Serbia: A Lesson in Endurance
by Ema Vukojevic
Whenever my family returns to the home-country of my parents, my mother remains unwavering in how she wants us to spend our time there. We walk around the large pedestrian street Knez Mihailova, pick a café at random, and sit — for hours. The first thirty minutes or so are fine, I’ll get myself a soda or maybe a snack, and try to ignore the unrelenting heat. It’s around when we start hitting the two hour mark that I grow restless and begin voicing my complaints. I’m probably on drink number three now, and my mother is still nursing the same cappuccino she’s had this whole time while she does seemingly nothing at all. Depending on how many days of this I’ve already endured, I might stick it out another hour or two before my frustration boils over and I insist we leave and see literally anything other than the same tired chunk of walkway that, unsurprisingly, has displayed nothing of note over the past several hours. I’m always left baffled by her choice of activity. We stand in the center of the capital city of her home-country, and this is all she wants to see — content to remain totally stationary as the world passes us by. The only break in the pattern happens when we visit the relatives still in the area, which typically involves us meeting up somewhere in Knez Mihailova and finding a café to sit in as we make small talk. It becomes a little mind-numbing after a while.
This habit of remaining stuck in one place, with few excursions into other areas in the city (let alone the rest of the country), left me feeling like I knew hardly anything about the city my parents met and attended university in. With Serbia scarcely appearing in the public eye of the West, there’s not even much of a stereotype for the country that I can choose to associate with or reject. Taking into account the general lack of public exposure coupled with how Serbia sports a population smaller than that of New York City by a couple million people, I’ve grown used to the initial confusion I’m often met with when claiming it as my ethnic background. As a kindergartner, my teacher accused me of lying when I said I was from there, because she did not believe it to be a real country. It’s not uncommon for people to ask me if it’s really cold there, mistaking it for Siberia. The best examples of prominent Serbs I can bring up are the odd NBA or tennis player. It’s from this same, often misconstrued country that artist Dragan Bibin hails, a painter with a penchant for depicting “Balkan historical and cultural references” in his large-scale, often somewhat unsettling work (Bibin).
Serbia’s modern day existence as an independent nation was born of the fracturing of Yugoslavia, a country shattered by conflict stretching from 1991 to 2001. Born in 1984, the greater portion of Bibin’s adolescence was colored by this violence, and its influence bleeds into his work to this day. Since then, Serbia has faced seemingly unending social and political turmoil, with outrage only growing in recent months. Bibin’s nods to mounting frustrations and systemic corruption are only more relevant to the country as hundreds of thousands of Serbs engage in active protest after a tragically fatal building collapse in Novi Sad, the blame being attributed to irresponsible and greedy government members. To reflect how his life has been affected by the misconduct expressed by his political leaders, Bibin paints references to the construction sites that were plentiful in his hometown. The accompanying text of Bibin’s 2017 exhibition “Unfinished” calls back to his childhood “on the periphery of a Serbian industrial city, where most of the houses were left unfinished because of the sanctions and war in the region” and “Red Bricks and construction equipment were his playground - as they still are for today’s children” (Bibin). Bibin’s relationship with construction is a direct consequence of the Yugoslav wars, which halted all public projects and left half finished structures dotting urban and rural landscapes alike.
Several massive unfinished sites that “[stand] as bitter reminders of the past, reminders of war, reminders of corruption, reminders of promises unkept or simply a reminder of what was lost” in former-Yugoslavia are documented in the Spomenik Database, an online platform chronicling Yugoslavian culture and history (Niebyl). Buildings like Sveučilišna Bolnica, or “University Hospital,” in Zagreb, Croatia were huge, optimistic undertakings that now serve as nothing more than a “thorn in the side of…residents and government officials” (Niebyl). Sveučilišna Bolnica has been gradually deteriorating since work halted in 1994 and is now referred to as the “mockery of Zagreb” by local news outlets (Niebyl). Huge, hulking concrete skeletons loom over communities of former-Yugoslavia, now devoid of the valuable materials they once touted, vandalized with graffiti, and crumbling with age as they do nothing more than take up space and act as constant reminders of the nation’s failures. The projects, started in what seemed to be a golden-era, were made possible by Yugoslavia’s role as a nation that had broken “away from the Soviet sphere of influence in 1948,” leading the U.S. to take a particular interest in its affairs during the Cold War era, providing both economic and military aid to the country (Office of the Historian, US Dept. of State). The money that was poured into Yugoslavia was hastily ripped away as soon as conflict broke out, forcing all development to come to a startling conclusion.
