being lost in a fight against this “repression”? As the few, and very much muted, alternative anti-war media sources in Macedonia have pointed out, it was too much of a coincidence that the 2001 war in Macedonia started at a time of intense and, at times, bloody competition between smuggling gangs regardless of ethnicity – usually these groups are mixed as crime knows no border. The main factor that allowed this smuggling (mainly of cigarettes) to thrive was that the border between Macedonia and Serbia (which officially included Kosovo at the time) was not properly defined, effectively creating a grey zone through the Shar mountains. The (occasional) enemy of these smuggling gangs was the police, so what a surprise that the first place to be attacked in this conflict was a police station – in the border village of Tearce. And surely it was not a coincidence that this attack happened just days after the Macedonian and Serbian governments signed an agreement that properly defined the border between the two countries – eliminiating the grey zone and, subsequently, the smuggling trade. Now crime works best when there’s chaos and lawlessness, and with loads of unemployed former KLA fighters on the Albanian side and as many unemployed ethnic Macedonian men on the other side, what better way to achieve this than whipping up ethnic differences and getting an armed conflict going to provide the cover to settle criminal scores. This, I believe, was the true cause for Macedonia’s 2001 armed conflict and not any of the official accounts on either side of “protecting national interests” or “ethnic rights” blah blah. In the end, it’s always the little people on all sides who suffer.

And it was those little people that many of our listeners were concerned about. They were their relatives and friends, as well as their wider community. They wanted far more detailed info than any of the English-language sources could provide, so our program became the primary source for the latest news of what was happening in their ancestoral land.

I also had a personal interest in the situation – my own little person was my first cousin Biljana (there’s that name again). At the time, Biljana and her husband and infant son were living in a village to the north of Skopje a few kilometres away from the newly formed frontline. In March 2001 Biljana had a littler person – a daughter. A day after returning home from having given birth to her daughter, and with the gunfire intensifying – an audible sign that the frontline would soon be at their village, she and her family made a fateful decision: they grabbed a few essential items, locked the door on their humble home and fled. Knowing that Biljana was due to give birth, my father had contacted his sister, Biljana’s mother, who told him what happened. That was the last we heard of their whereabouts…

In conflicts like these, it’s very easy to be caught up in the tribalism deliberately cultivated, fanned and exploited. It’s all black and white – “we are the 100% good side and the other is 100% bad” and “you’re either with us or against us”. Very primitive stuff, and if you think you can rise above it, then good luck! I know that I was going to do my best not to succumb to it, even though I was presenting a Macedonian radio program being fed news solely from Macedonian news sources that we had no possible means to verify if the information being provided was accurate, genuine, hearsay, propaganda or complete lies. Did I then contribute to this tribal politics? No doubt, yes! We’d all like to think that in situations like these we’d be like August Landmesser, the man in the famous picture where he’s the only person not giving the fascist salute within a sea of 45-degree poised arms, but let’s be honest here – sticking your neck out and going against the tribe has consequences so severe that only the truly brave… or foolhardy would contemplate. One thing though I did make a conscious effort in doing is not to resort to ethnic slurs that so many people in these situations easily slip into. Neither did I truly hate the Albanians as an ethnic group – they were being as manipulated by their corrupt leadership as much as the Macedonians were by ours.

There was one incident during this period that certainly caught me by surprise.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous tales from ethnic radio, our 11:30 am Sunday show would be followed by the one-hour Croatian program. The coordinator of the show, a devout Catholic woman who would rush straight to the studio after Sunday mass had finished, ran a tight ship. While doing my live show, when I’d have some Macedonian song playing, the whole team would pour into the studio (strictly speaking, they weren’t supposed to) and start preparing for their show. I didn’t mind as I knew they were very professional in their approach and kept quiet when they had to.

But there was this one time, in the studio….

It was late May 2001. I was doing one of my last live Sunday shows giving the latest accounts from the frontline in Macedonia. The Croatian team came into the studio as per usual and starting preparing themselves for their upcoming broadcast. Now, Croatians can at least get the gist of Macedonian as our languages are related though not mutually intelligible, but having been in the same country before – Yugoslavia – meant that there had been some linguistic levelling and mutuality, especially when it came to administrative, political and military language, and when there’s an armed ethnic conflict, there’s plenty of that. Of course, I was informing the audience of the latest attacks and where villages had been ethnically cleansed – familiar territory for the Croats, and which my colleagues in the studio had been listening quietly to so as not to disturb me or create any background noise. I went to a song and the Croats in the studio went back to organising their program.

Then a woman from the Croat team went right into an unexpected yet familiar rage rant…

“If these shiptari1 don’t like it in Macedonia, then they can all go to Albania for all I care. They’re always causing trouble. Get rid of them all! Violence – that’s the only language they understand. They’re backward primitives. No-one can live with them…”

And on she went!

I admit, I was stunned. “What do I do?” I thought to myself. “Do I reply?” I gave a simple “a-ha” just to acknowledge that I’d heard her, but to change the awkward mood in the studio, I decided to cut the song and go immediately into reading the latest community announcements. “Coming up this week at the Macedonian Hall…”

25 years later and this rant is still etched in my mind. This is why…

What this woman said was not out something random or unique – it was the standard rant Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins would, and still, say about Albanians in (ex-)Yugoslavia. I knew that this attitude had been shared by many others in Yugoslavia towards Albanians. I won’t dwell too much or unpick this, but I will say that outstanding writer Slavenka Drakulić did state in one of her books how growing up in Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia, due to language, culture and (to a degree not as significant as it might seem) religion, the attitude prevalent at the time was the Albanians “came from a different world”. Being the most numerous non-Slavic ethnicity in Yugoslavia and primarily still predominantly rural, they were an obvious cultural and linguistic “other”, though physically they did not stand out like the Roma did, who are the ultimate in Balkan “others”.

I should point out that this is no one-way street. Again, extremism knows no boundaries. For instance, whenever some internet war heats up between Slavs and Albanians, like the times when someone falsely claims that Tom Hanks said ‘Kosovo is Serbia’, prompting internet comments wars of epic proportions, then it’s only a matter of time that some Albanian will demand that all Slavs “go back to beyond the Carpathians where you came from”. This implies that unlike the Albanians, who are supposedly fully “autochtonous” (just ask Dua Lipa), the Slavs don’t belong in the Balkans as they’ve only been in the region for a mere 14 centuries, which is the Balkan equivalent of an overnight stay in the greater scheme of things.

What made this rant from a Croat in 2001 stand out was that it came soon after the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Until then, I had been under the impression that Croats and Albanians were allies of convenience in that classic arrangement of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” – that common enemy being the Serbs. One of the most high-profile Croatian Army generals who fought against the Krajina Serbs in Croatia’s 1991-5 “Homeland War” was Rahim Ademi, an Albanian born in Kosovo, who in 2001 was indicted (and later acquitted) of war crimes against Serbs. So there were close links there, but as it seems, they were solely superficial – despite shared animosities, not only is it not automatic that Croats would sympathise with (Muslim) Albanians but some outwardly and non-apologetically hate them to a level greater than towards Serbs. Even Ademi himself alluded that as a dispensible Albanian, his Croat superiors threw in him under the bus, so to speak, to protect other ethnic Croat generals who were more involved in war crimes than he was.

The other aspect of this rant that surprised me is that this Croat woman had a greater intensity in expressing her feelings towards the Albanians on this matter than any Macedonian, or most Serbs, I knew at the time, who had greater cause (whether justified or not) to feel such rage. But that wasn’t the first time I’ve seen bystanders be greater advocates for blood. I was just as shocked when during the 1999 Nato bombings of Yugoslavia, the most passionate outburst against the west’s actions I witnessed came from a Ukrainian colleague of mine – an otherwise calm and kind grandmother who had come to Australia after WWII as a displaced person (my grandfather was from this immigrant wave). With a passion betraying her otherwise default demure disposition, she urged how we needed to “uphold the Orthodox Christian faith in the face of the satanist west and its evil Nato”. This was at a zeal greater than any Serb I knew at the time showed. Looking back, it’s quite an about-face now to hear that a Ukrainian once would have said things of the west and particularly of Nato, considering the west’s full support for Ukraine now. This shows how attitudes can change completely based on immediate circumstances… but as the Croat woman showed, that the undercurrents of older, deeper attitudes can remain bubbling under the surface only to burst out given the right time and place.

In both cases, and as I’ve also witnessed with others since thanks to the rise of social media providing a platform for anyone to express their views, is that those calling for the most extreme solutions are the ones who will have no immediate repercussions from them. It’s very easy to call for all-out war or genocide when no-one within your circle will have to suffer from any of the grief, carnage and death subsequent to such evils. With that in mind, there’s a reason why some countries don’t allow their diasporas to vote in elections (such as Israel) or that there’s great discontent that people outside of the country can vote and ultimately determine the course their country takes based on nationalist and not immediate issues (such as Croatia).

In a way, I was quite relieved that I was bowing out of the Macedonian radio program when I did given the intensity of war and the all-encompassing tribal politics that comes with it. I saw what it did to my friends from other parts of Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s. Macedonians had a certain smugness at the time in that by having risen above the nationalism and not going into war was ultimately a sign of our higher sense of “civilisation” and “decency”, though the reality was that we were only in delay. Part of that smugness came as a response to prior Yugoslav prejudices that saw Macedonians as being backward, uncultured seljaci (country bumpkins) that only know how to play the gajda and make ajvar. This shows that you can never be dismissive – of a practice, a belief, a political move, extremism, genocide, whatever. Never assume that something “could never happen here” because… it can. Trust me, the circumstances going from living in harmony to killing your neighbour can happen anywhere and so fast that it’ll be too late before you realise it. “Ancient hatreds” don’t cause this to happen. Checks and balances? Rule of law? They can easily go and with hardly any resistance.

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Just before I did my last program in the beginning of June 2001, the community put on a special send-off soiree for me. All the community leaders gave rousing speeches in praise of me, and my colleagues Cveta and Bosko half-jokingly even pleaded that I reconsider my plans. At the end of my final show, two songs were played as a farewell to me. They got me to choose one of the songs, so I opted for Ne zaboravaj da se setish na mene (Don’t Forget to Think About Me) by the late Vlado Janevski, which was set and has become my anthem for my decades away from Australia. The thing is, when they did do that event this year commemorating 50 years of Macedonian radio programming in Adelaide – the event that prompted me to write about these experiences – they had forgotten to think about me. At least I haven’t forgotten my time there.

p.s. When I left Australia in June 2001, the whereabouts of my cousin Biljana and her family were still unknown. But I hadn’t forgotten to think about her and her family. There’s more to this story…

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Most deposed European royal families have the decency to fade quietly into minor nobility; the occasional wedding photo in a glossy magazine the only proof they ever wore a crown. The Zogus, Albania’s royal family, obviously did not get that memo… and to be fair, they never had much of a crown to begin with. The dynasty as we know it was founded in 1928 by Ahmet Zogu, a former Ottoman provincial chief who in 1925 became leader of the fledgling independent Albania and decided, reasonably enough by his own logic, that the job needed a better title. So the Albanian Parliament obliged, a dais was found, an oath was sworn on the Bible and the Koran in keeping with Albania’s unique (for the Balkans) accommodation of all religions, and Europe’s only Muslim king was created without anyone bothering to actually crown him – there was no fancy, huge-budget, tradition-steeped ceremony with a crown at all; just a vote and a speech, which didn’t stop contemporaries equating him with the self-anointed Napoleon anyway, on the basis that there’s nothing more Bonapartist than simply deciding you’re royal (-adjacent) and getting on with it.

Fascist Italy’s 1939 invasion of Albania brought an abrupt end to the country’s 11 years of royal rule. For the next eighty-odd years, the family went on to generate a genuinely operatic amount of material: we have bazookas, baby elephants, an Australian socialite in the mix, an armed insurrection… and a present-day prince who has, somehow, settled into the most normal life out of the lot by comparison.

It is, in other words, a family that never had the throne but never stopped behaving as though they might get it back any minute. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it all. Cue the intro music…

Leka I, “King of the Albanians” (1939–2011)

When the obituaries came out for Leka I in 2011, they somewhat undersold him, if anything. However, in his wife’s own obituary in 2004, the Telegraph described Leka as “a 6ft 9in tall, six-gun-toting giant who has never shaken off the aura of his country’s bandit culture”, which, allowing for journalistic flourish, was not an unfair summary of how he conducted himself for the better part of fifty years.

Leka’s mother was Geraldine Apponyi, the daughter of a Hungarian count and an American heiress, whom King Zog married in 1938. Leka was born the following year, but the Italian invasion of Albania two days (!) after his birth forced Zog and his family into permanent exile. The Albanian communists under Enver Hoxha formally abolished the monarchy in 1946.

The royal family then settled in the UK, with their first residence being The Ritz in London (nice digs!). In 1946, Zog and most of his family left England and went to live in Egypt at the invitation of King Farouk (who was of part-Albanian origin). After Nasser overthrew Farouk in 1952, a few years later the Zogus left for France. After King Zog’s death in Paris in 1961, the “Albanian national assembly in exile” proclaimed his son, Leka I, as “King of the Albanians”.

Leka was, by his own account, a man permanently engaged in liberating Albania from communism, though the lines between fact and cosplay here did tend to blur. In the late 1960s, it is alleged Leka I set up a training camp for an “Albanian Liberation Army” in Libya, a plan that collapsed along with King Idris’s regime in the 1969 coup led by Muammar Gadaffi. According to the South African journalist Jacques Pauw, Leka later discussed with notorious arms smuggler Dirk Stoffberg (who, by Pauw’s description, was “a murderer, conman, money launderer and self-proclaimed killer”) training a guerrilla force of up to 1800 men to invade Albania and toppling Enver Hoxha (now can we understand why Hoxha built those 750,000 bunkers). Nothing came of it, except for those bunkers in response, though the correspondence survived to be quoted back at Leka.

By the early 1960s, as friends of General Franco, Leka and his mother were living in fascist Spain, which was also the base for the deposed Bulgarian royal family. Madrid was where the legend started. Leka supposedly ran what amounted to a private war room at his villa, training – or living the fantasy of training – liberation forces. Leka eventually exhausted the patience of post-Franco Spain, and in 1979 fled the country owing, by one account, millions of pesetas in debts and having a personal arsenal that had led to several arrests on arms-smuggling charges, the most well-known occurring in Thailand in 1977. The flight out (to Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, no less) very nearly became a diplomatic incident in its own right: when his plane stopped to refuel in Gabon, local troops or armed mercenaries (depending on who you talk to – some claiming Hoxha had hired them to seize Leka, though the real reason was more likely score-settling of another, murkier, kind) surrounded the aircraft. Leka saw them off in the most, erm, diplomatic way possible: by appearing in the doorway of the plane brandishing a bazooka. It’s just another day in the office, really.

The Rhodesia sojourn didn’t last long. Leka later said of his hurried exit that he would have been the best gift Robert Mugabe could have given the Hoxha government in Tirana (Enver Hoxha certainly lived rent-free in Leka’s head). And so it was on to apartheid South Africa, which proved a more durable arrangement, not least because the white-minority government there granted Leka and his family diplomatic status. Life for Leka, wife and son (born 1982) continued in a compound near Johannesburg.

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With the Communists toppled in 1991 but then rebranding as Socialists and winning the subsequent multiparty elections in Albania the following year, Leka saw his opportunity to visit his former kingdom in 1993. He was expecting his long-suffering subjects to greet him as a saviour upon his triumphant return. That fairytale didn’t happen. Entering in on a passport issued by his own Royal Court-in-exile, which the Albanian government rightfully refused to recognise, Leka had his profession listed down humbly as “King”. The visit turned out to be a non-event; Leka was asked to leave immediately and duly informed that he would be readmitted only if he were to obtain an ordinary (read: genuine) citizen’s passport.

Leka was obviously delulu of how much (i.e. little) support for the monarchy there was inside Albania. However, throughout the 1990s when Albanians in former Yugoslavia, especially in Kosovo, were facing repression, Leka’s advocacy for a unified ethnic Albanian nation gained him widespread support among the Albanian diaspora (he was, after all, “King of the Albanians”). But given his unsavoury past and somewhat erratic behaviour, this positioning caused deep concern among Albania’s neighbours and in international circles.

That didn’t stop Leka though. He pursued his goal relentlessly, nay, recklessly. In 1997, Leka returned once more to Albania (at the time, it was reported he entered clandestinely and illegally, like on an armed mission) amid the violent uprising that engulfed Albania followed the collapse of pyramid investment schemes. First he tried to secure a support base in the traditional lands of his ancestors in the north of the country. However, the return of Leka, who portrayed himself as a source of stability, served only to further inflame Albania’s volatile politics.

A referendum on whether to restore the monarchy was held simultaneously with parliamentary elections in June 1997, resulting in an overwhelming vote for maintaining the republic. The monarchists blamed the socialists i.e. former communists for manipulating the results, which led to more mudslinging. Leka then decided to hold rallies calling on Albanians to “protect their vote”. On 3 July, dressed in military fatigues and with a grenade and a pistol strapped to his leg (on brand for him) and flanked by armed guards, he greeted around 2000 supporters in Tirana’s central Skanderbeg Square to chants of “Albanians will defend their vote. Down with the communists. We want the king”. In what can be described as “pure Albania”, a brief armed standoff and a deadly gunfight occurred soon after, resulting in one death and Leka being shot in the leg (ouch!). Leka later failed to respond to a summons from the prosecutor’s office to appear in court on the shenanigans in the square, and instead on 12 July hightailed it out of Albania on a private jet back to Jo’berg. In his absence, he was tried and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for attempting to organise an armed insurrection.

The controversy, and arms, kept following him regardless. In 1999, after the new post-apartheid South African government had soured on its house guest, police raided Leka’s luxury Johannesburg compound and found your usual household items: grenade launchers, anti-personnel mines and roughly fourteen thousand rounds of ammunition – a remarkable amount of ordnance for a man with no actual army and who now claimed not to be a “king” as stated on his novelty royal Albanian passport but as a “commodity broker” (yes, but what “commodities”?). The Albanian Royal Court’s own account adds a stranger post-script: while in custody Leka fell suddenly and severely ill, and the family suspected poisoning, though no cause was ever established; the charges were dropped within three months and the collection quietly returned.

For all that, he was touchy about the label “arms dealer” specifically. He always denied the accusation, insisting it was “communist propaganda”. Leka went as far to sue, and win, two defamation cases against French magazines that had called him such. Whatever the precise legal distinction between a man with fourteen thousand rounds of ammunition and an arms dealer, the courts apparently found one.

With sentiment changed in Albania after the millenium, more than 70 Albanian parliament members petitioned for the royal family to be allowed to return to Albania. Albanian president Alfred Moisiu rather surprisingly granted Leka a pardon in 2002, paving the way for him and his family to return legitimately to their homeland for good. Leka also had some confiscated property restored to him. This time round though, having finally learnt the hard way, Leka largely refrained from involving himself in politics, and from 2005 officially withdrew from public life.

What? You want some more absurdity about Leka? OK, here’s something extra. Leka struck up a friendship with Ronald Reagan (of course!) during Reagan’s time as Governor of California, and in 1967 marked the relationship by gifting him… a live baby elephant – a gesture that says a good deal about a man who never let the absence of a throne cramp his sense of scale. Apparently, the baby elephant’s name was Gertie, but Nancy Reagan deemed the name “unrefined” and renamed the pachyderm “GOP” – geddit, because the elephant is the symbol of the “Grand Old Party” aka Republicans *eyeroll*.

