Although I have only seen it in flashes between the trees, I have a connection with Sarajevo, It looked beautiful. Past the rocky slopes and cracking pine cones, it shone at me from a valley.
You can see my great grandfather Izy on the steps of the town hall in pictures, part of the committee that gave the Archduke Franz Ferdinand his send off.
In India, during Indira Gandhi's emergency, long ago now, I met my first girlfriend, a budding Yugoslavian. She had obsidian eyes, fine bronze hair, a smile like the Medusa and stubby fingers.
In1976 Yugoslavia seemed like a peaceful place and I romanticised it because I remembered Natasha and I felt I was a socialist and I was only 16. A year later, in summer, we lived together for a month.
In 1980. She left her new boyfriend in town and took me to a small Island off the coast. We slept in the forest and swam in a bay surrounded by yellow rocks like. Her friends seemed to have so much time to waste, to get themselves into existential knots. I envied them.
I suppose I was looking for a new kind of country, to admire and I so I admired Yugoslavia. It's spoilt young people, who in their peaceful society secretly longed to have been resistance fighters in the war. Some of her friends told me that Yugoslavia would break up in bloodshed and flames. I didn't believe them. But they kept the faith with their self fulfilling death wish.
There was a feeling that the lazing,lazy elite longed for Yugoslavia's historical celebrity, they wanted to restart history. History understood by these semi evolved intellectuals as war. I wonder what role the nostalgic Belgrade Serbian intelligentsia actually had in justifying and promoting Serbian nationalism and getting the peasants to assassinate one another.
So perhaps, before he assassinated the Archduke in that pretty city called Sarajevo, the Serbian nationalist also lazed about naked on the rocks and he was also bored and discussed philosophy in the Belgrade cafes and was at a bit of a loss.
The devil makes work for idle hands.
You can see my great grandfather Izy on the steps of the town hall in pictures, part of the committee that gave the Archduke Franz Ferdinand his send off.
In India, during Indira Gandhi's emergency, long ago now, I met my first girlfriend, a budding Yugoslavian. She had obsidian eyes, fine bronze hair, a smile like the Medusa and stubby fingers.
In1976 Yugoslavia seemed like a peaceful place and I romanticised it because I remembered Natasha and I felt I was a socialist and I was only 16. A year later, in summer, we lived together for a month.
In 1980. She left her new boyfriend in town and took me to a small Island off the coast. We slept in the forest and swam in a bay surrounded by yellow rocks like. Her friends seemed to have so much time to waste, to get themselves into existential knots. I envied them.
I suppose I was looking for a new kind of country, to admire and I so I admired Yugoslavia. It's spoilt young people, who in their peaceful society secretly longed to have been resistance fighters in the war. Some of her friends told me that Yugoslavia would break up in bloodshed and flames. I didn't believe them. But they kept the faith with their self fulfilling death wish.
There was a feeling that the lazing,lazy elite longed for Yugoslavia's historical celebrity, they wanted to restart history. History understood by these semi evolved intellectuals as war. I wonder what role the nostalgic Belgrade Serbian intelligentsia actually had in justifying and promoting Serbian nationalism and getting the peasants to assassinate one another.
So perhaps, before he assassinated the Archduke in that pretty city called Sarajevo, the Serbian nationalist also lazed about naked on the rocks and he was also bored and discussed philosophy in the Belgrade cafes and was at a bit of a loss.
The devil makes work for idle hands.
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