Welcome to Serbia

     Welcome everybody! Welcome to this blog about my country, my region, my city! Welcome to Serbia! Welcome to Srem! Welcome to Sremska Mitrovica!
Place where every thing runs slowly. Place where people look at all their problems and say FUCK IT. They just pour some white wine in glass with some sparkling water over it, and salute to the person on the right and drink it bit by bit. While in the background a sweat sound of TAMBURASI is coming.
   If you close your eyes you can hear whistling wind, whistling through the ears of wheat, in all this plain of Srem . You can hear people singing and laughing in cafana's.

"Stop the Danube, and the sands of  time. This is my song, and song of my dear. Let them accompany my everywhere. With the song of the best Wine. The eight tamburasi from the Petrovaradin" 

That is my favorite song, and that is my motto. And trust me, not just mine, it is a motto of almost every person who has a family in this region for a long, long, long period of time.
Close your eyes again. Do you see it? Do you see that person wearing white clothes with the black vest over it and black hat on his head? Can you see it how he is drinking cold white wine under the shade, during his break after working on his crops. Can you see it? Can you see that short guy with big stomach? You see that guy, that is Sremac.
This is the guy who did not care what nationality other people were; this is the guy who does not care which nationality other people are; this is the guy that would not care what nationality other people might be.
And I am just like that guy. Another usual, typical Sremac. And all of you that are currently reading this and thinking in your small closed minds filled only with westernized propaganda about Serbs and genocide  and war crimes, how they did this, did that, how they are responsible for all the mess that happened  here in The Balkans. Please, Get The Fuck Outta Here. Because your small, low IQ brains can not accept different and true information. And I am not willing to explain individually to each one of you who saw a couple news headlines and now think that you have all the knowledge of this world... And all of you who want to see the real Serbia, all of you who want to meet Serbia on her inside. Please stay and forgive me for my bad language in the previous sentences.
You saw that Sremac, right? Did you hear the giggling next to him? If not close your eyes again and hear it. Now move your look a bit to the right. Now you see from where that giggling coming from. It is from kids of the Sremac. You see those kids playing soccer, basketball, tennis...? You see those kids? They are the next  Branislav Ivanovic, the next Vlade Divac, they are the next Peja Stojakovic, the next Ana Ivanovic, they are the next Novak Djokovic... Those people that I just mentioned, they don't look like genocide maniacs do they, ha? No, they don't, and neither are the rest of the 99.99% of Serbian people. Oh, and what would  Sremac be without his Sremica, without his wife. The woman who makes the best strudels. And not just that, but all sorts of goodies made of dough. But be aware, you don't want piss that woman off... Just trust me :) I'm off, I'm heding to kafana. Cold white wine and sparkling water is waiting for me... You can look me up, just follow the sound of tamburasi and you'll find me. I'm buying. See ya :)   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oS0vTrKZDxI

Author: Milos Birovic

Editor: Cassi Merten 

Follow us on Facebook and Twiter

https://www.facebook.com/InSideOfSerbianLife

https://twitter.com/InSideOfSerbian

Outside of Serbian Life......

Milos asked me to write the next post.....not sure what he was thinking there. The topic is inside Serbian life; I am not Serbian, I do not live in Serbia, I have never even visited Serbia.

But, maybe that isn't such a bad thing for this post. That gives me the chance to tell you not so much about westerners' opinions but maybe about how westerners arrived at them through ignorance, about not just Serbs, but the Balkan peninsula, as a whole. As we should all know it is ignorance that breeds fear and hate, or at the very least apathy, and apathy can be more deadly than than the first two. It is my opinion that ignorant apathy was all that was needed for several wrongs to be inflicted on the people of Yugoslavia.

When I was in college I was a history major and while my concentration was not European or the modern era, I did take enough courses to have had a concentration in Modern European History. Yet, with that much education I will now, freely admit that I knew NOTHING about the Balkans. Why now? Cause I had to learn to know that I had been ignorant.

Okay, so maybe I wasn't totally ignorant, but the things I did know either were not truly important or they were random facts that I had picked up somewhere along the way. Yes, I knew about Vlad the Impaler and I knew the Ottoman Empire had invaded and occupied, and I learned a few dates and facts. But I truly knew nothing about the Serbs before the Ottoman invasion and knew nothing about the occupation.

Now, I am not going to say that ALL Americans were as ignorant as I was and still am; but considering that unlike most American students, I focused on history and still did not know The Balkans, I feel confident stating that the majority of the American populous was even less informed than I was. At most what the normal, everyday American knew was that Yugoslavia, had been the enemy during the Cold War. That made it very easy for Americans to assume the worst in the people of the land called Yugoslavia.

Typical everyday Americans are very self-absorbed, materialistic people, whom tend to act like the world ends at the end of their nose. For those flaws, Americans still tend to like to think they are helpful, defenders of the underdog. They see their country as the defender of all that is good and right and free in the world. Unfortunately, most Americans are so busy keeping up with the Jones, that they do not really take the time to know what is going on in the world and to understand all sides of conflicts, as much as we dislike our politicians we seem to still trust them when they tell us that these people or this group is bad and we support their decisions about how to handle said conflicts.

This poorly placed trust is what happened in the Balkans in the 90's. Our media only showed the “crimes” committed by the Yugoslavia Army. There was no logic, no reasonable questions, no verification, no investigating by our media that resulted in any story other than the ones that reflected negatively on the Yugoslavia Army or the Serbian people. I blame that on the fact that news has become business and in doing so has lost any and all integrity that it once might have had. And we all know that big business and politics are diabolical bed buddies.

Yet, even our leaders were ill informed about the truth of the Balkans. For Tony Blair stated in April of 1999, “Kosovo is on the doorstep of Europe.” I am not sure how many people consider the doorstep of their home to be in the middle of their living room. But it is this very ignorance and misunderstanding by most Westerners about the Balkans that allowed such misdeeds to occur.