Really, Nancy?! Did your astrologist come up with that one?

Susan, the Australian Albanian queen crown princess (1941–2004)

January 2024 saw the Australian media go into overdrive when news broke that Queen Margrethe II of Denmark announced her abdication in favour of her son Frederik.

Why would the Aussie media be that interested in Danish royalty, you may be asking?

Well, as most Australians know, Tasmanian girl Mary Donaldson met some Danish bloke at a popular drinking spot in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics. Mary had no idea this guy she was talking to was not just Danish royalty but also heir to the throne. Love blossomed, which resulted in marriage in 2004, Mary renouncing her Australian (and British) citizenship, becoming a full-on Dane and giving birth to four children. “Our Mary” (as the Australian media always refers to her) was on her way to becoming a bona fide queen – “the first Australian to do so”.

Or was she?

Poor Susan. Always overlooked, because if we’re going to be exact here, it wasn’t “our Mary” but “our Susan” who was the first Australian to become a “queen” – Queen of the Albanians, no less.

Leka’s own romantic life took an unexpectedly antipodean twist when in 1975 he married Susan Cullen-Ward, an art teacher, artist and budding Egyptologist by profession, but better known as a highly connected socialite from Sydney, Australia. Coming from a squattocracy family (Australia’s landed gentry), she had grown up on her family’s sheep station near Cumnock in rural New South Wales, and attended the prestigious Presbyterian Ladies’ College in the town of Orange and then university in Sydney. To show her pedigree, Susan’s cousin was apparently none other than Andrew Barton Paterson, better known to Australians as Banjo Paterson, one of Australia’s most heralded poets – he wrote the lyrics to Waltzing Matilda, Australia’s most famous song, and appears on the Australian $10 note. What we do know for certain is Susan’s first marriage with English husband Rick Williams lasted three years. The details from here on start to get a bit iffy, but that’s the internet for you. Where she met the King of Albanians depends on which account you believe – at a Sydney dinner party in the late 1960s or later during a scholarship at Sorbonne University in Paris where Leka invited her to study in Spain. Whichever it was, they were engaged in 1974, married the following year in a civil ceremony at the town hall in Biarritz, followed by a religious ceremony in Madrid.

Rumours always swirled that Susan had converted to Islam, Leka’s religion, but that’s simply not true. All throughout her life and later at ceremonies, such as at her funeral, there was always public acknowledgement of her Anglican Christian faith.

In any case, there were some Albanians, and other European royals, who did not approve of Susan – the former for her lack of Albanian roots; the latter for not being of the proper blood-line for them, despite her distant connections with the British royals.

Susan took on the unofficial title of Crown Princess of the Albanians, but royalist circles styled her as “Queen Susan”, though no government anywhere signed off on it. Australia’s own position was a tidy diplomatic fudge: when Andrew Peacock was foreign minister (and close friend and one-time lover of Shirley MacLaine), the Australian government issued her a passport reading “Susan Cullen-Ward, known as Queen Susan” – official enough to travel on but non-committal on the royal business.

And guess what was Leka’s affectionate name for Susan?

Apparently it was “Roo”. As in short for “Kangaroo”. Aww!

There seems to be an unwritten decree that every royal, official or not, must have a self-named foundation of some sort, and Susan was no exception – the Queen Susan Cultural Foundation in the United States, which funnelled medical aid and educational support to Albanians.

Susan went to Albania with her husband Leka and son Leka in 2002 after her husband’s long exile finally ended; however, she didn’t get much time to enjoy her time living in Albania. A life-long heavy smoker, Susan was diagnosed with lung cancer soon after their relocation to Tirana, where she died in July 2004, aged 63.

Leka II, the heir who’s been busy advising

Their son, and head of the House of Zogu since his father’s death in 2011, Leka II, or going by his full name: Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, has had, by pretender standards, a fairly active public career. He went through Sandhurst himself (named best foreign student when he was there) and had stints studying in Italy, Albania and Kosovo. From there, Leka (for short) has had a series of Albanian government advisory posts – to the foreign minister, then the interior minister and then the president. This is about as close as the family has come to actual office since his grandfather Zog’s dethroning in 1939.

His personal life has had its own royal-soap-opera quality. He married the actress and singer Elia Zaharia in 2016, in a civil ceremony at Tirana’s old royal palace, officiated, with a certain historical irony, by the city’s then mayor Erion Veliaj of the Socialist Party. Five Albanian religious leaders representing the faiths of Sunni Islam, Bektashi, and the Christian traditions of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant (in honour of his mother Susan) blessed the couple, in a ceremony symbolising yet again Albania’s time-honoured tolerance of different denominations. The guest list for the wedding was a who’s who of Europe’s deposed royal families, plus Leka’s rellies from his mum Susan’s side popped over from Oz for the bash (big question from the Australians: did they do the Nutbush?)

Now this is something – Elia gave birth to a daughter, Geraldine, on 22 October 2020 at Queen Geraldine Maternity Hospital in Tirana, on the 18th anniversary of Leka’s grandmother Queen Geraldine’s death. Now for something earth-shattering: the royal couple named their daughter Geraldine in her honour.

Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t turn out how they wanted it to be, and so Leka and Elia divorced in 2024.

However, Leka II is still one who believes in love, and so in early 2026 he announced on Instagram (where else?) that he is to tie the knot again – this time with Tirana-based photographer Blerta Celibashi. A private ceremony took place first on a beach near Sarandë, Albania’s tourist mecca, and then at Apponyi Castle in Slovakia – a venue that belongs to his late grandmother Queen Geraldine’s family line. Both were relatively understated events, so perhaps finally the Albanian royals had received that ‘go-demure’ memo the other faded blue-bloods of Europe have had for a while. It must have been lost in the mail given the seemingly no-fixed-address nature of Leka II’s predecessors.

It’s a peculiar kind of inheritance, taken as a whole: a bazooka-wielding father, an Australian socialite mother who became “queen” and a son who inherited the name, the “title” and none of the firepower – just a comparatively conventional life of advisor postings and little scandal, living away from full public view.

What’s striking, looking at the three of them in sequence, is how until their more dignified return to Albania in 2002, the family never truly adjusted its self-image to match its actual circumstances. Zog crowned himself out of a country he’d fancifully made into a kingdom; his son spent fifty years defending a throne that hadn’t effectively existed since he was two days old, arms cache and all; and in the middle of all that, an Australian woman found herself with a passport that listed her as a so-called queen. Only Leka II seems to have made peace with the gap between the title and the territory – he kept the name, did the advisory jobs, had the weddings and, on appearances, got on with it without the drama… which may be the most royal thing anyone in this family has done yet.

Thank you of Yakety Yak, a great friend of mine, for the suggestion to write about the Albanian royals, in response to my piece about their equally eccentric Bulgarian counterparts (more about them here).

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Thank you, Princess Kalina, and your strong arms, your striking, Michael Jackson-esque nose and for your (drunken?) gatecrashing of the recent “March for the Family” in the Bulgarian capital Sofia for bringing attention back to the near-forgotten Bulgarian royal family. I’m sure she’s saying: “You’re welcome!”

When pictures of Kalina with her distinctively muscled arms (since gone) and peculiar nose (still there) started doing the rounds on social media in 2024, plenty of people were genuinely surprised to learn that Bulgaria has a royal family at all. None more so than in the former Yugoslavia, which shows how little they know about their eastern neighbours – partly because they consider them inferior, even though both Bulgaria and Romania are in the EU and, apart from Slovenia and Croatia, they’re not.

I, on the other hand, have been hearing about the Bulgarian royals since birth.

My maternal grandfather grew up in Pirin Macedonia in what was then the southwest corner of the Kingdom of Bulgaria. And even though he identified his ethnicity as Macedonian and not Bulgarian all his life (this matters), he was – inexplicably – a devotee of the late Bulgarian Tsar (King) Boris III. I say “inexplicably” because of two reasons: my grandfather also adored Stalin and Margaret Thatcher, so you can draw your own conclusions about the consistency of his politics; the other was that the Pirin region was literally a law onto itself for most of the 1920s and 1930s, with rival, and often violent, factions of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) having their grip over the region. This reflected the local population’s lack of loyalty to the central Bulgarian government under the reign of Tsar Boris. However, this was contested in 1934, when to quash the lawlessness in the Pirin region, Tsar Boris sent in the troops to put an end to IMRO and bring some stability not just to the Pirin region but to Bulgaria as a whole. It was a year after in 1935 when Tsar Boris took over direct control of the government, establishing a personal authoritarian royal dictatorship that lasted until his death in August 1943. My grandfather never really talked much about that period, but given that prior to 1934 you could hire an IMRO assassin for next to nothing, perhaps Tsar Boris wiping out IMRO’s mafia-style control was a welcome relief, hence the adulation. But knowing my grandfather, the more likely reason for it was this: after a youth spent rebelling against the system and at much personal cost, life as a refugee in Australia was easier if you fell in with the royalist crowd – and in Adelaide, Australia, where we lived, that crowd was the core of the local Bulgarian community, centred on the suburb of Fulham Gardens and the nearby town of Virginia. Liking the Tsar was also a sure sign that you’re not a communist, which in 1950s Australia with the “red scare” hysteria about, it wasn’t a question of loyalty but also of survival to toe the line. Back in Bulgaria, the communist authorities had a name for these royalists in exile: враждебна емиграция – “the hostile emigration.”

Every year on 30 January, the ageing Bulgarian royalists of Adelaide would hold a lunch (no dinner as that would be too late for them) to mark Tsar Boris III’s birthday. Interestingly, my grandfather never went – hey, he adored the tsar but not that far!

These royalists, many with dubious records given that Bulgaria was on the Nazi side for almost all of WWII, shared one unshakeable conviction: the only thing that could fix Bulgaria was getting rid of the communists and bringing Boris’s son, the exiled Simeon, back to reclaim the crown.

No fairytale ending here for them as that didn’t exactly happen. Well, not immediately, anyway. But Tsar Simeon did eventually return to Bulgaria… and to power. Just not as tsar. He came back as… prime minister!

Picture it: Bulgaria, 2001

After more than a decade of lurching from “real socialism” – the Eastern Bloc’s preferred euphemism for a soft Stalinism that never had any intention of reaching actual communism – into gangster capitalism, mass corruption and grinding poverty, Bulgarian voters had had enough of the usual cast of mafioso-adjacent politicians. What they wanted instead was someone who simply wouldn’t steal. Bonus points for being Western-educated, which says a great deal about the inferiority complex many Bulgarians carry about their own institutions, and for having zero ties to the old Communist Party – a tall order, by any measure.

So here’s the thing: how about Tsar Simeon?

Simeon ascended to the throne in 1943, aged 6, after the mysterious death of his father Boris, who had defied Hitler by not declaring war on the USSR (the Russians had liberated Bulgaria from Ottoman rule after all, so waging war against the USSR was not popular amongst Bulgarians) and for not fully deporting all of Bulgaria’s Jewish population. A side note, and quite a controversial statement in Bulgaria but one also shared with Shalom, Bulgaria’s main Jewish organisation: Bulgaria did not necessarily “save” its Jewish population. Royalist, Nazi-allied Bulgaria had fully applied the Nuremberg racial laws, forced Bulgaria’s Jews to wear yellow stars and to report to concentration camps (“for their own safety”), and had willingly, enthusiastically and thoroughly deported the Jewish people in the Bulgarian-occupied regions of Macedonia and Thrace to their immediate deaths in Treblinka. Bulgaria then simply had not sent the Jews from the pre-1941 borders of the Kingdom of Bulgaria… yet. So it’s believed Hitler had ordered for the 49-year-old Tsar Boris to be poisoned.

The Red Army entered the territory of Bulgaria on 8 September 1944. The following day, a “revolution” occurred and the “Fatherland Front”, a Communist-lead resistance movement took over control under the direct orders of the USSR. The child tsar’s reign was numbered. The regent Kiril, Simeon’s uncle, was arrested and sentenced to death in 1945. The following year, after a Communist-engineered plebiscite abolished the monarchy outright, Simeon and the rest of the family fled the country, eventually finding asylum in fascist Spain after Franco took them in.

A small historical footnote: when Simeon was born in 1937, his father was so delighted to finally have a male heir that he decreed every student in Bulgaria should have their grades bumped up by one point. Bulgaria used a five-point scale at the time, where 5 was an A and so on down to 1 as a fail. After that decree, the scale simply shifted up a notch – 6 became the new A, 5 the new B – and it has stayed that way ever since.

Back to 2001, let’s run through that checklist for Tsar Simeon’s case: untainted by a communist past? Tick. Western-educated? Unquestionably. Rich enough that he wouldn’t bother dipping into what was left of the state coffers? Also a tick. He was, on paper, perfect.

Trading as “Sakskoburgotski”, the somewhat clumsily Bulgarianised version of his blue-blooded German surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – the same pre-1917 family name as his cousins, the British royals – Simeon launched his own party just eleven weeks before the parliamentary election, under the suitably modest name National Movement Simeon II (NDSV). He promised foreign investment, lower taxes and an end to corruption, all within his first 800 days in office (later denied). The Bulgarian electorate lapped it up! NDSV stormed to an unprecedented 42% of the vote, winning half the seats in the Bulgarian parliament.

I happened to be in Bulgaria for the summer of 2001, much of it in the Pirin region. The buzz was that the tsar who’s rich enough not needing to steal, with a Rolodex full of noble relatives and ultra-wealthy friends, would flood the country with so much foreign investment that everyone will soon be living like Krystle and Alexis from Dynasty – shoulder pads included!

Not everyone was convinced, though. I said how the Pirin region in Bulgaria historically had its own deep streak of anti-royalist sentiment… well, as I found out, it was still alive and shooting in 2001. It was one evening when friends of mine, all in their 20s, were gathered around, cigarettes and beers in hand, having a good old chat. The upcoming elections came up, and so the tsar unsurprisingly was the main point of discussion. One of the women, 22 years old at the time, had a stern word to say about the tsar: “I’m not voting for the man whose grandfather killed Sandanski, and that’s final!” Cheers all round came from the table. That was settled then. That “grandfather” was Tsar Ferdinand, known in the west as “Foxy Ferdie”. Sandanski was Yané Sandanski, the Robin Hood-like local IMRO hero whose armed band controlled much of the Pirin region in the late Ottoman era. Sandanski was firmly committed to socialism and Macedonian independence – two factors that made him an enemy of Bulgarian Tsar Ferdinand. So in 1915, Foxy Ferdie ordered Sandanski be liquidated… and was. Well, that’s how the local lore has it. 85 years later and sentiment was still strong about the matter. Some things, my friend said, you don’t forgive.

How it actually went

Here’s the thing about wanting a rich man at the helm so he won’t steal from the public purse: the Bulgarian electorate was right about that. What they hadn’t accounted for was everyone around him – the chancers and grifters who had hitched their wagons onto the Tsar’s juggernaut. The deputies and officials filling out his government were mostly wide-eyed opportunists who ticked none of the three boxes the Tsar himself satisfied. So when it came to actually stamping out corruption, the Tsar should have started by looking at his own benches.

The promised foreign investment never really showed up, despite the Tsar’s vaunted contacts. However, what marked the Tsar’s rule as prime minister was a brief window of cautious optimism in the run-up to Bulgaria’s accession to the EU. Surely now the rule of law, functioning public services, genuine debate about issues concerning marginalised communities, decent infrastructure, an end to corruption… basically “Germany arriving in Bulgaria”… were finally on the way. Unfortunately, not much actually changed. That disappointment showed up at the ballot box in 2005, when NDSV’s share of the vote collapsed to 19%, and its seat count fell from a commanding majority to just 53. The party limped on as junior partner in a coalition with the Bulgarian Socialist Party, which made for a rather pointed irony, given that the Socialists were the direct successors to the very Communist Party that had forced a nine-year-old Simeon out of the country in 1946.

That’s Bulgaria for you.

By then NDSV carried the same reputation for graft as every other party in parliament. It rebranded itself the National Movement for Stability and Progress, keeping the acronym, but voters weren’t fooled. At the 2009 election, it scraped together a mere 3% of the vote – below the 4% threshold needed to hold any seats at all. Simeon resigned as party leader the day after the results came in, and NDSV has since faded into political irrelevance.

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So what’s left of the royal mystique?

Ask the average Bulgarian today what they think of their royal family, and the honest answer is: not much. If the family comes up at all, it’s usually about how they’re not in any way ethnic Bulgarian, plus their shaky command of the Bulgarian language. That compares with the Greek and Romanian royal famlies, also fly-ins, but not the Serbian or Albanian royals, who at least have some local blood line. All this is true: the Bulgarian royal family is from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha-Koháry and primarily of German origin, belonging to the same influential European dynasty as the British and Belgian royal families.

So now that Tsar Simeon is no longer the topic of discussion as before, there’s another family member getting tongues wagging.

Enter Princess Kalina

Kalina, born in Madrid in 1972, is Simeon’s fifth child and only daughter, raised in exile alongside her four brothers and educated, like the rest of the family, partly in France and partly in England, where she went on to study art history (don’t they all?). She married the Spanish adventurer, former commando, and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador Antonio “Kitín” Muñoz in 2002, in the first royal wedding held on Bulgarian soil since her grandparents married back in 1930. Five years later she gave birth to a son, Simeon Hassan, in Sofia – the first member of the Bulgarian royal family to be born in Bulgaria in seventy years.

For most of her adult life, Kalina cultivated a reputation as the family’s more unconventional, modern member: distinctive fashion sense, a genuine interest in art restoration and heritage, and somewhat removed from the stiffness one expects of European royalty. Then, in May 2024, a set of photographs of Princess Kalina at the reburial of her great-grandfather Tsar Ferdinand’s remains in Bulgaria went viral, with social media fixated on her noticeably muscular arms and unique nose. The princess, by then in her early fifties, found herself trending for her physique rather than her lineage. So trust Hello magazine to do a full piece about Kalina’s remarkable transformation, as well as explain why her nose is so.

It hasn’t been the only headline-grabbing moment. There have been previous episodes where she’s been photographed going around barefoot (scandalous!) and her bold fashion choices. Amongst Bulgarians, however, she’s most famous for being convicted of driving under the influence following a car accident in the ski resort of Borovets in August 2023, for which she picked up a suspended eight-month prison sentence… and earning her a reputation for being a lush.

Which brings us to her most recent moment in the spotlight: the “March for the Family” held in Sofia on 13 June 2026. The march, a counter-protest to that day’s Sofia LGBT Pride, is organised by a coalition of conservative and Orthodox Church-aligned groups, and this year had the full support of the current Bulgarian government. Kalina turned up dressed in a peasant-ish dress in the Bulgarian colours of white, green and red, and positioned herself at the very front of the procession, ahead of the Guard’s ceremonial brass band, alongside her husband Kitín. Organisers claimed she hadn’t been invited (even though everyone is welcome to join as it’s not an invite-only event) and supposedly had asked her more than once in the opening stretch of the route to move behind the band – to little effect, since she stayed at the front for some time regardless.

What followed was a familiar pattern: footage and photos of Kalina swaying along to the march music in heels quickly went round Bulgarian social media, with large numbers of commenters declaring she appeared visibly drunk while fronting a procession ostensibly about family values and sobriety of public life – pointed, given her existing drink-driving conviction. The organisers, keen to put a distance between themselves and the moment, issued a statement insisting her presence at the front was entirely her own initiative and not something they could be held responsible for. None of that stopped the memes or viral clips, which by all accounts comprehensively buried the march’s actual message under a pile of jokes about the princess instead.