The upsetting part of these artifacts of a bygone-era sticking around for so long is that, even still, barely anything has been done to demolish or refurbish the plots. In place of improving upon existing issues, the Serbian government has chosen to begin projects like the Belgrade Waterfront Development, a choice that was met with extensive protest. The project was set to cost upwards of three billion dollars and take as long as thirty years to complete. Concerns rose up for both the lack of clarity as to “how Belgrade Waterfront’s costs [would] be met” as well as the safety of the “riverfront Savamala district” which overlapped with the project and was home to “galleries, arts centres and nightlife attracting crowds of overseas and local visitors” (Delauney). Tensions heightened as outcry emerged accusing the Serbian government not only of a “lack of transparency,” but of city officials organizing “masked men armed with baseball bats [to enforce] the overnight demolition of several Savamala buildings that stood in the way of Belgrade Waterfront” (Delauney). With protests at their height in 2016, just a year before the release of “Unfinished,” Bibin uses his series to make a direct nod to the mascot chosen to represent the opposition: the duck.
Bibin grapples with the seemingly unending efforts at rebuilding and the role of the worker in “Unfinished #03, Plague,” a 6.4 square meter diptych depicting a construction worker as he toils on hands and knees, injuring himself as he does so. The exhausted worker, our main subject, is surrounded by the hollow, cheap red bricks of Bibin’s childhood and a small fleet of ducks. The word for duck in Serbian, “патка,” also serves as a slang term to refer to someone as a fraud. It’s for this reason the mascot was chosen and why Bibin makes use of them repeatedly throughout the collection. They appear in several of the paintings, always gathering around the workers as a sort of omen, unperturbed in their judgement and observation. Everything about the composition points to a lack of genuine progress. The actual bricks themselves sit untouched as, in place of continuing his work, the man engages in self-flagellation. The brutality of the act is only emphasized by Bibin choosing to center the gash created by the lashings on the physical wound between the two canvases, adding a sense of depth not present anywhere else on the painting. Bibin references self-flagellation’s use “as a preventive cure during the Black Plague pandemic in the Middle Ages,” believed to serve as a form of atonement in the face of an ailment of such proportion it could have only been the work of God (Bibin). The worker punishes himself for his association with the fraud as he silently grovels before us and obscures his face in shame. He’s marked as a pawn for the fraudsters by the distinct orange adorning the brim of his otherwise white hard-hat, mirroring the heads of the ducks that surround him in a poor imitation. A fraud among frauds, he feels a sense of guilt by association with the real culprits who sit content.
The youth of Serbia, though, seem to have reached a boiling point. On November 1, 2024 a portion of the roof of the freshly renovated Novi Sad railway station collapsed and killed fifteen people. Since then, mass student-led protests calling for justice have erupted across Serbia. As recently as January 31 of this year, three months after the tragedy, hundreds of students “received a hero’s welcome from fellow students and thousands of local residents in Novi Sad” after completing an eighty mile march from Belgrade over two days (Emric, Stojanovic). Furious at the loss of life, protestors blame the canopy collapse on “nepotism and a culture of impunity” running rampant in the government (Delauney). One of the major backers of the development project was Serbian president Aleksander Vučić, who deemed the redevelopment, “a key stop on the government’s flagship infrastructure project,” the “way to a better, progressive Serbia” (Delauney). Clearly, much like the Belgrade Waterfront Development, the people of Serbia do not see these construction efforts as an improvement to the country. Instead of inciting a sense of hope for the future, such undertakings have come to represent the shaky foundations upon which the nation rests. There’s a lack of a sense of security that is no novel concept, with Biljana Djordjevic, the co-leader of the Green-Left Front in Serbia, explaining that “the slogan of the people is that we are all below this canopy that’s called Serbia – it can collapse wherever you are” (Delauney).
With the looming threat of complete collapse, both literal and figurative, it’s unsurprising that Serbia’s youth is packing their bags and leaving at staggering rates. In a survey conducted by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, 64.8% of young respondents indicated they would leave Serbia if given the chance (WFD). The same survey also found that respondents between the ages of 18-29 were far less trusting of government institutions than older citizens (WFD). For years now, the overall population of the country has been dropping, and it’s projected to drop as low as 5.79 million by 2050 — placing it in the “top ten countries around the globe whose population is declining at [record speeds]” (Čalija). The numbers don’t exactly paint the prettiest of pictures.