• “Rocking like a boat after your fifth vodka”. One of the viral videos of Princess Kalina at the March for the Family, with the chalga hit Celuvka s Tequila (A Kiss with Tequila) superimposed.

So, in the end, it seems the only thing keeping the Bulgarian royal family in the public conversation these days isn’t the crown, the politics or the glamour – it’s Princess Kalina’s ongoing talent for turning up to events and unintentionally becoming the drama.

I know for certain my grandfather, or for that matter all those Bulgarian royalists who’d raise a glass to Tsar Boris every 30 January, never imagined it would end up like this – not with a restoration, nor even with a scandal of substance, but with their beloved dynasty’s last gasp of relevance riding on a princess’s arms and a (suspected) drunken wobble at the front of a parade for traditional values. Then again, maybe my grandfather would have found that ending entirely fitting.

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On Saturday 13 June this year, the Bulgarian capital Sofia saw two processions wound through its streets within a few hundred metres of each other. One was Sofia LGBT+ Pride. The other, larger event was the “Shestvie za semeistvoto” i.e. the March for the Family, advocating “the traditional family” and “traditional values”.

This was no coincidence — this has been the case now, by design, for years.

The precedent was set by former Sofia mayor Yordanka Fandakova, who, when pressed on why she permitted this arrangement the first time round, offered something that sounded reasonable: “Bulgaria is a democracy and everyone’s voice should be heard”. What a lovely, and yet highly flawed, sentiment.

Because here is what that framing erases: LGBT people in Bulgaria get just the one day in the year… and yet, their single march gets hemmed in by a counter-demonstration specifically staged to diminish and humiliate it. “Traditional values” meanwhile are not confined to a single Saturday afternoon in June; they’re the default setting — in political rhetoric, advocated by the all-powerful Orthodox Christian and Islamic clergy, in the mainstream Bulgarian media, in the classroom, in the courtroom, at the police station, in most Bulgarian homes, workplaces and social events. It does beg to ask: why have a march when they already own the street?

And this is no unique arrangement. Over the border on Saturday 20 June, Skopje Pride in Macedonia’s capital will be “balanced” with an Orthodox Church-led parade in defence of the family in Macedonia’s second largest city (and Skopje’s bitter rival) Bitola.

Zagreb Pride this year coincided with the Antunovski hod mladih (The Saint Anthony Walk of Youth), an annual Catholic event where young Catholics walk 16 km from one St Anthony church to another in Zagreb. Mix that with a firm dose of social conservatism, flag waving and the take-over of Zagreb’s main square, then you know which event out of the two captured the most media limelight.

The government picks a side

This year in Bulgaria the situation was sharpened considerably. The recent Bulgarian elections, the eighth in five years, finally delivered what the previous seven didn’t – a workable majority to one party. That was former Bulgarian president Rumen Radev’s brand new Progressive Bulgaria (PB). Many Bulgarians have pinned their hopes that Radev (let’s face it, Radev IS the party) will break the deadlock that has characterised Bulgarian politics in the 2020s. During his time in the largely ceremonial role as president of Bulgaria, Radev, a former air force commander, didn’t shy away from unconstitutionally stating his socially conservative views, much in line with the majority in contemporary Bulgaria. But most Bulgarian politicians know they must tread a fine line catering to the specifics of the Bulgarian electorate while paying at least lip service to the people funding this all – the Eurocrats. Previous Bulgarian governments have been rather non-committal on the staging of these two parades. However, this year the new government broke ranks and made it quite clear what side it’s on.

Slavi Vassilev, deputy head of the PB parliamentary grouping, stood up in parliament and delivered the message plainly:

“The traditional family is an issue of national security, identity and future.”

Yes, they went there. That means, by logical extension, Bulgarians who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or otherwise not cisgender or straight are a threat to the country.

This is not a fringe position that some anonymous profile posted in all caps on a comment on social media; this was said in parliament, by a senior member of the governing party, in the week that Sofia Pride is taking place. Vassilev went further, pledging the government’s “complete institutional support” for the March for the Family. So the state apparatus, the same state that is nominally bound by EU anti-discrimination law, threw its weight behind one side – the one with the religious icons and not the rainbow flags.

To add more to this position, Bulgaria’s influential Orthodox Church spoke openly of its opposition to Sofia Pride and urged its congregation to participate massively in the March for the Family.

And yet, despite all of Bulgaria’s main social apparatus working openly and vigorously for the one side in this cultural war, many Bulgarians will still say that the “genderité” (lit. the “genders” but pejoratively meaning “queers”) are “ruthlessly taking over the country”. Popular Bulgarian hip-hop star Ustata, who never shies away from political matters, made that clear with this AI-generated video for his latest song Novite bratushki, comparing the Bulgaria political elite’s slavish devotion to the EU on par with that of the communists for the USSR pre-1989.

“Russian influence”?

There is a temptation, particularly in Western European commentary, to file all of this under the heading of “pro-Russian influence”. However, this is a misnomer. Anyone saying this truly doesn’t understand the situation.

Yes, Russia under Putin has gone as far as officially labelling the LGBT movement as an “extremist organisation” Yes, the Orthodox Christian Church worldwide has been consistent in its instigation and support for such moves. But the hostility towards sexual and gender minorities in Bulgaria is not an import – it is predominantly homegrown, widespread and, crucially, cuts across the political divide that otherwise is often made into an easily-digestible pro-Russia versus pro-Europe dichotomy.

Just like everything, it’s not black and white – it’s a whole sea of grey. People who will tell you they are staunchly pro-European, hate Russia, wave EU flags and invoke “Western values” will, in the same breath, tell you that gay people are a threat to civilisation. These are not contradictions they feel any need to resolve. “Pro-Europe” in Bulgaria often means “pro-economic integration” and “pro-security alliance”. Only rarely does it also mean “pro-equality for people who are different from me”.

Part of this comes from a distorted sense of what the EU actually embodies; one that contorts ideal with reality. I was reminded of the time when a gay couple I know, one French, one Portuguese, went on holiday to the Croatian seaside. After having returned from their trip, I was eager to find out how the Croats treated them (oh, there’s an article full of stuff there). They told me of one incident. One evening, they were at a table together at a restaurant in Zadar. The waitress came to their table with the menus, but she hesitates and then said in a sarcastic tone: “I don’t which one out of you two is the lady to give the menu to first.” That was it. They were both furious, and in their typical Latin temperament, launched into a diva-ish yelling match. The waitress soon disappeared and the couple left the restaurant, thinking that they caused enough commotion to get the waitress the sack for her homophobia.

I told them that nothing of the sort would’ve happened. They were shocked!

Their response: “But Croatia is in the EU and that’s the law. Or else, why was Croatia accepted into the EU in the first place?”

Just because it’s in the EU, doesn’t mean that it’s all-round gay-friendly. Hey, that’s not even the case in the Netherlands or any other western country.

The “traditional family” that never existed

There is something else worth saying about this “traditional family” that has apparently become a matter of national security: it is, to a very significant degree, a modern invention — and a selective one at that.

Prior to the Second World War, the dominant family structure in the Balkans was not the neat nuclear unit of mother, father and children that today’s “traditionalists” are so busy protecting. It was the extended family — multigenerational, communal, improvised — built to absorb the shocks of poverty, illness, early death and the instability characteristic of Balkan history. It was flexible because it had to be. People died young of disease, war and childbirth; relatives stepped in when parents couldn’t; neighbours filled gaps that relatives couldn’t. Childhood, in the modern sentimental sense, barely existed: once you could walk and follow instructions, you were out in the fields working alongside the adults. The whole fairytale-like adoration throughout the Balkans and into eastern Europe of “our happy childhood” was a Soviet invention from Stalin’s time.

I know this not from history books alone but from my own family. Both of my maternal grandparents grew up without both parents present. My grandfather’s mother was killed when he was an infant; he ended up being raised by his two older sisters and Hatidja, his Turkish neighbour, who apparently had the most wonderful singing voice. When he escaped Bulgaria, he left behind a wife and two infant children, who had to deal with the wrath of the Bulgarian authorities who by association had been marked for life as “enemies of the people”. As children, my uncle and auntie were left to fend for themselves.

My grandmother’s father left for pechalba or gurbet (labour migration) to Australia when she was four years old… and never came back. She grew up in an extended-family household of twenty-two people. So too did her mother - her father also went on gurbet, leaving the village a year after she was born. He too never came back – he died in a work-related accident working in a mobile railway maintenance team somewhere in the wild west of the USA. His widowed wife remarried soon after with a man in a neighbouring village – his first wife had died in childbirth leaving him with four children.

These were not broken families. They were the actual traditional families of the Balkans, joined up, divided and/or held together by necessity, the tradition of the zadruga (wider Slavic clans) and soy (Turkish for “family” but in Macedonia meaning ‘extended family’)… and a great deal of poverty.

None of this features in the March for the Family’s literature, presumably because it complicates the mythology considerably. The “tradition” being defended today is not a historical reality; it’s a retrospective fantasy — a post-WWII nuclear-family ideal grafted onto a Balkan past where it largely did not exist, dressed up in Orthodox iconography and presented as something ancient and sacred.

And then there is the part of the tradition that nobody wants to discuss: domestic violence. It has always been woven into the fabric of these “traditional Christian family values” generation after generation. I have had women in the region, many of them relatives, say such things as “he hits me because he loves me” and “how else will I learn if he doesn’t hit me?” There was complete disbelief from the women when they heard that domestic violence is a punishable (though not enough apprehended) crime in countries such as my birthplace Australia. These are not aberrations; they are the logical endpoint of a value system that places male authority at the centre of family life and teaches women that their suffering is a form of devotion. That tradition too is being marched for in these defence of the family parades… just that it’s not splashed on the banners.

Twenty years lost

Bulgaria joined the European Union in 2007. For the country’s minorities and marginalised communities — not just LGBT+ people, but women, Roma, other ethnic, cultural and linguistic minorities, people with disabilities, etc., EU accession carried enormous symbolic weight. The promise, explicit and implicit, was transformation: legal protection would actually be enforced, the rule of law finally applied and equally, and a change not just in the statute books but in the lived reality of being a minority in Bulgaria. The atmosphere in the country in the years leading up to EU accession saw genuine debate and discussion about the issues concerning marginalised communities. Things seemed like they were going the right way. Then accession happened, and just like that, the façade was dropped. Mission accomplished, so it was back to normal programming.

Twenty years on, it’s worth assessing what those promises have and have not delivered.

Legislation exists. Bulgaria has transposed EU anti-discrimination directives. On paper, much of the framework is there. In practice, the machinery of enforcement remains weak, the judiciary is still susceptible to political and economic (organised crime) pressure, and the cultural climate has not moved in the direction the optimists had hoped. If anything, the organised backlash — the “family values” movement, the constitutional amendments explicitly defining marriage as between a man and a woman, the banning of “LGBT propaganda” in Bulgarian schools, parliamentary rhetoric of national security — has grown more confident and institutionalised.

This all raises the question: why is Sofia Pride tolerated at all in a political and social environment this hostile?

Talk to many LGBT+ people in the Balkans and they’ll say cynically that pride parades go ahead because the West uses it as a barometer — visible, photogenic, easy to point to — for measuring how “western” (or, to be more honest, “white”) a country is. A Pride parade happens; most of the right pieces of legislation exist on paper; a box gets ticked in Brussels – everything then is, officially, fine.

The most brazen case of this happening? The first ever “Pride parade” in Prishtina, Kosovo. Happening on a Tuesday at lunchtime, Hashim Thaqi, who’s now being tried for war crimes, made sure to make an appearance for the many cameras there. Who were marching? A whole bunch of young straight women from the public service pulled out from work, given rainbow flags and paraded in front of the cameras. There were hardly any LGBT+ people in the parade. An overwhelming majority of LGBT+ people in the Balkans are not out in general, let alone at their workplaces, so asking for time-off for a Tuesday lunchtime Pride parade march would’ve outed them and probably left them unemployed. But hey, who cares! The parade looked great on camera for the western audience. Slay, Kosovo!

Parades like this are then a profoundly superficial measure of whether a minority population is genuinely protected. The parade happens, the laws might exist, but for the other 364 days of the year, enforcement is absent, the judiciary looks the other way, the rhetoric in parliament escalates and the government pledges institutional support for the march happening a few hundred metres away. None of that truly disturbs the barometer reading.

This matters because it lets everyone off the hook. It lets governments claim democratic credentials while actively undermining them; it lets the EU point to formal compliance while ignoring lived reality; and it lets western governments and commentators feel reassured that the problem is being managed, when in fact it is being performed.

A Pride parade that exists primarily to satisfy a western checklist is not progress – it’s optics. And the people marching in it today deserve better than to be someone else’s proof of concept.

Bangaranga!

Now for some celebrity stuff. Dara, who won Eurovision representing Bulgaria last month, was the headliner for the post-parade Sofia Pride concert, putting in an energetic performance for the appreciative crowd. And just like that, all of the Bulgarian naysayers and upstanding Orthodox Christians who have been insisting that Dara is a satanist for promoting traditional (and paganistic) Kukeri rites and costumes, felt vindicated; plus the Bulgarian “patriots” who last month were lavishing praise for “our beautiful girl Dara” have done the usual and taken to social media to class Dara as “national enemy No 1”.

Bulgarian LGBT people and many more of their allies marched in one parade. A larger crowd, brandishing Bulgarian flags, religious icons and other paraphernalia, including the very masculine-looking Bulgarian princess Kalina shocklingly LARPing as a Bulgarian peasant (perhaps to quell the persistent rumours she’s transgender), marched nearby, with government backing, to tell “genderité” that they are a problem to be solved rather than people to be respected.

The mayor’s old formula about democracy and hearing everyone’s voice was conveniently invoked whenever there was questioning of the timing of the parades. It sounds, as always, like fairness… but it isn’t. It is the use of “balance” as a weapon — the pretence that there is some neutral ground between a person’s right to exist freely and the demand that they be marginalised.

Bulgaria is an EU member state and has been for almost twenty years (yipes!). Its government officially gave its blessing and support for a march premised on an idea that some of its citizens are a national security threat, in defence of a “tradition” that never quite existed, while the real traditions, the good and the bad – the violence, the poverty, the neighbours who raised each other’s children across ethnic lines — go unmentioned and conveniently forgotten.

This is worth saying out loud… and not just once a year.

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Bulgaria, and the Balkans as a whole, have survived yet another gruelling graduation season. Chestito! That was yet another hard slog.

Every year at the end of the academic year in the Balkans, which is around the end of May, the whole region becomes focused on one thing – high school graduations. Convoys of rented luxury cars clog city thoroughfares, teenagers in fancy suits and sequined gowns emulating celebrities parade through city and town centres, restaurants and reception centres host all-night celebrations, professional photographers and (Roma) musicians work overtime… and lots of money (that everyone claims not to have) is spent.

Plus, as it’s 2026, there’s also plenty of social media and tabloid footage and commentary, ranging from pride to snickering, often to do with the excess it has become. Let’s have a look of it here and you can judge for yourself. All of these are images and clips from graduation celebrations in Bulgaria this year… (care of the X profile Една българка)

The red carpet awaits! The usual parade of the graduates through the town centre on their way to the prom ball. But before they get to this, you need to make a splash of sorts. Cue the car parade to rival Dubai!

Note this clip is not in a big city such as Sofia or Plovdiv but in the provincial town of Kardzhali in Bulgaria’s south.

But turning up in a flashy car has soooo been done. So every year, the transport options to the parade become… erm… more inventive…

And how about this?

Social media influencers use this opportunity to the max, with this one gaining particular attention this year for his entrance…

and for his, well, dancing…

While such celebrations can be found all over the Balkans, it’s in Bulgaria where there has been the greatest fundamental shift affecting, or effected by, economics and the changing social environment in the country.

Traditionally, June heralds the transition into another season: weddings. But increasingly, the wedding season pales in comparison.

For much of the past decade, Bulgarian graduation celebrations have become bigger, louder and more emotionally significant, while weddings have quietly shrunk… or disappeared altogether. The “big fat Bulgarian wedding” still exists, but it’s no longer the social default. Many young couples now opt for small civil ceremonies, minimalist receptions or (clutch pearls!) simply never marry at all.

And nowhere is this transformation clearer than within my own Bulgarian family.

The era of the big Bulgarian wedding

The first out of my Bulgarian cousins to marry was in 1989 in the final summer of Communist Party rule (no-one could predict that daddy Zhivkov would be gone by the end of that year). OK, it was a shotgun wedding – everyone in the village knew that – but that was the socially conservative code at the time, for it was otherwise shameful on the family to have a daughter who was pregnant and not have the father marry her. Photos arrived in Australia showing the entire extended family gathered outside the “Ritual Palace” as they were known in communist Bulgaria at the closest town near their village, for the obligatory civil marriage ceremony, where both comrades pledged their matrimony in loyalty to the party and state. Everyone was there: grandparents… well, minus our grandfather, who had been in exile in Australia for forty years and would’ve faced imminent arrest and time and certain death in a prison camp had he attempted to return; all the cousins, neighbours, family friends… and the whole village. The clothing they all wore smacked of poor quality, indicative of the dire state of Bulgaria’s planned economy, but the event itself was a big social event and a brief respite of joy in what otherwise was borrowed time.

The second out of my Bulgarian cousins to marry did so in 1992. Her husband was 33 — considered unusually, even scandalously, late for marriage at the time. Bulgaria was deep into its chaotic post-communist “transition” by then, and weddings had become fascinating hybrids of old traditions and newly recovered freedoms. There was now a church ceremony after the civil one, something discouraged and subject to repercussions (particularly on career advancement) under atheistic communism. The wedding was professionally videotaped, another novelty of the era. Again, the entire extended family was in attendance.

Then came the wedding of another cousin in 1994.

This one was truly big!

Again, we received a VHS tape of the entire event. There was the traditional procession from the groom’s house to the bride’s, accompanied by Roma brass musicians. But the reception itself was pure 1990s Bulgaria: the band played almost entirely chalga, the newly dominant Balkan pop-folk genre that exploded during the post-communist years, and the fashions were… of its time.

In honour of our absent grandfather in Australia, the musicians also performed several patriotic songs associated with the Macedonian independence movement a few years earlier in the dying days of Yugoslavia. These songs advocated a separate Macedonian identity, a major sticking point to this day in Bulgaria. One relative, who had lived during the time when the local Bulgarian authorities had taken violent measures to combat such sentiment, felt compelled to go on stage, grab the microphone and publicly reassure everyone that Macedonia “was, is and always will be Bulgarian”.

Again, the whole extended family was there.

As it turned out, that was the last time.

Above: clip of a Bulgarian wedding in 2010. Note how much smaller an event it is compared to the 1990 clip before.

The weddings that never happened

Fast forward to the 2010s.

Those same cousins who married in the 1990s now have adult children of their own, and without thinking, we expected this generation to continue the tradition for big weddings. Importantly, my relatives don’t live in big cities such as cosmopolitan Sofia or Plovdiv, but are clustered around two provincial towns – one being best described as a depressed post-industrial apocalypse located in one of the most polluted areas in the entire EU, and the other quite quaintly isolated in one of Bulgaria’s most socially conservative and yet ethnically diverse regions, where the population is roughly split evenly between Orthodox Christians and Muslims.

Yet something fundamental had changed.

The first sign came when I saw a Facebook photo of the eldest daughter of the cousin who married first. The daughter (who happens to be a redhead – yes, they exist in the Balkans) standing in a brilliant blue dress beside a man in a suit, while two Roma zurna musicians serenaded them.

I contacted her mother to ask what had happened.

It turned out the couple had already been living together for some time. Now that she was pregnant, the families had hurriedly organised a small engagement party involving only immediate relatives. Like mother, like daughter then.

Several things about this were once unthinkable.

First, engagement parties were not traditionally a thing. Historically, engagements were often followed by big weddings within weeks.

Second: she had been openly cohabiting with her boyfriend before marriage.

“How was that allowed?” I asked.

My cousin rolled her eyes. “That’s what young people do these days.”

Only a few years earlier, this would have been treated as scandalous. Now it was accepted with weary resignation.

Naturally, my family in Australia had been waiting eagerly for news of a big wedding so we could finally attend one of those enormous Bulgarian celebrations we had seen on the VHS tapes they sent to us in the 1990s.

But that big fat Bulgarian wedding never came.

The couple eventually formalised the relationship with a simple civil ceremony and nothing more. To add further shock, my second cousin did not even take her husband’s surname.

This is happening in provincial Bulgaria!

Has this world gone mad?

At first, my whole family assumed this was an exception… but by 2026, it had become clear that it was the new normal.

The daughter of another cousin met a guy while studying in Sofia. He, like her, also came from a provincial Bulgarian town. The young lovers soon moved in together, finished their studies, found work in the same government department, had twins… and more than a decade later still remain unmarried.

Another cousin’s daughter also moved in with her boyfriend shortly after meeting him. They later had a child together, followed eventually by a small civil ceremony attended only by immediate family and close friends.

Another cousin’s son, now 33 – exactly the same age his father was when he married, has been with his girlfriend for seven years. When I asked earlier this month whether there might finally be a wedding, the answer was simple:

“No.”

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Why Bulgaria stopped having big weddings

The reasons are predominantly economic.

For decades, Bulgarian families saved for years to finance enormous weddings. In provincial communities especially, weddings were public performances of family respectability. Everyone judged everyone else. A large wedding demonstrated status, stability and social belonging.

But younger Bulgarians increasingly see things differently.

Today, many couples know they themselves, and not their parents, will ultimately pay the bill. After decades of economic insecurity since 1989, many simply choose not to spend tens of thousands on a single day.

At the same time, Bulgarian society has become more accepting of cohabitation. Couples living together outside marriage, once deeply frowned upon, are now commonplace even in conservative regions.

Smaller weddings also better fit the urbanised lifestyle most Bulgarians now lead. What once was solely a Sofia, Plovdiv or Varna thing has spread nationwide. If weddings happen at all, they are often intimate affairs of 50–100 guests, focused on close friends rather than sprawling extended kin networks.

Large banquet halls are increasingly replaced by restaurants, boutique venues or, for those with the means, destination ceremonies.

The stereotype of the gigantic Balkan wedding survives partly because older generations still remember a different social reality.

Historically, rural extended families lived close together. Under communism, rapid industrialisation scattered relatives across the country, turning weddings into rare opportunities for family reunions. But now, with roughly a third of Bulgarians living abroad, gathering everyone together has become vastly more difficult.

Older Bulgarians often lament this shift bitterly. “We knew who were our second cousins, but now people don’t even speak to their siblings.”

I have to emphasise again that’s it’s wrong to say that there are no more “big” weddings in Bulgaria – they certainly still exist, but they’re not the standard anymore.

The bureaucracy doesn’t help

Like so much of Bulgarian life, marriage too is somewhat unnecessarily over-bureaucratic.

At a minimum, couples are required to provide the local municipality identity documents, civil marriage declarations, premarital medical certificates (Bulgarian bureaucracy loves these!), proof of payment for municipal fees…

If previously married, additional divorce or death certificates are required.

And because this is Bulgaria, municipal officials often request further paperwork of wildly varying relevance depending on mood, office or municipality.

The costs for all these documents do add up, not to mention the “joy” of dealing with Bulgarian public officials through the little openings of their counters and their arbitrary and countless coffee and smoke breaks. So why bother with this hassle!

So when are you having babies?

The other big pressure that Bulgarian couples face is to have babies. There is a saying said at Balkan weddings that there’ll be a christening in a year’s time, so when you get married, you’re expected to provide your parents with grandchildren post-haste. With many young couples either unable to afford a new child or having other priorities in life, a loophole has been found. In a situation also found in other socially conservative and traditionally family-oriented societies, engagement periods now last for years – just like that of my cousin’s son and his seven-year relationship. Italians and Greeks know about this, and now with the taboo of pre-marriage cohabitation gone, it has also come to the Balkans. But there’s only so much time the wider family, or even one of the people making the couple can put up with this limbo period. A confrontation is almost inevitable, and the light-hearted backhands turn into outright shade. The most extreme example of this was when couples like this used to appear trash TV shows such as on Greece’s Erotodikeio in the 1990s, where parents would confront long-term engaged children embarrassing them nationally by telling them that the clock is ticking – what are they waiting for?

But having children is essentially a vote of optimism for the future… and for many in Bulgaria who have only known of economic turmoil, there’s very little incentive to bring a new mouth to feed into their chaotic world. Bulgaria’s population has been rapidly declining, going from 9 million in 1990 to now barely over 6 million. And with fertility rates so low, plus with an ageing population and still mass migration, the predictions are catastrophic.

The new great Bulgarian celebration

But economics and bureaucracy alone do not explain the decline of weddings.

The deeper reason is that weddings are no longer the most emotionally significant rite of passage in Bulgarian life. Given that many Bulgarians are not under obligation, as dictated by the judging eyes of the neighbours, to live with their parents until marriage and then become fully fledged, independent-ish adults, there’s been another ceremony that has taken that role…

High school graduation.

This transformation has deep historical roots.

When the communist regime took power in 1944, Bulgaria was overwhelmingly rural and poorly educated. According to the 1934 census, fewer than 3 per cent of Bulgarians had completed secondary education. However, under communism, mass literacy campaigns and universal schooling transformed society within a generation.

For most Bulgarian (and Balkan) families, having a child graduate from high school, let alone attend university, represented unprecedented social advancement. Graduation therefore had enormous symbolic importance.

Today, that symbolism has only intensified.

For many young Bulgarians, graduation now also marks the moment they leave home: usually moving to the big cities such as Sofia, Plovdiv or Varna, or even abroad, for university or work. Emotionally, it now carries much of the weight weddings once did.

And so, Bulgarian graduations are the new weddings, with just as an elaborate, and highly expensive, celebration culture to go with it.

The Abiturientski Bal

The centrepiece is the abiturientski bal — the graduation ball aka prom.

Held after final exams in May, it marks the completion of 12th grade and has evolved into one of the biggest social events in the Bulgarian calendar.

Students wear fancy suits and extravagant gowns, often emulating the chalga stars or celebrities they admire. We are rivalling the Met Gala here! Hair and makeup are professionally done. As seen in the videos above, luxury cars, limousines, retro vehicles, sports cars and, as has been a trend showing on the socials, semi-trailers complete with Roma musicians, are rented for ever dramatic arrivals. The whole town will gather outside of schools and squares to greet the graduates as they parade through before they’re greeted by the obligatory red carpet leading them into the restaurant, hotel or hall where all-night celebrations await. Oh, and the graduate chant is counting up to 12 to signify completing 12 years of schooling, with chalga songs to go with it.

There are speeches, dancing, DJs, live music, drinking, endless photography, and traditions such as everyone staying up and gathering to see the post-party sunrise.

Unlike the relatively modest prom traditions of many countries, Bulgarian graduation season can stretch across multiple days. There are separate celebrations with classmates, friends and family; elaborate professional photo sessions for the school album, often featuring multiple costume changes; farewell ceremonies for teachers (bring out the bouquets and guitar!); school rituals and processions, originating from communist-era ceremonies though now stripped of their ideology; and post-prom holidays abroad or on the Black Sea coast.

The season also overlaps with 24 May celebrations honouring Saints Cyril and Methodius, linking graduation directly to Bulgarian national identity, literacy and culture, so there’s a nationalist element to it.

In effect, the graduation ball has become something larger than a school event. It also transcends any ethnic or religious differences, becoming a ceremony and experience shared by everyone in Bulgaria.

It is now the great public performance of entering adulthood.

Graduation as status performance

The irony is striking.

Communism unintentionally created the cultural conditions for this shift. By massively expanding education, the socialist state transformed high school graduation into a profound marker of upward mobility.

Post-communist consumer culture then amplified it.

Today, families who would never spend lavishly on a wedding may spend extraordinary amounts on a child’s graduation. Professional photographers, designer dresses, imported suits, luxury vehicles, drone videography, post-prom trips to the Black Sea coast and even abroad (Greece and Turkey being the most popular destinations) are not options but all mandatory… and this all adds up. One statistic going around the net at the moment is that the average monthly Bulgarian wage is 720 euros, and yet the average spend on graduation celebrations per graduate is 1680 euros… which I personally, and many others, think is a gross underestimate.

In many ways, graduation celebrations now perform the social function weddings once did: they gather extended families, publicly display status, create community spectacle, provide one final collective ritual before dispersal and, above all, mark the start of true adulthood.

The difference is that weddings once celebrated the creation of a new family unit. Graduation balls celebrate the collective departure of the community’s 18-year-olds into an uncertain modern world. Perhaps, that says everything about contemporary Bulgaria – this is now the prime rite of passage for Bulgarians.

But then again, you have this couple who combined their graduation ceremony with a wedding proposal….

Wishing all of our graduates all the success in the world!

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Montenegro will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the restoration of its independence today, 21 May, with a giant free concert on the aptly named Trg Nezavisnosti (Independence Square) in the centre of the nation’s capital Podgorica. It promises to be a huge event!

The headliner?

Of course, that champion of Montenegrin independence, Ricky Martin.

By the way, there will also be a slew of Montenegrin pop singers – the usual suspects and many of them having represented Montengro at Eurovision: Sergej Ćetković, Nenad Knežević Knez, Bojan Marović, No Name (wow!), Daniel Popović, Andrijana Božović, Nina Žižić, Milena Vučić, Isak Šabanović, Tamara Živković, Baryak, Samir Ramović, Bubnjivi & Psi.

This being a “respectable” event means there are no turbo folk singers invited, nor are there any Belgrade-based Montenegrin singers in this line-up. Perhaps big names such as Boban Rajović, Dado Polumenta, Šako Polumenta, Vlado Georgiev or even Rambo Amadeus (who coined the term “turbo folk” and even represented Montenegro at 2012 Eurovision) would have been there.

Interestingly, no Jadranka Barjaktarević, a controversial Montenegrin turbo folk singer who had the honour of being banned from entry into Serbia. The irony is that she was most famous for coming third on the second season of the most popular singing audition show in the region, the Belgrade-based Zvezde Granda. She has worn her Montenegrin-ness on her sleeve ever since, such as with this number Dupla s čemerom (A Double with Sadness) from 2012 featuring the gusle, the instrument most symbolic of Montenegro. But in 2020, Barjaktarević earned her ban from entering Serbia, and effectively cutting herself from her biggest market, from the outrage after she sang popular 1980s Neo-Folk song Ne može nam niko ništa (“Nobody Can Do Anything to Us”) but changed the line after to jači smo od Srbije (“we are stronger than Serbia”). The ban has since been lifted, but in a defiance emulating that of Croatian superstar Oliver Dragojević, Barjaktarević has vowed never to step foot in Serbia ever again. Many others had said that before… and relented when huge amounts of money have been thrown at them. Still, you’d think that with patriotic songs like Crna Gora je moj dom (“Montenegro is my Home”) that Barjaktarević would’ve been up there shaking her bon-bon with Ricky Martin…

So why have Ricky Martin there?

This is part of Balkan practice for blowing budgets on big-name stars to appear at major public events in a classic case of bread and circuses. While there never seems any taxpayer-funded public budgets to tackle some of the most pressing of issues such as fixing critical infrastructure – public roads, facilities or transport, there always seems to be money for lavish celebrations often engaging a high-profile star to perform in front of the unwashed masses for free in the central square or local stadium of villages, towns and large cities for some big event. New Year’s Eve is the primary night of the year for this, where in the lead-up to the najluđa noć (“the craziest night”) of the year, the media in the Balkans provide non-stop reporting on which big-name star is performing in which city or town… and the mouth-watering appearance fees they’ll be earning. Turbo folk superstar Ceca and rock star turn brass band showman Goran Bregović always end up cashing in the most, with both of them earning up to 200,000 euros on the night.

Many of these cities justify spending so much on these stars claiming that many people from neighbouring cities and even countries will come just to see these singers perform, pumping the local economy with good money into accommodation and hospitality venues. However, considering many of these visitors usually just drive in for the concert of their favourite star and then just leave once it’s over, such justifications are often quite feeble.

One place that can rightfully claim that they get a return for their investment here is Montenegro, and particularly the coastal resort towns. Budva, one of the most established of these towns, has its tourist infrastructure primarily catering for regional tourists, and that includes being the site of some of the biggest discos in the Balkans playing local music and hosting big-name stars to lure visitors. Getting in big names to perform there for the New Year period right in the middle of the winter, an otherwise dead season for coastal tourism, ensures that the main towns on the Montenegrin Riviera are all-year destinations and keeps the local economy pumping. This Serbian tabloid’s report from October 2025 announced who’ll be singing for New Year’s Eve that year in Budva – all big regional names with big appearance fees.

Otherwise, the reverse in seasons happens at some ski-dominant resorts in the Balkans, where places like Bansko in Bulgaria or Zlatibor in Serbia will hold concerts of huge names during the summer months.

But in most cases, getting these big stars to perform in their non-descript town can be used for one-upmanship purposes and to show off how much more influential the town, and ultimately its mayor, are in stature in relation to, or despite, population size. Locals then can laud their town is better than rival nearby towns because they get bigger stars to perform at their town’s special day, giving them something shallow to be proud of. An example of this is the small town of Hadzhidimovo, population 4500, located in a forgotten corner of southern Bulgaria within earshot of a forgotten corner of northern Greece, whose mayor loves boasting how he’s such close friends with some of the biggest singing stars in the Balkans that he’s been able to get them to come and do concerts in his fair town – something bigger towns in the vicinity and beyond can only dream of.

So getting someone as internationally famous as Ricky Martin to sing in Podgorica now is a bit of a coup and will get people from all over Montenegro and from neighbouring countries to come and visit the Montenegrin capital. However, there has been some backlash from the Montenegrin public regarding the expect huge amount of money spent on today’s event. The Montenegrin government, though, has countered this, as stated on the Podgorica tourism website, by claiming: “This extraordinary artistic event is envisioned as a gift from the state to the citizens of Montenegro. The arrival of an artist whose name symbolises top-level production and a universal musical language confirms the intention to mark two decades since the restoration of independence in a truly magnificent way.” Isn’t that nice of them!

But any mention that Ricky Martin is gay? OK, that’s the topic for another article altogether… but to sum it all up, it’s been conveniently muted.

So of all stars, why have the Montenegrins managed to rope in Ricky Martin?

A friend of mine did ask whether then he has some sort of Montenegrin connection?

No, there’s no apparent personal connection between Montenegro and Martin, apart from both names starting with M and the former will be paying the latter.

But then again, if we apply the logic that Serbian writer Dragoslava Koprivica used to claim that Fidel Castro is Serbian, no-one has ever proven that Ricky Martin isn’t Montenegrin.

And if all that fails, do what one overzealous Macedonian Shakira fan did when in the mid-2000s they edited her IMDb and Wikipedia entries to say she’s part Macedonian. This was immediately accepted as fact, no questions asked. Even The Guardian quoted she has Macedonian roots. However, in February 2007, at a press conference in Berlin, Germany, on the second European stop of Shakira’s Oral Fixation tour, Macedonian TV radio presenter Zhivkica Gurchinovska was chosen out of field of over 500 journalists present to ask one of the four questions Shakira’s people had allowed time for her to answer. Gurchinovska simply asked Shakira whether she has Macedonian ancestry on account that IMDB claims she is of Colombian, Lebanese and Macedonian origin. Shakira answered with a laugh saying that she is the great, great, great-grandchild of Alexander the Great... but then added that the information on IMDB is sadly not true, but did she say she really would love to have Macedonian origins – very diplomatic of her. Still, the damage has been done and a quick internet search of “Shakira Macedonian” will still bring up many articles based on this false link.

There’s actually a whole industry of pseudo-history in the Balkans, filling up local tabloids with articles of how everyone and anyone of note has some sort of [insert ethnicity] origin. And no ethnic group can claim the moral high ground here – they all do it!

Bulgarians insist that the Macedonians claiming Alexander the Great as their own is laughable and a sign of their “blind nationalism”, using the books written by fringe amateur historian Aleksandar Donski as evidence... though it’s perfectly fine when a Bulgarian in all seriousness claims that Jesus was Bulgarian and all the stories from the Bible happened in the Balkans, or when any of the crackpot historians on extreme-right-wing Bulgarian TV station SKAT (yes, that’s its name) have something to say. Hey, according to one Bulgarian “academic”, every Russian luminary, from Peter the Great to Pushkin to Putin, are of Bulgarian background. It’s all very “take the red pill, sheeple!” stuff.

Just a quick look into the comments for anything related to Albanian politics and history will get commenters claiming that everything is Albanian. Well, many do firmly believe that they were the first people in the Balkans and everyone else are jolly-come-latelies. The Slavs being in the Balkans for 1400 years is the equivalent of an overnight stay, apparently. That means all of the characters from Ancient Greece you know are all Albanian. After all, one of the theories behind the name of Albania’s currency, the lek, is that it’s named after Alexander the Great, otherwise known as Leka i Madh in Albanian, as the Albanians claim him as their own. The first 1 lek coin featured Alex on one side and the reverse showed him on his horse Bucephalus.

But the ultimate in internet stars in claiming everything comes from their ethnic group is the late Jovanka Jolić, whose whackadoodle claims ranging from the Serbs being the oldest people on Earth to Elon Musk being from Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina, made her the butt of many a joke amongst the level-headed in the region.

It’s to the point that brilliant Belgrade-based satirical news portal njuz.net even did its own (deliberately false) claim – that Lady Gaga is actually the pseudonym for Dragana Miladinović, and really originates from the town of Kruševac in Serbia. And how did they come to detecting such a link? Well, Gaga is the diminutive for the common Serbian (and Balkan) female name Dragana, so how could she not be Serbian? And for an article from 2010, Njuz.net were very much ahead of its time by claiming their source as an anonymous person with the initials A.I. While their Zagreb satirist colleagues newsbar.hr had their own spoof article claiming Croatian archaeologists have yet to confirm that Jesus was a Croat, though they’re still working on it, but they are absolutely certain that Judas was a Serb given he kissed three times (Serbs traditionally greet with three kisses, Croats greet with two).

Of course, all this is wrong because everything and everyone is Greek. Just ask Helen and Stelios. And my Greek uncle fully endorses this! This is a true story – he once told my mother, with full conviction and with no irony whatsoever, that the Moon is Greek, and the reason being is because he saw it first in the night sky in Greece.

How about you? Are you really from the Balkans just that you haven’t realised it? Then we can get one of our distinguished “historians” to prove it based on the most spurious of notions. And then we can celebrate with a giant free Ceca concert in the middle of town. Sorted! Ne može nam niko ništa!