So what’s keeping the students of Serbia fighting? Why continue to protest against a government that seems to have done little more than repeatedly ignore the pleas of its citizens? Shifting our purview a little, we can find a history of mass protest by looking back on the anti-war protests of ‘91 and ‘92. A number of protests took place in opposition to military action, the most notable being “the Black Ribbon March” where “about 150,000 people” marched “in solidarity with the people of Sarajevo,” which subsequently remained under siege for nearly four years (Oklobzija). I asked my father, who lived through this period, what he remembered of the protests. He seemed to disregard them, telling me that “at the end of the day, it was just a handful of students” (Vukojevic). When discussing the more recent Belgrade Waterfront protests, he maintained a similar attitude, saying that, “in [his] opinion, Serbs often protest, but not so much comes from it” (Vukojevic). 150,000 people, and, to him, they represented nothing more than a pitiful minority, naive in their calls for peace. It seems to me that, seeing this disheartening cycle of failed protest, he’s lost any kind of desire for a friction that could generate real change. He, like my mother, seems content to watch the country pass him by from a carefully distanced vantage point. His perspective begs the question, is it foolish of today’s Serbian youth to follow in the footsteps of their forefathers? A path worn down by decades of civil unrest, the route taken in pursuit of radical socio-political change has historically led to bitter disappointment, and the country remains suffocated, held in stasis by the dominant, corrupt few.
My views on the Serbian government are overwhelmingly pessimistic, and I believe it to be an institution riddled with fault dating back far beyond even the civil war. My understanding of what Serbia is, though, has never been rooted in its politics. I loathe to cut away my personal ties to its people and culture in favor of judging it on a scale of quantifiable merit. The Serbian identity has persisted in the face of insurmountable challenge and loss, laying new foundations wherever it can find opportunity. My own upbringing featured the embrace of a robust community of Serbs, many of whom have been closer to family than friends for as long as I can recall. We speak the language, cook the food, play the music, and generally revel in our shared heritage. It is this proof of an ability to thrive regardless of circumstance that has kept me from assuming an outlook of little hope in Serbia’s future. There still exists a fervor within the Serbian people to protect the pieces of an identity that has long outlasted all of the conflict and grief that they’ve persevered through. Serbs, despite their frustration with the state of the country, are acting in protest not out of anger, but because they still care. Thousands of students would not sleep in a field halfway through an eighty mile march, exposed to the bitter cold of a January night, if they did not care. Dragan Bibin would not spend hours honing his craft, choosing to immortalize the pain and struggle of a nation, and criticizing his government, if he did not care. The degree of success the Novi Sad protests will find remains to be seen, but I cannot help cheering for them, because I still care.
Works Cited:
Bibin, Dragan. “About.” Dragan Bibin, www.draganbibin.com/about. Accessed 12 Feb. 2025.
Bibin, Dragan. Unfinished #03, Plague. Unfinished, https://www.draganbibin.com/unfinished. Accessed 12 Feb. 2025.
Delauney, Guy. “Controversy Surrounds Belgrade Waterfront Development.” BBC News, BBC, 21 June 2016, www.bbc.com/news/business-36576420.
Delauney, Guy. “Fury over Serbia Station Tragedy Prompts First Arrests.” BBC News, BBC, 22 Nov. 2024, www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0qdyg8yn5yo.
Emric, Eldar, and Dusan Stojanovic. “Serbian Anti-Graft Protesters March to a Northern City and Plan to Block Bridges.” AP News, AP News, 1 Feb. 2025, apnews.com/article/serbia-march-students-protest-novi-sad-blockade-5e58d14b8459367db9efc0590cfffc5d.
Foreign Service Institute, Office of the Historian. “The Breakup of Yugoslavia, 1990–1992.” Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, U.S. Department of State, history.state.gov/milestones/1989-1992/breakup-yugoslavia. Accessed 18 Feb. 2025.
Niebyl, Donald. “13 Unfinished Architectural Relics of the Yugoslav-Era.” Spomenik Database, 6 Sept. 2023, www.spomenikdatabase.org/post/13-unfinished-architectural-relics-of-the-yugoslav-era.
Oklobzija, Mira. “The Serbian Movement Against Violence - FPIF.” Foreign Policy In Focus, 23 May 2023, fpif.org/the-serbian-movement-against-violence/.
Vucicevic, Dusan, and Nikola Jovic. “Youth Emigration and Political Distrust in Serbia.” Translated by Vladimir Brasanac et al., Western Balkans Democracy Initiative, Westminster Foundation for Democracy, Serbia, May 2020, www.wfd.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/WFD-Serbia-Research-Survey-and-analysis-Youth-emigration-and-Political-Distrust-2020.pdf.
Vukojevic, Ema, and Bojan Vukojevic. 10 Feb. 2025.
Čalija, Jelena. “Why Population in Serbia Keeps Declining?” UNDP, UNDP, 6 Feb. 2020, www.undp.org/serbia/stories/why-population-serbia-keeps-declining#:~:text=The%20children%20are%20fewer%2C%20the,different%20areas%20to%20visit%20Serbia.