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Eurovision is all about high energy, disposable, insipid pop songs all based around the visuals. Pretty much the same as what most of the top selling turbo folk and chalga stars push. So it’d be a no-brainer that the countries of the Balkans would send this stuff to Eurovision… and yet they not only haven’t, they actively discourage it. For not want of trying for there have been many attempts over the decades to get turbo folk and chalga on the grand Eurovision stage, and all times they’ve failed.

But first, let’s just define what is turbo folk or chalga? I use here the colloquial definitions of what actually is a bundle of folk-based Balkan pop genres. “Turbo folk” itself was the name of a particularly type of electro-based pop-folk from Serbia, with a very distinct sound, that had its heyday in the mid-1990s. Chalga was the late 1990s Bulgarian off-shoot of this, mostly characterised by songs with humerous and/or overtly sexual lyrics (continuing the Balkan folk song tradition for this) and with a heavier Roma and Greek influence. These two genres were superseded in the early 2000s with what is pretty much the pop-folk of now, where the music, production levels and presentation often make it indistinguishable from western-style pop music. Gone are almost all live instruments; the only element surviving has been the singing style still based on local traditional folk techniques – it’s that ever slight trill. No turbo folk or chalga artist claims to be a purveyor of either music form; the genre in ex-Yugoslavia and Bulgaria is positively referred to as “pop-folk” or just “folk” (not to confused with the English definition of “folk music”, which in the Balkans is otherwise known as etno, i.e. “ethno” or folklorna i.e. “folkloric” music) or disparagingly as “turbo folk” (ex-Yugoslavia) or “chalga” (Bulgaria).

So why hasn’t this music been sent to Eurovision?

Well, in western European countries, especially in the UK, Eurovision is considered a bit of a joke at most and even since the 1960s something to be ashamed of. But that fits when, to take the UK, its position in the world is fixed and prominent. For the countries of the Balkans, Eurovision has been serious business as this is one of the few opportunities where they can get to compete on a seemingly level playing field with the big western European countries. It’s also for some of the smaller the countries the only time in the year that most of Europe will even hear of them. So they have to put their best face forward so as to represent the national interest in the best possible light… and on terms they consider will garner them the most respect, or at least acknowledgement, from (civilised western) Europe.

Let’s face it: the Balkans are white but not white enough as they’ve deemed to be – how should I put it – “infected” by non-European, i.e. non-white, culture. Those aspects come from the cultural legacy of five centuries of Islamic rule, or even being Orthodox Christian with a non-Roman alphabet. Balkan countries too feel, or rather have been made to feel, that these elements are what have made them “lag behind” and therefore don’t meet the “high” cultural standards to be accepted on equal terms with central and western Europe. Turbo folk and chalga highly represent these “non-white” elements, therefore the public broadcasters have made it a priority to send entries that present their countries as the “European” societies they wish to be. The flip-side is that this attitude actually highlights the great insecurity in national identity these countries have – had they just accepted their true selves, ditched their shame and actually be proud of what they’re truly are, then we’d be seeing turbo folk and chalga at Eurovision.

And there is a precedence here. Greece and Turkey started sending entries to Eurovision in the 1970s. While there were times when they’d send songs that would be more in the style pertaining to widespread popular music tastes in their countries, an example being Turkish pop diva Ajda Pekkan’s 1980 entry Petr’oil (albeit with a more westernised arrangement), right into the 1990s both countries would regularly send entries that would fit the presupposed western sensibilities of the Eurovision. In a way, this was them showing the western European viewing public that “yes, we’re worthy of being here” and to contradict any oriental stereotypes this public would have of Greeks and Turks. But if we look at track record, sending these staid entries didn’t do well for either country, with mid-ing results at best. It wasn’t until well into the 1990s when Greece first and then Turkey later realised that sending their real music actually works. For instance, in the midst of government-propagated nationalist hysteria regarding the name of Macedonia in 1992, Greece sent Cleopatra (the singer, not the Egyptian queen) with this entry in the elafrolaika style featuring mainland Greek folk music motifs, including a Macedonian clarinet solo. The song came 5th, a unthinkably high placing for Greece at the time. Turkey managed to get its highest up-to-then position of 3rd when in 1997 it sent their previous year’s entrant Şebnem Paker (now with new nose) and the group Etnic with this very Turkish pop-folk number, and since fan-favourite classic, Dinle. The success of these two songs would prompt both countries to go for entries showcasing their local music, the culmination of which was wins for Turkey in 2003 and Greece in 2005. Self-confidence pays off!

But wait! Haven’t ex-Yugoslav countries and Bulgaria also sent entries that were based on local music and have done very well with them too? Well, yes. Serbia and Montenegro’s highly anticipated return to Eurovision in 2004 after 12 years of sanctions came with moody ethnic ballad Lane moje by Željko Joksimović. What was noteworthy in the lead-up to Eurovision was how vicious the Serbian media was in its hate for the song. There were constant implications that Joksimović plagiarised an Azerbaijani folk tune by Alihan Samedov – emphasising its “oriental” nature, belittling the title of the song by referring to it in English as “My Bamby” (lane in Serbian, while also a name of affection, literally is a “fawn”), and that his other, very western, hit at the time, Leđa o leđa (“Back to Back”) would be a far more worthy entry for Eurovision. All that, however, was conveniently forgotten when Lane moje almost won the competition by coming second. The song even heralded the thaw in post-war inter-Yugoslav public relations when, unexpectedly, the Croatian televote gave the song its top 12 points. The success of the song, which went on to become a regional hit and spawned versions in many other languages (even a Dagestani version that I can’t find anymore), set the trend for the “bombastic Balkan ballad” to become the go-to template for many consequent Serbian and other ex-Yugslav Eurovision entries, many penned by Joksimović, whether it be Bosnia 2006, Serbia 2008, Montenegro 2015 and even recently with Serbia’s 2025 entry.

Croatia even tried their hand at it in 2005 with rock star Boris Novkovic’s Vukovi umiru sami, and then with regional megastar Severina the following year with her controversial number Moja štikla, penned by Goran Bregović (his father was Croat, and he was the frontman of Yugoslavia’s most popular and biggest rock band, so that makes him “acceptable”). Severina was accused with this entry of “promoting Serbian turbo folk”, something that she did flirt with in her later albums, especially her highly successful 2012 release Dobrodošao u klub. Severina’s song was much criticised in her country as its Dinaric folk elements (shared with ethnic Serbs) were considered too “oriental” to represent “central European” and “civilised” Croatia. Baby Lasagna scored independent Croatia’s highest ever Eurovision ranking of 2nd in 2024 with this number that drew from the folk traditions of his native region of Istria, located in Croatia’s far west and never under Ottoman rule, therefore “permissable”. Croatia’s 2026 entry though has sparked controversy due to its “celebration of women defending their Christian identity”, harking to local Balkan folklore emphasising the commonly held belief in the region that five centuries of Ottoman rule was “slavery”.

After Bulgaria had sent two rather weak pop numbers in its first two years at Eurovision (the 2006 entry even had Azis in backing vocals), both failing to qualify for the Saturday night grand final, the Bulgarian public went for a different tact and sent Stoyan Yankulov and Elitza Todorova with the song Voda (Water). The performance is heavy with both performers on highly visual and energetic percussion, and Todorova singing in the Bulgarian “throat” music style (rather poorly, in my opinion). The song was Bulgaria’s first ever qualification for the Eurovision grand final and finished an impressive fifth place. That same success, however, was not repeated when they were eventually selected in 2013, where their song Samo shampioni failed to qualify for the final.

Macedonia’s entries have often featured the aksak (Turkish for “stumbling”), the 7/8 time signature most characteristic of Macedonian folk music but very foreign to western ears. Examples include the late Toshe Proeski in 2004 and Karolina Gocheva in 2007, who had gone from popstar dating one of Serb warlord Arkan’s sons to the respected etno artist she is now. Toshe Proeski’s 2004 song started off as Angel si ti, which when first presented to the Macedonian public as an option for the country’s Eurovision entry that year featured a solo with a kaval (a traditional shepherd’s flute found throughout the former Ottoman Empire), drumming with a tapan and a musical arrangement more reminiscent of turbo folk styles of the time. By the time the tune had arrived to the Eurovision stage with English lyrics, the “oriental” arrangement of the song had been toned down and the kaval replaced with a more “European” violin.

Serbia and Montenegro’s 2005 entry, featuring a quickly assembled boy band from Montenegro called No Name made up of sons of people close to then highly corrupt Montenegrin prime minister Milo Djukanović, also was in an aksak time signature. The performance itself featured archetypal Montenegrin folk dancing in an overt display of Montenegrin identity fitting with the growing calls for independence at the time, a topic that would be the defining point come the following year when tensions between Serbia and Montenegro came to the fore when picking its (ill-fated) 2006 entry.

Doubling down on what are society’s norms regarding turbo folk are the lyrics to Macedonia’s 2006 entry Ninanajna, where singer Elena Risteska laments how her boyfriend, who supposedly introduced her to “good” music (the song states “R&B and hip-hop” fall under this category) is now fully into turbo folk, so he’s “no longer the guy for her”. The lyrics also spell out that this “good turn bad” boyfriend has replaced Eminem with Planeta (a Bulgarian chalga TV station very popular in Macedonia at the time) and banned her from listening to Shakira (what, this song?) and Madonna. Make of that what you will. The irony of the song, and that doesn’t seem to dawn even on its composers or the song’s fans, is that the music to it, and using the well-used ditty “ninanajna” or variants of it, which can be found in songs from the Balkans across the former Ottoman Empire and even into Russia, are precisely these “bad” turbo folk elements that actually give the song any colour or saving graces. You can file this song under the title of “I don’t like turbo folk because that’s what the peasants listen to but this is fine because even though it sounds like turbo folk, it criticises it so that makes it not turbo folk, and so I can enjoy it”. That’s the logic gymnastics involved. Interestingly, the song ended up being extremely popular in Armenia… because of the turbo folk elements. Oh the irony!

OK, so there has been one time when a “turbo folk” singer has been at Eurovision. That was with Serbia’s 2010 entry Ovo je Balkan. OK, the scare marks are here because the performer of this song, Milan Stanković, who going by singing, music and especially his K-pop-ish image, is firmly pop, but only gets placed in the turbo folk bracket as he first gained his fame by appearing and coming fourth on ex-Yugoslavia’s biggest singing audition show Zvezde Granda, a platform mainly for discovering new turbo folk singers. Stanković subsequently had his first album released by Belgrade-based Grand Production, the biggest turbo folk label in ex-Yugoslavia. Like with Severina’s Moja štikla, Goran Bregović was the composer of Ovo je Balkan, and given that Bregović was a rock star, none of his music is allowed to be labelled as “turbo folk” even though you’d be none the wiser.

OK, so it’s taken all this way to flesh out how Balkan musical elements have made it to the grand Eurovision stage. However, it might not seem it from afar but Balkan pop-folk performers with overtly pop-folk songs have attempted to get that ticket to Eurovision… just that often they’ve had officialdom thwart their chances. So here are some cases over the years where this has happened…

Yugoslavia 1983: Lepa Brena with Sitnije Cile Sitnije

Lepa Brena and her band Slatki Greh were an overnight sensation in Yugoslavia in 1982 when they first were featured, initially as a joke, on the popular Minimax Show. Their intoxicating mix of pop, disco and rock elements to Yugoslav neo-folk music, spiced with humerous lyrics and Lepa Brena’s provocative attire, were just what the Yugoslav public wanted and needed, but many in the establishment were horrified by this “low-grade” music. When RTV Belgrade unexpectedly selected Lepa Brena and her band to be one of its two representatives at the Jugovizija competition to select Yugoslavia’s Eurovision entry in 1983, many believed she and the band had it in the bag with this signature tune, even if their pop-folk music was the antithesis of Jugovizija. However, seemingly from nowhere, Montenegrin representative Daniel Popović won a landslide of the juries’ votes with the song Džuli (Julie), which many (rightfully) dismissed as a Shakin’ Stevens rip-off. Lepa Brena came a lowly 7th. To this day, many in ex-Yugoslavia firmly believe that the results were rigged against Lepa Brena to ensure that Yugoslavia not be represented to a European audience by someone of “such low class”. Džuli went on to come fourth at that year’s Eurovision, at the time equalling Yugoslavia’s best ever previous result at the contest, and the English version of song was hugely successful throughout Europe. Daniel Popović ended up being a one-hit wonder, while Lepa Brena went on to become the biggest and most iconic star in Yugoslavia and throughout the Balkans; Sitnije Cile Sitnije has become a classic hit and one of her signature tunes. However, even her megastar status couldn’t guarantee a later spot to represent her beloved Yugoslavia at Eurovision – in 1986 she tried again at Jugovizija with Miki Mićo but came a scandalous 10th out of a field of 16.

Serbia and Montenegro 2004: Jelena Karleuša with Moli Me

After 12 years of sanctions wilderness, Serbia and Montenegro (as what rump Yugoslavia had been renamed to) was back at Eurovision. The year before, a brand new pop song contest was started to become the vehicle to select the federation’s entry – Beovizija. When the list of entrants was revealed, many were shocked (just like with Lepa Brena in 1983) that turbo folk blonde bombshell Jelena Karleuša was in the field of prominent Serbian and Montengrin pop and rock stars. Karleuša was, and firmly remains, a hugely controversial and outspoken figure not just in her native Serbia but all throughout ex-Yugoslavia. Her appearance at Beovizija was to signify her pivot away from turbo folk towards pop. No one except her anticipated that she would win Beovizija (she came 8th out of 25 in the end) but because of her undeniably spectacular stage shows and bold presentation, she has been touted, often self-promotingly, almost annually as a frontrunner to be Serbia’s next Eurovision entrant. It’s to the point that she openly taunts the Serbian public by saying she’s the only chance the country has of ever winning Eurovision again, given her fame and notoriety outside of the Balkans – a point solidified when she became the first and only Balkan star to be imitated on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Bulgaria 2005: Sofi Marinova and Slavi Trifonov with Edinstveni

Bulgarians treated their country’s first apperance at Eurovision as a sign of acceptance into the civilised family of Europe. Many of Bulgaria’s top performers at the time relished the opportunity of performing at Eurovision and present themselves to a wider European and world audience. So when Bulgaria’s biggest celebrity, Slavi Trifonov, a comedian, late-night show presenter and chalga/rock singer, most famous for his song Red Ferrari and the only Bulgarian to have filled the O2 Arena in London, teamed up with chalga superstar Sofi Marinova for a power ballad duet called Edinstveni, then it was practically settled in the mind of the Bulgarian public that they’ll be off to Eurovision. However, would Bulgaria “risk” having two chalga singers, one of whom is Roma, represent the country like this at an event as “prestigious” as Eurovision? Well… when it came to voting out of the three final songs in Bulgaria’s national final, Edinstveni gained 28,000 votes, but virtually unknown band Kaffe with the song Lorraine captured an unprecedented 76,000 votes (53% of the total vote) to become Bulgaria’s first ever Eurovision entry. Booing was heard from the audience when Kaffe was announced as the winner. Slavi Trifonov later claimed Lorraine received only 3,000 votes before the final, however, the number increased drastically by 60,000 at the last moment thanks to vote rigging spurred more out of racism towards Sofi Marinova. Bulgaria’s first Eurovision entry eventually failed to qualify for the Eurovision grand final that year.

Sofi Marinova was later picked to represent Bulgaria at Eurovision 2012 with Love Unlimited, a dance number in the style most associated with Romanian pop divas Inna and Alexandra Stan and at the tail-end of that style’s popularity. However, Sofi alone on the huge stage lacked the visual impact Eurovision dance numbers need to succeed, and coming joint 10th place in her semi-final saw her edged out from going to the grand final on a technicality.

Macedonia 2006: Adrian Gaxha and Esma Redžepova with Ljubov e… and Macedonia 2013: Lozano and Esma Redžepova with Imperija

Esma was hands-down the queen of Roma song, universally adored and a national treasure of Macedonia and Yugoslavia. However, when it came to Esma’s attempts at Eurovision, there’s always been controversy, and both times it had partly to do with treating her as an equal. When she first tried to represent Macedonia in 2006, she paired with Adrian Gaxha, the hottest Albanian pop star in Macedonia at the time (he’d release all his songs in both Albanian and Macedonian). Their song Ljubav e (“Love is…”) is very representative of the sound of mid-2000s Albanian-language pop (though composed by ethnic Macedonian pop producers). However, there was much unease with the ethnic Macedonian public of having people who are not ethnic Macedonians represent Macedonia at Eurovision, let alone having Esma on an equal footing with a pop singer. That the duet, the favourites by far leading into the competition, was pipped out by Elena Risteska’s anti-turbo folk turbo folk song (mentioned above) by a matter of a few televotes, led to suspicions that the vote had been fixed. Following the incident, Gaxha stopped releasing songs in Macedonian and solely focused on the Albanian-language market.

The controversy continued in 2013 when after it was revealed Esma will be teaming with Lozano, one of Macedonia’s most popular pop vocalists, as that year’s Macedonian Eurovision entrants, Macedonia social media went into a tailspin on hearing that Roma musician Simeon Atanasov, one of Esma’s 47 adopted sons and the person behind all of Esma’s modern pop-folk numbers, will be composing the song. When the song did come out, the turbo folk-esque Imperija (Empire) had Esma on an equal footing with Lozano, and the video clip heavily showcased the controversial Skopje 2014 renovation project that took Ancient Macedonia as its main aesthetic cue. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response from international Eurovision fans, the response to the song amongst many Macedonians was extremely negative, though this was more driven from the chattering classes using criticism of the song to vent rage at the then Gruevski government (which Esma vocally supported). Still, the level of blatant anti-Roma sentiment expressed from people who otherwise see themselves as “European-oriented urban sophisticates” was particularly high – in a case of all’s fair in love and war. A new, more “appropriate” replacement song, Pred da se razdeni, this time composed by pop producers, was quickly commissioned – a pale copy of Esma’s 2002 duet Magija with Toshe Proeski (mentioned above). Like in Magija, the new song saw Esma relegated to a supporting role providing what’s best described as “orientalist colour”. As predicted, not even getting Lozano in contact lenses could save this song from being relegated, so yet again no Macedonia at the Eurovision grand final. By the way, if you go to the 3:15 mark in the clip below and see the guy with glasses frantically waving a Macedonian flag – that’s me!

Bulgaria 2009: Gergana Dimova with Yasno Sluntse

There was huge interest from the Bulgarian public when this song first appeared in the semi-finals to choose Bulgaria’s 2009 Eurovision entry. Done in the 9/8 karshilama beat, and very reminiscent of Slavka Kalcheva’s 2000 neo-folk hit, the now standard Byala roza (“White Rose”), this song however stood very little chance of making it to Eurovision. And that was the case – even though the song clearly won its quarter final, it failed to make it past the semis. It still went on to become a huge hit for Gergana Dimova. The same can’t be said of Bulgaria’s eventual 2009 Eurovision entrant, Krassimir Avramov, who failed to make it to Eurovision Grand Final with his falsetto and has since disappeared from the public spotlight. And in what has become the usual, following the Bulgarian national final several Bulgarian musicians openly issued letters demanding Avramov withdraw from the Eurovision Song Contest, criticising his performing abilities and and questioning the legitimacy of the voting.

Serbia 2022: Sara Jo with Muškarčina

Sara Jo is a Serbian R’n’B and pop singer who first came to prominence in 2012 by coming third in the second and final season of singing audition show Prvi Glas Srbije (The Number One Voice of Serbia). She along with the other two finalists from that season represented Serbia at Eurovision 2013. After a string of successful hits, Sara Jo then faded into the background, but her 2022 appearance at Pesma za Evroviziju (Song for Eurovision – PZE), the contest that picks Serbia’s Eurovision entry, was to herald her comeback. So what does this have to do with turbo folk? Well, the composer of this song is Slobodan Veljković, otherwise known as Coby – one of the leading figures of the 2010s Balkan Reggaeton genre, otherwise known as Balkanton or Turboton, which combined Reggaeton with Balkan pop-folk and turbo folk. What was curious with Sara Jo’s number was the use of the karshilama beat (just like in Gergana Dimova’s song above), a time signature associated exclusively with pop-folk music and one that had somewhat fallen out of fashion in Serbia. Even though Sara Jo was tipped to win the ticket for Eurovision easily, she came second to Konstrakta, a conceptual art-pop act, with their lead appearing on stage washing her hands. Konstrakta’s win even took the act by surprise having entered the competition as a joke, though the large televote for the song has been largely attributed as a form of protest against the government-run Serbian national broadcaster RTS and, ultimately, the government of Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić.

Serbia 2024: Breskvica with Gnezdo orlovo

Listening and watching this brazen Kosovo-tinged pop-folk number much to the liking of Serbian nationalists and traditionalists, it’s shocking to think that a mere five years before Breskvica was Serbia’s foremost bedroom musician and the leading vocalist in Belgrade’s ultra-cool “Balkan trep” scene. This song formalised Breskvica’s transition to pop-folk, following which she’s since progressed further into pure neo-Folk. Gone was the cool urban girl and in came Serbian nationalist soundbites no different from what Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vučić would say. Given the song’s propaganda value aligning it firmly with the Serbian government’s line on Kosovo, and the massive public support Breskvica and her song had (it won the televote by far), it was a complete shock when the PZE jury members, including 2007 Eurovision winner and long-time Vučić loyalist Marija Šerifović, tanked this song into second place by voting more in favour for the eventual winner Ramonda by Teya Dora.

Montenegro 2025: Boban Rajović with Suze

Danish-born, Belgrade-based pop-folk star Boban Rajović announced that he was on the ticket to represent his ancestral country Montenegro at its national final for Eurovision 2025. However, quickly after Rajović withdrew from the competition on “personal grounds”, prompting showbiz gossip to spread that it was made clear to Rajović he had no hope of coming close to winning the spot.

Serbia 2025: Maja Nikolić with Žali srce moje

The Serbian personification of delulu, skandalmajstor Maja Nikolić is always guaranteed to bring an unimaginable new level of crazy to any proceedings. This does take away from the fact that Nikolić has had a great career with some fabulous “pop” hits. OK, there are those scare marks again. That’s because Maja Nikolić makes it quite clear how much she HATES turbo folk, but listen to many of her songs and you’ll be scratching your head as to what world is she living on as most of her material can be classed as such. Case in point, her attempt for Serbia’s 2025 Eurovision entry. Musically similar to Breskvica’s song the year before, the whole of Serbia was expecting Nikolić to ignite a one-person civil war when this number failed to even make it into the PZE final.

Croatia 2026: Zevin with My Mind

This was very much a fan favourite in the lead-up to Dora, the song contest that selects Croatia’s Eurovision entry, and showed much promise. However, the ropey vocals in its live performance certainly sealed the already doomed fate for this number — the pure 1990s turbo folk nature of the (Serbian) brass band interlude at the 1:50 mark was more than enough for the prim and proper Croatian public to rule out any chances for this number.

So what counts as “intelligent music” in the Balkans? Well, check out Bulgaria’s 2022 Eurovision entry…

This one also failed to make it to the final, coming second-to-last in its semi-final. Bulgaria was so annoyed by this that it opted out of Eurovision until it was lured back this year. Perhaps Europe was just not “intelligent” enough.

All I can say is the societies of these countries need to grow up and take pride in what music they produce. We have to let go of classist prejudices and outdated views of what’s considered “appropriate”. We should be honest with ourselves and take ownership of it. There’s no point in waiting for western societies, which have their own faults to deal with, to say that the Balkans are OK – that has yet to happen using the Balkans’ existing try-hard approach, so why should we expect that to change. If we of the Balkans want the world to accept us, we have to learn to accept ourselves first.

Should you decide to watch Eurovision this year (there are plenty of reasons not to), then I hope you have an enjoyable evening.

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Honestly, I didn’t expect at first that I’d have this much to say about my seven years doing the Macedonian radio program in Adelaide, Australia in the 1990s, but here we are, Part 4.

Part 1 covered what ethnic radio (to use the term used them) in Australia was all about in the 1980s and 1990s, Part 2 was how I joined the Macedonian radio team and scared the establishment of sorts with the hardcore turbo folk songs I’d regularly play, and Part 3 went into the problems that come when a standardised language is an unwanted and unwelcomed compromise.

But I mentioned “team”. Though there were times when I was a one-man show, most of the time doing the Macedonian program meant I had company, and what an interesting bunch of people they were.

Before I started on the program, for years it had been two people – a loving and fun couple Cveta and Bosko1, who lived with Bosko’s parents not that far away from where I lived.

Cveta is a wonderfully chatty and effortlessly fashionable person, thought we’ll forgive her for the time when she came dressed to one event in a shaggy purple top that one of my sisters derided as “the toilet cover”. Back in her hometown of Prilep, she had been a promising middle- and long-distance runner (a contemporary of Slobodanka Čolović) and once even won the Prilep best sportsperson of the year award. But as Cveta would regularly admit, coming from a very humble background, her parents simply didn’t have the connections (all too crucial in the Balkans) to allow her running career to go forwards, so instead she turned to cigarette smoking. Oh, she loved smoking, and we’re talking about full-strength cigarettes that would fill your lungs with thick tar from one inhalation. Prilep, after all, was the centre of Macedonia’s important tobacco-growing and processing industry, so to smoke in Prilep was an act of civic duty and kept the city’s economy rolling.

Cveta also had a wonderful voice for radio – so much so that when encountering new arrivals from Macedonia, they would often be convinced that she had learnt her craft from having worked in radio broadcasting in Macedonia. Nothing of the sort! Cveta was a natural.

I remember one of the first direct encounters I had with Cveta on the infamous 287 bus to Fulham Gardens. I would’ve been a teenager. It was a warm day in Australia (shocker!) and I was on the bus and had the window open. Cveta happened to be sitting in the seat in front of mine. Now, Macedonians have a thing with promaja, the dreaded draught that people from the Balkans and wider European continent firmly believe is the cause of all sorts of fatal illnesses. So Cveta turned around to me to ask, in Macedonian, for my window to be closed as there was too much promaja. Understanding the seriousness of the situation, and the fact that Cveta spoke such a mesmerising form of high-level Macedonian (that’s my linguistic side coming out), I promptly complied. Hey, the fact that Cveta felt so comfortable enough to be able to conduct such interactions, or make such demands, in Macedonian certainly says a lot of the nature of Fulham Gardens. This is the suburb back in the day when in the local supermarket (a huge Foodland, a local South Australian chain, by the way), if any of the local oldies – dressed not much different from their peers back in the village in Macedonia – couldn’t find the thing they wanted down what seemed like endless rows of produce and products, then all they needed to do is shout out what they wanted in Macedonian… and someone would respond. Mind you, the same could be done in Bulgarian, Italian or Greek. It would also come as no surprise that this supermarket was the first major one in Adelaide to stock ajvar and ljutenica in the 1990s.

Cveta had the most extraordinary accent when speaking in English – a mix of Macedonian and the broadest of Australian! The way she would incorporate those long, nasally Aussie English vowels was unintentionally entertaining. Just imagine someone from the Balkans saying the Aussie “naur” and you pretty much have it. The Macedonian community of Adelaide would regularly have picnics at the Harry Bowey Reserve… now that was a bit of a challenge for Cveta to say, the resulting sound being at first a beastly growl but then as the years passed, a thing of beauty.

Later, I was joined on the air by Sime, who had this amazingly deep voice perfect for radio. Sime had been one of the many highly educated Macedonians who migrated to Australia in the late 1980s just as Yugoslavia was sliding into ever greater economic chaos with the prospects of civil war going from ‘unlikely’ to ‘matter of time’ far too quickly. This generation of migrants from Yugoslavia, and the Balkans in general, was unlike all previous waves. Up to then, most migrants from what was Yugoslavia had basic education at most, were often unskilled apart from agricultural work, but were very much willing to do hard work. What distinguishes the pre-1980s migrants from most who have arrived since is that they came with no knowledge of English whatsoever. But when Australian migration policy changed in the 1980s from the legacy of ‘populate or perish’ to the much vaunted ‘points system’ – or the ‘beauty contest’ as I’ve seen some English people describe it, which is apt considering how much ‘beauty’ was involved in early post-WWII Australian migration waves, e.g. Caldwell’s ‘Beautiful Balts’), the migrants coming to Australia, particularly from southern Europe, changed completely in terms of nature and numbers. Now they were armed with university degrees, could speak some English and did crazy things such as listen to prog-rock or go to art exhibitions – activities unthinkable for us peasants who came before them. They also couldn’t do simple folk dances, which we found both amusing and shocking. Sime was definitely one of them.

A civil engineer in Yugoslav Macedonia before migrating to Australia in 1988 to join his visual artist sister who had migrated a few years earlier, Sime certainly made an impression on his first encounter with the local Macedonians. You see, he was very much a product of Yugoslavia… and that means he had an interest in playing the system, which any self-aware and forward-focused Yugoslav at the time knew (and still knows) is how to get ahead. The thing is that those tricks don’t work the same way in Australia.

However, Sime had skills that he would later be able to hone and apply not only to his advantage but for the better of whole communities of people beyond the local Macedonians – a seemingly effortless charm and an uncanny ability to relate to people, especially from Yugoslavia, of all socio-economic groups, whether they be like him from the intelligentsia right through to your average folk. He had the gift to make people feel at ease and be on an equal footing as him. Now, if you know how snobby people from urban elites, let alone Yugoslav ones, can be like, this was quite a feat.

Though Sime was a civil engineer by trade and qualification, there was another calling for him in Australia and much more suited to his persona. As more a product of Yugoslavia’s and not just Macedonia’s educated urban culture, his command of Serbo-Croatian, Yugoslavia’s effective national language, was on par with his native Macedonian. Added to his excellent knowledge of English and his very amiable character, he made for the ideal interpreter.

After the Balkan wars started in 1991, what had been up to then a steady trickle of new arrivals from what had become a fragmenting Yugoslavia soon turned into a flood of refugees. The first wave were, curiously, people who either had lived in Australia before (usually the 1970s) but had the foresight to at least take out Australian citizenship (when it was relatively easy to do so) before returning to Yugoslavia, or, as was more the case, young people in their early 20s who had been born in Australia to parents who were those who returned to Yugoslavia after not liking life down under – these young people had automatic Australian citizenship based on the laws at the time. For most of this latter lot, going to the other side of the world and for the first time tasting the freedom of not living with their parents certainly made many of them go a bit wild. Some of their actions caused such friction within the community that we started referring to this lot disparagingly as “imports”.

The second 1990s wave of arrivals was made up of refugees fleeing the wars in the territories of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also highly educated cultural refugees fleeing Belgrade and Zagreb, which by then had been gripped by organised nationalist madness. Many of them had been assisted by relatives already in Australia, but as the wars progressed, Australia then gave priority to the most pressing of refugee cases – people who had been made to flee not once but twice (I definitely need to write about this another time), and the huge number of couples and families who were now deemed to be “mixed”.

Reflecting the conflicts in the Balkans, it was during this time that tensions too between the existing communities in Australia originating from now ex-Yugoslavia were rising, with even cases of open violence – particularly at football (soccer) matches. This greater division was also reflected linguistically. While the “Yugoslav” communities of Australia were on the whole already operating on ethnic lines, officially the language that the Serb, Croat, Bosniak and Montenegrin communities spoke was deemed as one – Serbo-Croatian. That meant that a qualified Serbo-Croatian interpreter in Australia would be sent on assignments regardless of the ethnicity of the interpreter and/or client. For example, a Serbo-Croatian interpreter who otherwise is ethnic Serb and spoke Serbo-Croatian as used in Serbia could be sent to interpret for a Croat who spoke the form of the language as spoken in Croatia. While this was acceptable (to a degree) when there were no overt tensions between the ethnic groups originating from Yugoslavia, that was no longer the case with the war happening.

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One time during a break while taping a radio progam, Sime gladly announced to me that he had become an interpreter. I congratulated him, but I was curious to know whether there was that much need for a Macedonian interpreter to sustain a full-time role. Oh no, he was already fully booked doing assignments as a “Serbo-Croatian” interpreter. I use scare marks here as the term was no longer in official use by the early 1990s as the language then had devolved into three (at the time) – Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian. What the local Australian authorities had ruled that due to problems and complaints they received, and to avoid any possible uncomfortable situations, this will be the case from now on: anyone who identifies as “Orthodox Christian” (regardless of whether they were religious or not – most weren’t) will have Serbian interpreters assigned; Croatian for “Catholics” and Bosnian for “Muslims”. No consideration here was taken that the new languages were, in practice, more regional than ethnic-based – many of the “Orthodox Christians” from Croatia, for instance, spoke what would be better classed as “Croatian” than “Serbian”. But there was no other way in defining or ascertaining which interpreter would be the best match. In fitting with the tribalism happening at the time, this was the simplest solution.

But what about the “mixed” families? These were the people who had been officially of Yugoslav ethnicity. They were the ones who formed the bulk of the new arrivals and were most in need of interpreting services.

Sime told me of the absurdities surrounding the handling of these new successor languages to Serbo-Croatian. He showed me a list of families that required his interpreting. It was clear-cut what language and appropriate interpreter applied for the families where every member was of the same “religion”… but what about the “mixed” families? Making sure to hide everyone’s name from me, even though it was unlikely I would’ve known them, Sime showed me the most extreme example from his list of clients: the father was “Orthodox Christian”, the mother was “Muslim” and yet they raised their children as “Catholics”. As Sime pointed out, according to instructions, a Serbian interpreter must be sent for the father, a Bosnian one for the mother and a Croatian one for the children. How in the world can this family then communicate with each other?

That’s where Sime came in.

Macedonia was fortunate at the time not to have been dragged into the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Part of that came from not being in the same language as the Serbo-Croatian speakers, so the separate ethnic identity of the Macedonians was already a given amongst Yugoslavs. And even though there were a small number of extremists amongst the Croats and Bosniaks that would attribute the Macedonians as being no better than Serbs on account of being majority Orthodox Christian, and some extremist Serbs belittling Macedonians as recalcitrant and misguided “Southern Serbs” not deserving of sympathy, an overwhelming majority of ex-Yugoslavs saw Macedonians as neutral bystanders, so no-one really had any beef with them. That made it perfect for Sime, as an ethnic Macedonian Yugoslav interpreter of Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian being the right person to be sent for interpreting assignments for these “mixed” families. Thanks to this, Sime quickly established himself as the prime conduit of verbal communication between these “mixed” families and the Australian authorities, medical staff and judicial officials. For the past three decades that has been Sime’s important role for these people.

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Sime and I would do the Macedonian radio program together on Fridays right up until I left to go overseas in 2001. For him, he was doing this to maintain his connection to his Macedonian roots – speaking in Serbo-Croatian all day and having a Croat girlfriend (now wife) meant he was only rarely speaking in Macedonian, but like with me, being on the program maintained that. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

While Sime would have a pleasant demeanour all the time, there was one topic that would make him feel melancholic – his son. Sime had married relatively young and had fathered a son soon after, but his marriage didn’t last long. Migrating to Australia was a way of getting over his relationship, but it did mean he was not there to see his son grow up, which was something he felt guilty about. Sime would always light up whenever he’d tell me the latest with his son, but I knew very well never to ask Sime about his son as this was a topic that solely Sime should determine when it is appropriate to talk about.

Sime was also a very inquisitive person who would always ask me about the latest English language grammar or Australian English quirk he’d heard. That’s what happens with people who work with languages! One saying that he loved bringing up was “dig deep”. One time when doing a live broadcast from the radio station as a part of its annual fundraising drive, my sister accidently found herself in the studio with us and a whole panel of other illuminaries from the radio station. With no preparation and no prior on-air radio experience (the first time is scary!), the head of the radio station, who also happened to be Macedonian, asked my sister if she had anything to say to the audience for the fundraising drive. After a slight pause out of shock, she simply said – dig deep. Sime was taken by the saying. He had never heard of it before, and for years afterwards he would just say it out of the blue and laugh. You have to admit that it’s a great saying.

While we would do recording, Sime and I would entertain ourselves with our own humerous observations of the things happening around us. One time, Sime told me how had been invited to a dinner party with some very pretentious people who had found Sime intriguing for coming from Macedonia and Yugoslavia. I remember saying to him: “Oh don’t tell me they spoke like this”… and I proceeded speaking in a plummy accent mispronouncing his name. “Yes, that’s how it was” Sime told me. So after that for years we’d occasionally go into posh accents with each other for fun.

I left the radio program in 2001 just before I left Australia to take up an opportunity in Canada. Sime was never great when it came to emails and communication, so even though I did attempt communicating with him, he never responded. It was a while after that I asked my parents whether Sime was still doing the program on Fridays – no, as soon as I left, so did he.

The last time I encountered Sime was over a decade ago. I had undergone intense chemotherapy for stage IV cancer in 2008, followed by nine years in remission. During that time, once I reached the stage that I could do check-ups at six-monthly intervals I was able to move back to London. Yes, I’d go all the way to Australia every six months for a check-up! One time while I was in the sterile and highly unglamorous hospital seating area waiting to be called in for a CT scan to be done, I heard a familiar voice chatting away in the distance. Don’t tell me it’s Sime? Yes, it was! He was still doing what he does best – interpreting for the ex-Yugoslavs. So I approached him and surprised him when I said in my plummiest of accents: Mister PetrOFFski, I presume. His response in equally plummy accent: Oh Mister NEIGHzeff! A pleasure!

It was indeed a pleasure!

What happens when technology advances leaps and bounds riding on the wave of this newfangled worldwide web, changing the very nature of reporting news. And what happens when armed conflict happens in the home country? That’s in Part 5… on the way.

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Every country, era, movement, you name it, has its icons – instant recognisably images of people or places that can identify or personify it. Socialist Yugoslavia has plenty of them – Tito, abstract spomeniks, tourist hotspots such as Dubrovnik or Mostar… and Arif Heralić.

Arif Heralić? Well, not even ex-Yugoslavs would be able to put a face to that name, but they all certainly know his face. Particularly for those born before 1980, they all saw him daily smiling whenever they paid for something, for Heralić was on a Yugoslav dinar note – the 1000 one to start off with in 1955, and then the 10 dinar note following devaluation in 1965. There’s no Yugoslav who didn’t have him in their wallets or purses, or stuffed as savings under bed mattresses from Triglav to Vardar.

But while most Yugoslavs are very familiar with the face, probably second only in ubiquity to Tito back in the day, if you were to show his face to them and ask what his name is, most will say that it’s hero miner Alija Sirotanović. The reality is that the Yugoslav collective consciousness has had its wires crossed in a case of (deliberate) mistaken identity for someone else who also appeared on Yugoslav money but at a much later and briefer time.

Still, the stories for the people behind these faces on Yugoslav money show two different fates of living in socialist Yugoslavia, and often with elements that massively contradicted the ideology and optimism their images symbolised.

Most countries tend to feature notable individuals on their banknotes, often drawing from prominent historical figures. In contrast, communist states, including Yugoslavia, were founded on the idea of being “dictatorships of the proletariat” and their propaganda followed suit by emphasising the workers and peasants as the true leaders and heroes of society. As a result, members of these groups were often honoured on national currency. Since all these “people’s democracies” imposed what effectively was a Stalinist Soviet template, with its strong economic focus on heavy industry and the related use of imagery (such as smokestacks) as symbols of strength and progress, industrial workers in particular were elevated in this heroic narrative. It’s therefore not surprising that Yugoslavia’s most widely used banknote featured one such figure: the blast furnace worker Arif Heralić.

But who was Arif Heralić and what happened to him?

Arif Heralić was born on 5 May 1922 to a poor Muslim Roma family in Magljaj, Bosnia. During the Second World War, the Ustasha (Nazi-allied Croats), who conducted their own Holocaust of the region’s Roma, Serbs and Jewish people, murdered over fifty members of Heralić’s extended family, including his father and brothers in his presence. After the liberation of Bosnia under the rule of Tito’s communists, holocaust survivors such as Heralić were given precedence to opportunities unthinkable under the previous system. Since 1892, his adopted hometown of Zenica had been the site of a huge steelworks, which were to be expanded as part of Yugoslavia’s initial five-year plan focusing on heavy industry. This was to provide plenty of jobs for many, Heralić included.

At the end of 1954, Nikola Bibić, a photo-reporter from the main Yugoslav newspaper Borba took a photo of Heralić for an article about the Zenica Ironworks. Heralić was not only a model udarnik (“shock worker”) who had won medals and awards for his many achievements but also represented the success of Yugoslav communism bringing the lowest of the low to the top. Heralić certainly ticked all the boxes of disadvantage: Roma, poor, Holocaust survivor, Muslim background, no education. It also helped that Heralić was very photogenic.

The image of the smiling worker reached the heads of the central Yugoslav institute for banknote design, who in 1955 decided that Heralić’s image would be perfect for the new 1000 Yugoslav dinar note. That would in 1965 become the 10 dinar note after hyperinflation prompted a devaluation and the lopping of two zeros. Heralić was to appear on Yugoslav banknotes until the 1980s.

However, while Heralić’s smile radiated optimism with a bright future waiting ahead for him and his fellow Yugoslavs, the reality was that this was the beginning of what ended up being a tragic life for Heralić.

In May 1967, journalist N. Cvetić decided to investigate what had happened to Heralić, so he tracked him down. The interview Cvetić had with Heralić was later published in the magazine Nedeljna Revija. It’s best that Heralić talk about his life in his own words, so here’s a translation of the interview:

The life of Arif Heralić, one of the best workers at the Zenica Ironworks, began to change the moment he became aware his image was to be held in the hands of millions of Yugoslavs every day...

Arif Heralić is not a happy man. The smile that every Yugoslav knows has disappeared from his face. The man whose image is on the 1000 old and 10 new dinar banknote has changed. His eyes are downcast and framed by wrinkles and dark circles. His cheeks are swollen. His beard is grey and unshaven. Long, tangled hair... age, a chaotic life and alcohol have taken their toll.

It’s hard to recognise Arif...

The former hero worker at the Zenica Ironworks is now a pensioner. He lives in a dilapidated building in the Prvi Maj neighborhood of Zenica. His house has hardly any possessions in it, and plaster is peeling off the walls. When I was at his place, there were empty bottles on the floor amongst crumbs of dried-up bread.

We chatted for some time. Arif was sitting on a rickety ottoman because there was no chair. He didn’t mince his words. He recalled the great times he had that were now forever gone. He was one of the best workers at the ironworks. For his extraordinary efforts, he was awarded the Order of Labour 1st class and 2nd class, as well as a medal.

“Twelve years ago, they took pictures of me. When the banknote entered circulation, I actually had a heart attack. Then word spread that I had received two million dinars (US$666,666) for appearing on the bank note, so one night some people came round and almost beat the death out of me and stole 150,000 dinars (US$500) from me...”

Heralić’s life took a different turn the moment he became aware that millions of people were going to hold a banknote with his photo on it in their hands every day. He said that a strange feeling had came over him; his head went fuzzy, and so he turned to rakija to make sense of his thoughts… but that didn’t help. The demise of this hero worker from Furnace Number 3 is now littered with bottles.

He retired six years ago. This is what he has say about it now:

“I could’ve worked for another 20 years, if not more. But, well, I didn’t feel like I could do it anymore...”

Heralić receives a pension of 240 dinars (US$20) – that’s 24 notes with him on it, and 190 dinars (US$15) in child allowance. That’s not a lot for so many mouths.

How many children do you have, Arif?

“Ten, exactly. I also have a wife... and children. Wait... I have eleven children!”

What does Arif Heralić do? What does he do now that he’s not working?

“I once read how some woman had her picture taken and they put that picture of her on the cover of the book, but they didn’t want to pay her. The woman sued and won millions. My picture has been printed on millions of notes, and so, I want money for that too. I’ve tried pleading my case everywhere I can but nothing has come from that. If nothing else happens, I’ll take this to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. I know that the rich are rich. I’ll go to the United Nations if I have to...”

Why do you drink so much? That’s not good for you...

“I know it’s not. But, well... I’ve been treated twice at the psychiatric hospital in Sokolac. They say I had some depression in my head. I was also taking disulfiram (a medication to treat alcoholism – ed.) and something else. For what it’s worth... I have a doctor there who keeps me in check. But I don’t touch those medications anyone. I’m all right.”

Let me take your photo.

“And what are you going to give me for it?”

I will send you a copy of the photo.

“Well, don’t take my picture then.”

He then asked for 600 dinars. After that, he immediately sent his son Jasmin off to get him rakija from the nearby kafana. That’s how we parted. Arif was there beside the bottle...

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As mentioned in the interview, Heralić tried through the courts to receive compensation for appearing on the banknotes; however, the Yugoslav courts ruled that it wasn’t a photo of him on the banknotes but a drawing, therefore cancelling any chance of reimbursement. Evidence was also presented in court that he had signed away the use of his likeness for a symbolic sum of money.

Also in 1967, Vojdrag Berčić filmed an interview he had with Heralić for his controversial documentary Devalvacija jednog osmijeha (Devaluation of a Smile). Heralić was just as candid about his fate on film as in his interview for Nedeljna Revija. He admitted that he’d drink on average half a litre of rakija a day!

TV Zagreb bravely broadcast the film about the exploited and rejected labor hero, causing a huge scandal. As Heralić’s actual life story ran counter to the image of happy workers and positivity perpetuated by the Yugoslav communist authorities, TV Zagreb later had to apologise to viewers for broadcasting the film, describing it as a “political and programming error”, and the station’s programming editor was forced to resign.

Heralić died in abject poverty and penniless on 16 June 1971, aged 49. He had 12 children in the end, but only seven survived to school age.

The following day, Večernji Novosti, a Belgrade newspaper, had this to report on Heralić’s death:

“Yesterday in Zenica, after a long illness, Arif Heralić, a worker at the Zenica ironworks and shock worker, whose image appears on the 10-dinar banknote, died. He worked hard at the ironworks and fell ill a few years ago. That’s why he retired.”

That’s it.

Fast-forward to now and the image of Heralić can still be seen… just not on notes or as regularly as before, but on Yugonostalgia-related souvenirs ranging from mugs to t-shirts. As for royalties?

So who then is Alija Sirotanović, the name most Yugoslavs erroneously attribute to Arif Heralić’s likeness?

Sirotanovic’s image on currency first appeared on the new 20,000 Yugoslav dinar banknote released on May Day 1987; however, it was only in circulation for a couple of years after having lost much of its value from hyperinflation and eventually replaced on 1 January 1990 with a new convertible dinar as part of the monetary reforms ushered in by Ante Marković, Yugoslavia’s last prime minister.

Unlike Heralić, Alija Sirotanović was not a blast furnace worker but a famous miner. The mix-up in names is colloquially attributed to the images of both workers on their respective banknotes being similar in terms of face and worker’s helmet, but I’ll let you decide – here are the banknotes: Heralić up top, Sirotanović below. Do they look the same to you?

Alija Sirotanović was a miner from the town of Breza, 25 kms north of Sarajevo, and became a star hero worker and the stuff of legend. Sirotanović was thrusted into the limelight when on 24 July 1949 at the Kreka lignite mine near Tuzla, northeast Bosnia, he broke the world record in coal mining, digging a staggering 152 tonnes with his brigade in eight hours. This record surpassed that previous set by the first Soviet shock brigade miner Alexei Stakhanov by as much as 50 tonnes. What made this even more audacious was that it happened at the height of animosity between Tito and Stalin following their ideological split in 1948, so a Yugoslav breaking this Soviet record was more a case of one-upmanship than anything else.

While Arif Heralić’s image was far more famous, the anecdotes from the life and times of Alija Sirotanović were, let’s just say, far more cheerful and politically suitable for propaganda purposes, especially in light of what had happened to Heralić in the final years of his life. Mixing the two workers was then a deliberate ploy. And this remains to this day. Despite many references correctly stating otherwise, whether it be on the net or in articles in newspapers and news portals throughout ex-Yugoslavia, just a quick internet search for “Alija Sirotanović” will bring up many images of Heralić instead.

A plethora of legends and anecdotes grew around hero worker Sirotanović, primarily designed to provide the masses a shining example of what the ideal Yugoslav citizen should be like – hardworking, humble and happy with his lot. The most famous Sirotanović anecdote goes like this: allegedly, during a grandiose visit by Tito to the mine, Sirotanović “complained” to the Marshal about the conditions at the mine by saying “I need a bigger shovel to work better”. Even though his primary mining tool was a pneumatic drill rather than a shovel, legend also has it that this bigger shovel, christened the Sirotanovićka, was actually made for Sirotanović. It was twice the size of the other shovels in the mine and by using it Sirotanović was able to break even more records in coal mining.

Sirotanović refused the new apartment offered to him in his hometown of Breza and instead had it reassigned to a family with no permanent address. When Tito offered Sirotanović the car of his choice, the miner insisted on a modest Zastava 750 aka Fićo, Yugoslavia’s version of the Fiat 500. He never seeked to progress in his career and remained an ordinary miner until he retired in the mid-1970s. His humble life continued in retirement, during which he lived off of his average pension in relative obscurity. His granddaughter said in an interview for the Croatian magazine Arena that when Tito died, her grandfather cried for three days nonstop.

All seven Sirotanović brothers and most of their sons were also miners. Alija’s nephew Arif, the son of his brother Ahmed who had died in a mining accident in 1970, founded an association in honour of his uncle – Alija Sirotanović and his comrades – to continue the spirit of the family’s dedication to hard work. Today, a street in Breza bears the name of Alija Sirotanović, and his bust stands in the vicinity of the town’s mine.

The legend surrounding Alija Sirotanović was even the inspiration for the satirical song Srce, ruke i lopata (“Heart, Hands and a Shovel”) by legendary Sarajevo rock band Zabranjeno Pušenje on the band’s 1987 album. The band was astute enough not to reference Alija directly, but instead the hero miner in the song is “their neighbour Avdija”.

Sirotanović died in May 1990, which was rather symbolic given that Yugoslavia, the country in which he was one of its headliners, at the time was in its deathknell.

In many ways, the figures chosen for socialist Yugoslavia’s banknotes, and more so what their images represented, trace the arc of the state itself: Arif Heralić embodied the optimism of a country rebuilding from the ruins of war and an era defined by drive, industry and a genuine belief in a collective future. By contrast, Alija Sirotanović eventually came to be the anachronistic symbol of a later time, when that early optimism had long faded and the system was straining under its own contradictions. The fact the back-stories of the two were deliberately conflated also reflects the approach underlying where socialist Yugoslavia go it wrong – rather than face the grim reality, take responsibility and do something tangible about the situation, the easier way out was to stage-manage everything. Together, these banknote heroes are not only Yugoslav icons but also markers of the country’s journey – from a hopeful ascent to an uneasy twilight that would, too quickly, give way to the violent conflicts of the 1990s.

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Prvi maj aka May Day, also known as the International Day of Labour or International Workers’ Day, was one of the red-letter days on the socialist Yugoslav calendar. A day full of symbolism – it was not only a day of rest and nature but was also a focal point in the socialist ideology guiding Yugoslavia. May Day was that big that it stretched for two days, the 1st and 2nd May, and that’s still the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Slovenia – Macedonia cancelled 2nd May as a holiday in 2007, a major sore point with Macedonians. Still, May Day was, and continues to be, one of the most anticipated holidays of the year in the region.

In many ways May Day was the socialist and secular Easter, much like how New Year’s Eve and Day were, and in many countries in the Balkans still are, the socialist-inspired secularised Christmas Eve/Day. May Day, like Easter, after all did start off as a pagan festival celebrating the rebirth of nature and the start of spring/summer. It’s these perennial and underlaying nature- and season-related elements that have survived to this day and give May Day in ex-Yugoslavia its current vibe and look.

May Day in socialist Yugoslavia also adapted and changed with the times. Starting from its copy-paste of the existing Soviet model in the early years of Tito’s rule, by the 1970s and 1980s May Day would eventually eliminate a lot of the Stalinist elements and instead take on more of these synthesised and co-opted pre-socialist practices.

Officially, and much propagated at the time, the celebration of May Day in Yugoslavia had a clear and strong political message – it was the day when the ruling League of Communists (as the Communist Party was known in Yugoslavia), together with trade unions and municipal structures, promoted the role of the worker in building a self-governing socialist society. Official public imagery would often show masses of happy workers, usually with Josip Broz Tito, Yugoslavia’s extremely charismatic paramount leader. Tito would be portrayed as the ultimate symbol of the workers’ struggle – always smiling, and appearing next to said workers, farmers or children in Young Pioneer uniforms.

But let’s first get to its name. May Day in Yugoslavia was officially praznik rada, literally “the holiday of labour”, though more often it was just simply referred to as prvi maj (the first of May) – even the Croats, who otherwise have completely different names for the months of the year, used this term keeping in the spirit of the main official language of Yugoslavia, Serbo-Croatian. Post-1990, and reflecting the polemics of language in the Balkans, which always manages to force its way into all angles of everyday life, the day’s name, lo and behold, changed the most in Croatia. The Serbo-Croatian prvi maj has given way to the Croatian prvi svibanj, though many Croats still use the former; however, the authoritarian government under Croatian nationalist Franjo Tudjman obviously had nothing better to do in 1996 and so they insisted on renaming the day officially from praznik rada to the ‘purer’ Croatian blagdan rada – the former name was promptly returned in 2001 after the change in government.

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One of the main features of May Day in the the early decades of Tito’s Yugoslavia was, to use the official media’s term, ‘spontaneous’ parades. A complete paradox as these highly organised parades were not spontaneous at all but carefully choreographed as part of state propaganda emphasising the value of collective labour and solidarity. The slogans that would appear at these parades, such as “Long live the working class!” and “Labour is honour”, were not just rhetoric, according to many, but embedded into everyday Yugoslav discourse, featuring constantly in Yugoslavia’s educational systems, the media and institutional culture at the time.

From liberation starting in 1944 until Tito’s groundbreaking split with Stalin in 1948, socialist Yugoslavia was much like the other “people’s democracies” of Soviet-controlled central and eastern Europe – it simply applied the Stalinist system operating at the time in the USSR in full and with no questions asked. The same went with May Day, as this 1946 report on celebrations in the Croatian capital of Zagreb shows:

“Celebrations for the Day of Labour in Zagreb started at factories, schools and social organisations and institutions, from where processions of people marched on to the centre of Zagreb. The first and honourable place in the procession went to the workers of the Metalworkers’ Union, amongst whom the May Day workers were at the forefront. Immediately behind them were the workers of the Rade Končar manufacturing goods factory. The numerous slogans carried by the participants in the procession highlighted the collective’s successes and what quotas had been exceeded. Odred (Detachment) 16 of the Young Pioneers proudly boasted ‘we collected 55,000 cans!’. Other banners proclaimed ‘since liberation, we’ve built 30 bridges’ and ‘In our May Day contest, we repaired 1,205 telephones’. In Zagreb’s main square, next to the well-decorated stage, from which union leaders and model workers addressed the masses, a monumental anvil was erected, decorated with a large union emblem and the Yugoslav coat of arms, as well as huge, stylised sheaves of wheat, which were tied together with the colours of the Yugoslav flag.” An estimated 150,000 people participated in this parade – an impressive number for Zagreb at the time (the city’s population in the 1948 census was 227,538)

In Macedonia, the main parade used to take place in the capital city Skopje, down ulica Makedonija and across Skopje’s main square then named after Marshal Tito (now named after Macedonia and crowned with a giant statue of Alexander of Macedon). In the 1940s and into the 1960s these parades were major spectacles with banners, flowers, displays of strength and discipline, and columns of happy children and stern-faced workers and peasants expressing their love for Tito, the local communist party leadership, labour, peace and the future. In Macedonia’s provincial cities, local factories would get their workers to proudly parade through their city centre, carrying their own banners with the names of their most prominent and awarded workers. Showcased was how socialist Yugoslavia was advancing rapidly, with floats displaying the signs of industrialisation and progress, and commentators listing detailed figures such as a 39% increase in milk production. Riveting stuff!

Curious as to how it looked like?
Here’s a news reel from 1960 featuring the Skopje May Day parade.

As the above news reel shows, media played a key role in shaping the public image of May Day. On the day before the holiday, newspapers would be full of dedicated articles, profiles of prominent workers, reports from factories, announcements from unions and, of course, the obligatory message from Tito. Radio stations would broadcast programs dedicated to labour and worker pride. The posters on display would be artistic and symbolic: the sun rising behind a factory, a hand holding a tool, a child waving to his factory-worker father, etc. At schools, teachers would organise special May Day performances, and students would have to write essays with titles such as “Why I love labour” or “My father, my hero.”

Of course, these visual and textual representations were part of a broader cultural program teaching generations of Yugoslavs that labour was not just a means to an end but the highest of moral virtues. Even children’s magazines in socialist Yugoslavia well into the 1980s would present workers, farmers and members of the armed forces as people worthy of respect and honour. School parades were part of the upbringing for future “conscious citizens” who were to continue Tito’s socialist project unswervingly. Even I as a 1980s child in the Yugoslav diaspora (on my father’s side) in the decadent west was not immune to this. We’d regularly receive these children’s magazines where, in between articles about rock stars and pictures of children in fancy-dress costumes, there would also be drawings, sent in by readers, of tanks adorned with red stars shooting at fascist invaders, and poems glorifying past revolutionary heroes.

In 2024, Croatia’s Večernji list newspaper published an interesting article after having delved into its archives and reposting what their journalists had reported about May Day over the years in socialist Yugoslav Croatia…

“‘I’ve loved all our lively May Day celebrations, whether it’s now or in the past, but the first, free celebration of the workers’ holiday in my home city of Split remains my favorite of all time. I was young, the city was festively decorated, and my heart was in a flutter.’ That’s how in 1975 Lucija Bilić Luce, a ‘defiant and brave Split resident, wife and mother’ described May Day 1945. She remembered all the details: ‘the wreaths of ivy and cypress branches, the intoxicating scent of freedom, the accordions being played and the young, enthusiastic people of Split who, at the crack of dawn, while singing joyously, rushed out in lorries to nearby villages to pick flowers and branches that they used to decorate all the entrances and shop windows of Split.’ In those first, post-war years, as Luce recounted, the hills around Split were ‘almost overwhelmed by crowds of people; the songs of thousands of early risers echoed through the stone squares and narrow streets of Split, kolo dances were performed on the waterfront, and the entire city was on its feet from early dawn until late at night.’”

What Večernji list found when sifting through its archives is that going by what it was reporting, May Day celebrations in the immediate post-WWII decades heavily involved most people not leaving the cities but rather the provinces coming to them en masse to celebrate May Day. By the 1970s though, May Day was still being touted as a holiday of joy and freedom, being celebrated with almost equal fervour throughout the country with the usual grandiose events – the opening of new factories and plants, the awarding of certificates and medals to workers, etc. However, the bigger story now was that the May Day holiday, since extended to two days, had become one of the key periods of the year for the fast-growing Yugoslav urban population to escape their cities and cramped apartments and head off on holidays to resorts on the Adriatic coast, return to villages to see relatives and pick up on much needed supplies, picnic in areas deep in the interior and, for those with means, holidays abroad, particularly shopping trips for jeans in Trieste, Italy.

On the one hand, the official side still presented May Day as a day for the collective expression of working-class pride and identity through parades, rallies and trade union-related festivities. However, higher on the list for most Yugoslavs, and especially once the official side was over and done with, May Day to your average Yugoslav was a day of family, relaxation and nature, the centrepiece being various forms of izleti – picnics in local parks or outings to the countryside. It’s this side of socialist May Day where the holiday had its continuity from the pre-Socialist past – many of the traditions and practices were similar to those Christians and Muslims in the Balkans would do for spring-related festivals and holidays such as Easter and Hidrellez, and form the bulk of the traditions that have survived the fall of socialist Yugoslavia.

One of these co-opted traditions was, and still remains, the May Day uranak or budnica (lit. “early rising”), a vigil at dawn often accompanied by a bonfire at a location somewhere deep in nature. These vigils post-WWII were infused with a heavy dose of politics, emphasising the link forests and nature had being the main domain of the Yugoslav partisans during the National Liberation War (as World War II within Yugoslavia 1941-45 was known). This would be followed by outings (izleti), barbecues and socialising in nature – and it’s these features that still form what is May Day for most ex-Yugoslavs. Nowadays, these vigils are more like picnics. People will often camp out and sleep in tents the night before to grab themselves an ideal location for the upcoming day full of picnicking, barbequeing, drinking and loud music.

It was these picnics more than anything else that gave the holiday its revelry and festive ambient. The focus away from oficial parades in the 1970s was in keeping with the massive changes that came with the huge rise in living standards in Yugoslavia, as well as mass urbanisation. Yugoslavs had gone from mere workers and peasants to voracious consumers and were more into the latest European fashions and rock music than the proclamations of the League of Communists. This change in outlook and greater general prosperity prompted greater individualism, affecting not only how Yugoslavs celebrated May Day but also how they lived their lives. These May Day picnics would be, and still are, in local parks or nearby places of nature – basically anywhere there was any green patch, sometimes organised by work units but more often they were as units formed of family members or a select group of friends within a wider mass of people. People would bring food, particularly meat for grilling and seasonal salads, drinks and radios or casette players and make a day out of it. Let’s just say, it’s loud!

May Day in essence was when nature, the people and the system intertwined. The original izleti would keep to the socialist theme promoted for the day, so when it came to music, partisan songs would feature heavily. After all, the partisans in World War II were, as it goes in the popular song, po šumama i gorama (through forests and over hills). As it was a holiday for the people, narodna muzika/glasba i.e. the people’s music would be the go-to, and this is the case today – the soundtrack of contemporary May Day celebrations is local music, whether it be folk, turbofolk, pop or rock.

Another feature of these izleti was, and still is, the mass preparation of bean soup (grah/pasulj). Billed as a simple and hearty dish of the proletariat and usually made in a huge cauldron, this soup would be distributed to all present. This was a secularised adaptation for communal food commonly practised in celebrations of religious festivals, whether it be for saints days for Christians (Orthodox or Catholic) or kurban for Muslims. This bean soup is also known as vojni pasulj/vojni grah i.e. “military bean soup”, as it was no different to how the dish was prepared and served to the soldiers in the much revered Yugoslav People’s Army.

Mass izlet celebrations would attract thousands of visitors, and with the bean soup on offer, entertainment would be put on to give the working class a celebration. Večernji list reported how in 1983, the Zagreb trade union council organised the first all-day May Day celebration in the city’s central park Maksimir, a tradition that continues to this day. Zagreb residents who opted to remain in the city for the holiday could enjoy the smorgasbord of entertainment put on featuring well-known actors, singers, and cultural, artistic and folkloric groups. Many people would spend the entire day in the park as entry was free, but not the grah, which in 1987 cost 300 dinars (US$0.66) per serving. Nowadays, which artists will be headlining the event is eagerly anticipated news in Zagreb, with big-name stars bound to draw huge crowds.

Sports were also encouraged as part of May Day celebrations and still are an important part of festivities. Come the afternoon of May Day, nets are set up for social volleyball matches, the nearby basketball court (there are plenty of those throughout the region) will be packed out with people of all ages doing hoops, the jackets every Balkan mother has told their (even adult) children must wear are now off and forming the goal posts for football (soccer) games, and the oldies will be taking their lawn bowl session very seriously.

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A regular feature for May Day would be the opening of new factories, facilities, buildings, infrastructure… you name it, to much fanfare and with cheering crowds on hand. The launch of these projects on such a prestigious day would be showcased as symbols of how Yugoslavia’s socialist system was serving its people and particular the working class. However, and as it was becoming quite apparent come the 1980s, it wasn’t clear as to who was paying for all this. The huge loans Yugoslavia took out in the 1970s from western banks needed to be repaid, and that simply wasn’t happening as it should. Soon after Tito’s death in 1980, Yugoslavia started its steady decline into huge economic turmoil that would have catastrophic consequences.

Unlike in previous decades when reports on May Day celebrations were unthinkable without footage or pictures of the local party boss cutting the ribbon for something new and flashy with a large crowd in tow dutifully clapping, by the late 1980s May Day became relatively muted. Večernji list’s 1988 May Day headline said it all: Celebration in the Shadow of Crisis. This foreshadowed the end of an era and the imminent coming of major, and violent, changes. As the Croatian newspaper aptly narrated, even though dark clouds were looming over most of Yugoslavia that year, figuratively and literally, not even the possibility of bad weather prevented hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs from getting out of their homes and, for at least that one day, udarili brigu na veselje (threw their cares away) and enjoyed their day outdoors.

Even before the breakup of Yugoslavia and the transition to full capitalism and multiparty systems, May Day had shed most of its socialist ideological aspects. Today, the holiday remains a big day in the calendar all throughout ex-Yugoslavia, but all the parades and the stuff about “labour” are all but a distant memory at most. Local media outlets often recall what May Day used to be like (like in that Večernji list article), to the nostalgia of older readers and to the amazement or disbelief of those who’ve grown up post-Yugoslavia. Trade unions in the region still organise protests and parades on May Day to highlight local issues facing working people. These protests bring May Day back to its original modern purpose, but the number of people attending these is very small.

So what’s it been like since the 1990s? Well, it’s still one big picnic. There’s still gatherings in parks or countryside, plenty of eating and drinking, and loud music. Young people in particular get into the day. The photo above pretty much sets the scene. Usually a fun time is had by all.

But it’s not always as planned. Let me tell you about one of my most, erm, memorable May Day experience. Here’s what happened when I did Majo (as Macedonians colloquially call May Day these days) in 2003…

At the time I was living in Macedonia, mainly providing company for my grandfather in his village. His wife (my grandmother) had died suddenly two months earlier, and his only offspring living in Macedonia, his daughter (my auntie), had gone on a three-month trip to visit my father (her brother) and my mother in Australia, so my grandfather was on his own and feeling rather lost. Of course, what didn’t help with everything was that my grandfather, like most of the other old men in the village, was a heavy alcoholic. Actually, his nickname was chelik, Turkish for ‘iron’, given he could outdrink everyone else as he was “tough as iron”. He was also a grumpy old thing – no shocker, really.

I hadn’t done a May Day in Macedonia since I was a child, so I had no idea what was the norm. My grandfather had told me I have to wake up before dawn so that I can get to the May Day izlet site at a nearby monastery. I don’t do the waking-at-dawn thing (well, not then), so my plan was to make my way there a little bit later. In any case, a younger relative of mine woke me up at around 6 am (rude!) and forced me to go with him. I was not a happy camper. When we arrived at the site, quite a few people, particularly teenagers, had already set themselves up for the day with chairs, tables, crates of alcohol, food and barbeques… on what was the side of a very steep hill. The thing is Majo in my grandfather’s village is a day of heavy eating and heavy drinking in the direct sunlight, but the true goal for the day was not to get so drunk that you fall down the hillside. Hardcore! Needless to say, as the day progressed, there was a steady number of casualties, much to the amusement of the many onlookers. One heat-affected guy almost knocked me like a domino as he tumbled down the hillside, beer still in hand no less. To top it all off, I was also punched in front of everyone by a guy I knew from the village. Honestly, I didn’t expect to be part of the day’s entertainment. My opponent had been in a relationship with one of my godsisters from Australia whose mother was from the same village as my father. Our Romeo had fallen head over heals in love with my godsister… and her passport, and his parents were already talking in earnest about wedding plans and their son’s rosy future life in Australia. Just one problem though – she was just not that into him. It took a while for him to figure that one out, especially when she had returned to Australia and was not answering his emails or calls. He had been heartbroken for some time, with his dreams all shattered. Wanting to get a clear answer from someone about what had happened, he asked me a few times whether I knew if my godsister still loved him. I didn’t have the heart, or guts, to tell him at first that their relationship was a non-starter to begin with, but after his constant questionning turned into nagging, I just suggested to him that he forget her. That’s first love, and ticket out of the poverty of the village, gone. Still, the rage was building within him, and so in a fit of rage, the switch flipped and Romeo decided at May Day, in front of everyone, to take it out on me, the only Australian-Macedonian in the village at the time. Now I’m a lover not a fighter (wow… I went there) but still, this guy’s right hook was pretty dismal. He was, after all, so drunk that he practically knocked himself out, but he almost took out the cauldron full of the bean soup being doled out to everyone, so kudos to him for (inadvertently) going for such a tough target. But this being Macedonia, such public brawling is frowned upon, and it’s criminal to threaten bean soup like that, so the guys nearby immediately grabbed hold of him and basically told our young lover to get lost and sober up. Hey, that really shook me up, not to mention ruin my day. As I ended up complaining to my great aunt who, true to her role as the lead gossip in the village, just happened to be in pole position to witness it all, it’s not my fault that I’m from Australia.

So yeah, happy May Day!

Though May Day izleti, uranaci and budnice are done in public areas and with a collective spirit, most May Day celebrations now for people in ex-Yugoslavia are generally personal and private affairs. While on May Day it still seems that every bit of greenery from Vardar to Triglav has been taken over by people grilling meat and listening to loud music, it’s becoming less of a phenomenon as the years pass. Some municipalities throughout ex-Yugoslavia have been starting to ban barbequeing in public parks, the amount of rubbish left behind from lazy people always makes the news every year, and many people in the region, who are living from paycheck to paycheck, simply can’t afford the expense of the day. On the flipside, those with the means and can add a few extra days off use the opportunity to cross the border for holidays – Greece being the most popular destination. Border crossings are packed on both sides of the holiday, with news bulletins regularly reporting wait times (sometimes of several hours) at the major points.

Nevertheless, for many, especially those who grew up with the image of May Day as a day of worker pride – this holiday remains an important symbol. It recalls a time when labour was a core merit, and average Yugoslavs had some sort of safety net and certainty in their lives. In today’s context of flexible contracts, low or no wages, mass emigration and an uncertain future in the region and beyond, it’s time to bring May Day back to its roots as a day of struggle, not only for respect for workers, but also for better conditions, security and a dignified life for all.

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Bulgaria goes to the polls on Sunday (19 April) for the eighth (!) time in five years. Yes, they’re over it and, woo hoo, now beating Israel! And as with the previous seven elections, the results are probably going to produce a fractured parliament followed by prolonged talks for forming a coalition government that will soon after fall apart leading to election number nine later in the year. Or at least that’s what many Bulgarians will say… because that’s what they said the previous seven times and each time they were correct.

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One constant about Bulgarian election campaigns is that there’s a statement that appears on all election-related materials, billboards, posters, leaflets and media broadcasts…

Купуването и продаването на гласове е престъпление

“The buying and selling of votes is a crime”

Despite Bulgaria supposedly meeting the strict criteria on fully functioning, transparent and robust election processes and democracy to join the EU in 2007, 19 years later and still Bulgarian election campaigns are marred by mass vote-buying. Estimates claim that up to 250,000 votes are bought and sold each Bulgarian election, which when looking at the average number of total votes is 2–3 million, that’s a sizeable chunk. However, talk to many Bulgarians and they’ll claim that that share of the bought vote is vastly underestimated.

Vote buying and selling remains a major problem in Bulgarian elections. While some foreign reports have painted this being proof of Russian meddling, ask any Bulgarian and they’ll tell you that campaigners from most of the major parties in Bulgaria have been caught participating in this illegal yet widespread practice. Main targets tend to be deprived areas, especially Roma neighbourhoods, as well as diaspora communities, such as the Bessarabian Bulgarians in Moldova.

One of the most common vote-buying methods is the индианска нишка i.e. ‘the Indian string’, which is so associated with Bulgaria in the region, much to the offence of Bulgarians, that in ex-Yugoslavia the practice is called ‘bugarski voz/vlak’ i.e. ‘Bulgarian Train’.

This voting process goes like this: political ‘handlers’ have pre-filled ballots ready with the vote going for their candidate. These handlers will be waiting in front of polling stations to negotiate a price with voters. Those who are willing to sell their ballots will take one of the pre-filled ballots into the polling station, where they will obtain an empty one but cast the pre-filled one. They then leave the polling station and hand the empty ballot to the handler, who will then complete that one to be used for the next paid voter. Now that makes sure that the paid voter actually votes for the ‘right’ party. Ingenious!

There has been a lot of complaints about индианска нишка, but you can be rest assured that the Ezikovi belezhki (‘Language Notes’) website has addressed this pressing issue and stated that according to the rules of the Bulgarian language, the term should properly and orthographically be индийска нишка. There – I’m glad that’s solved!

Of course Bulgarian singers, particularly of the chalga/pop-folk variety, are recruited to be part of the entertainment to drag in the unwashed masses to the many pre-election campaign meetings throughout the country. However, unlike in neighbouring countries such as Serbia or Macedonia where the fortunes of the party you campaign for then will determine the immediate outcome of your pop career, the appearance of these singers at campaign meetings in Bulgaria tends to be more transactional. Thought this is not always the case – when dance music group Deep Zone was chosen to represent Bulgaria at Eurovision in 2008, their lead singer Joanna Dragneva was then unknown to the Bulgarian public but she has gone on from then to have a very successful pop career. Word had it then that Dragneva’s membership in the newly ruling GERB party helped Deep Zone get the Eurovision ticket.

Chalga has caught itself up in Bulgarian politics in its own crazy style. 1990s chalga star Luna was on the ballot to become Bulgarian president in 2021, ending up in an unpredecented 6th place after gaining 0.9% of the vote (0.9% more than expected!) – her quest for the Bulgarian presidency being pre-empted by her 2016 song Prezident. I won’t go into Slavi Trifonov’s major foray into politics. And Azis was once touted as a candidate for the Euroroma party. However, chalga/pop-folk singers tend to avoid the nitty-gritty of Bulgarian party politics, and do you blame them?

That’s not to say that chalga stars avoid social issues. The brilliant Esil Duran has tackled the poor treatment of women, conceptual artist Antonina became a spokesperson for raising awareness of eating disorders with this humorous chalga-style song, while Diona has lately caused a stir with her socially charged songs mixing chalga with pop and hip-hop. And we musn’t forget that in July 2020 the poor and distressed chalga stars of Bulgaria united and took to the streets of Sofia in protest against the closure of Bulgaria’s discotheques during the Covid-19 pandemic.

But chalga did have its part in getting Bulgaria to where it’s now in its party-politics culture. Take for instance… part of the 2005 New Year’s Eve line-up on commercial Bulgarian national TV station bTV was a show where the chalga babes, headed by Ivana – otherwise known as the “singer of the people” and the queen bee of chalga at the time, were put around a table akin to Jesus’s final supper and tasked with the hugely important role of picking Bulgaria’s man of the year. Talk about lots of hair, filler and make-up! Ivana heavily pushed the girls to pick ‘the’ man of the moment – long-time supreme Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov’s former bodyguard Boyko Borisov, who at the time was the head of the Ministry of the Interior (i.e. the Police) and had earned himself the nickname ‘Superman’ on account of his highly publicised arrests of known mafia dons, which in turn singled him out as a gangland murder target… though later on in his nine-year reign as prime minister showed, that ‘anti-corruption’ badge was just a ruse. Despite the valiant attempt by Raina to push for her then boyfriend and fellow chalga star Konstantin to get the gong, she was heavily outvoted (out of fear of Ivana) and Boyko the Superman won, to no-one’s surprise. Still, that Borisov was seen as the ultimate symbol of Bulgarian masculinity was put to music with this classic of a chalga hit with Extra Nina, Nikol and Nagona called… erm… ‘Tripartite Coalition’. Yes, you can work out the double entendre here yourself.

Talking about Borisov, who bills himself and his centre-right party GERB, i.e. Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, as the pillars of ‘security and stability’ – as stated in the pic of the billboard above and something Bulgaria has been lacking for years, there’s something about his look that might be the true deciding factor as to his (former) appeal. Quite often during Borisov’s rule in the 2010s, this sequence pic would go viral on Bulgarian social media…

And then, let’s look at the new front runner in the Bulgarian elections – former air force officer and Bulgarian president Rumen Radev, who also projects ‘security and stability’. For your info, Radev is the one on the right.

Are Bulgarians then consciously or subconciously into a particular look when it comes to their leaders? OK, I’ll just say it – the legacy and shadow of long-time Bulgarian communist supreme leader Todor Zhivkov lives on. For many, especially older, Bulgarians, Zhivkov’s rule (1954–1989) was a time of ‘security and stability’ and/or their idyllic and carefree childhood. This is apparent with the way many Bulgarians react in the comments sections of social media groups and profiles focused on nostalgia for pre-1989 communist Bulgaria or even for the country’s main tabloid news portals. With Borisov massively discredited with large swathes of the Bulgarian electorate craving that perceived ‘security and stability’, it’s former military guy Radev, who could pass off as Zhivkov’s son, to take over that mantle. And with opinion polls showing Radev’s Progressive Bulgaria having a massive lead over the other parties, he’s very much in line to become Bulgaria’s next Zhivkov… sorry… Prime Minister.

While for many younger Bulgarians now, the times of Zhivkov, five-year plans, red stars on the Party House and deficit are stuff from some mythical past that baba i dyado talk about, it wasn’t that long ago (well, that’s how it feels for me) that this banger of a chalga hit would get the teenage crowd in a village disco into complete delirium (as I’ve witnessed). This tongue-in-cheek homage to Zhivkov is by far the best work the late chalga singer Panko every did, and this video, complete with archival footage with Panko slotting himself next to ‘Bay Tosho’ is complete genius!

What I do have to say about all this is that Bulgaria and Bulgarians deserve better! Let’s hope that the average Bulgarian does the right thing and prove their ingrained pessimism wrong… at least for once. Моля Ви!

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