Diaspora Voices 11: This House
Diaspora Voices is an occasional series of conversations with ex-Yugoslavs living abroad.
With Vedrana Govorčin (Vienna/Mostar).
Listen: “Diaspora Voices 11: This House” (Episode #138)
Bonus Extras: “Diaspora Voices 11: This House” (Episode #138)
Ad-free version of “Diaspora Voices 11: This House” (Episode #138).
Transcript: “Diaspora Voices 11: This House” (Episode #138)
PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.
Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join today.
[JINGLE]
PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your host, Peter Korchnak.
Diaspora Voices is a segment on this show featuring conversations with ex- or post-Yugoslavs living abroad.
Today’s yugodiasporan reached out on Instagram wanting to share a story about a house. She introduced herself as Veza; we spoke on May 25th, Dan mladosti, Youth Day.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: I woke up today and I thought, ‘oh my god, it’s Dan mladosti, and we have this conversation today.’ It’s beautiful. Sretan Dan mladosti, dear Petar.
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: Vedrana Govorčin was born in Mostar in 1991 and has lived in a small town in Austria since 1993.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: There were not so many people from Yugoslavia in the countryside, or if there were, then they were more from the Gastarbeiter time, like they were there from maybe the 60s, 70s, or 80s already. We had some friends and neighbors, but in school I remember I was, I think, one of the only people who came from another country.
I have no conscious memory of Mostar as a child, yeah.
PETER KORCHNAK: Govorčin first trained as a translator and then went to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is a translator, artist, and a school teacher of art.
It was one of the Diaspora Voices on this here podcast that touched her and inspired her to reach out and share her story.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: The person said something about not having a real sense of identity or always looking for a sense of identity or something like that. And I listened to that I think one or two weeks after my father died, he died in the beginning of March, and very suddenly, he had a heart attack, and he was 65 years old, so actually 65 years young, and I listened to the podcast, and it touched me deeply, and I somehow I thought I would like to share some of the story, or something that I got from my father.
PETER KORCHNAK: Govorčin’s story is a story of a house, which is a story of the city, which is the story of her family, which is her story.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: There is this house in Mostar, in the neighborhood called Carina, in the street called Lacina, Lacina ulica, which is named after a Partisan fighter that also has a, like, one of these stones in the Partisan Memorial Cemetery that’s probably destroyed, sadly.
PETER KORCHNAK: Lacina street is named after Hasan Zahirović Laca, a Mostar-born Yugoslav Partisan who was after World War II proclaimed a People’s Hero. He is buried at the Partisan Memorial Cemetery designed by Bogdan Bogdanović; his headstone, along with almost every other of some 700 headstones there, was destroyed a few years ago. For more on the story of the Partisan Necropolis, check out Episode 2 of the Visiting Yugoslavia podcast, available to Yugoblokniks everywhere.
At any rate, the story of the house begins in the first, interwar Yugoslavia.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: My great grandfather, Nikola, who is from the island of Iž—
PETER KORCHNAK: —near Zadar.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: —was a policeman for the Yugoslav, like the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and for his job, he came to Macedonia, where he met my great- grandmother Ana. And they had three children, and again they had to move for the job and went to a town close to Mostar. There they lived, and in the Second World War, in the beginning, like 1941, one day my great-grandfather, he just didn’t come back from work. My great-grandmother Ana got to know that he was murdered, but they don’t know who murdered him, or how. No corpse was ever found, they didn’t know what happened.
And so Ana was alone there with three children in this small town, she didn’t have a family there, she didn’t have anybody there, so she decided to go back to Macedonia to her family. She decided to go to Mostar first and to take a train from there. This small town it was about 30 kilometers from Mostar, and she walked to Mostar with her three children. And when she arrived in Mostar, she also saw that it was not really easy to get to Macedonia. I think, the trains were not really running, and the situation was bad. So they stayed in Mostar, and they slept, I think, here and there, mainly close to the railway station, because they hoped for a possibility to get back to Macedonia.
And in that time Ana met a woman, Baka Joka, and this woman offered her a place to stay in her house, because she was living alone in her house. Ana and her three children, one of them being my grandfather, Vjeko, Baka Joka offered them a room in her house, and Ana and her three sons, they moved into the house, and that’s actually the house that I’m talking about.
When the three children were still small, their mother also died, my great grandmother Ana died, and they stayed alone in the house with Baka Joka. My grandfather was the oldest one, and he was the one who first bought the house from Baka Joka. And at some point also Baka Joka died, and so they inherited this house, my grandfather and his two younger brothers.
Later my grandfather married my grandmother, and my father was born in that house, and he grew up in that house.
PETER KORCHNAK: Govorčin’s father, Marko, was a tourist guide and musician. He played bass in various groups in and around Mostar, in hotels and restaurants and other venues. The most prominent of these bands was Rondo, named after a big roundabout in Mostar. In 1984, the band finished fourth at the Sarajevo pop music festival, “Your Season Hit,” behind the likes of Oliver Dragojević, Neda Ukraden, and Kemal Monteno. Based on their success, in 1985 Rondo represented Bosnia and Herzegovina in the Yugoslav round of the Eurovision song contest, with the song “Linda.” They didn’t win; that year, Yugoslavia sent a different song to Eurovision, “Ciao amore” by Izolda Barudzija and Vlado Kalember, which finished last.
[SOUNDBITE]
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: And my mother, she was a dentist, yeah, she was already working as a dentist when they met, and they met in Hotel Ruža.
PETER KORCHNAK: Built in 1977, Hotel Ruža was a beautiful modernist complex designed by the renowned Mostar-born architect, Zlatko Ugljen. Ruža means rose. The hotel was gravely damaged in the Bosnian War and demolished in 2001. A different hotel was built on the site.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: My mother is from a Muslim background, and my father from a Catholic background. But the funny thing is that my mother grew up on what is called the Catholic side of the city, and my father grew up on what is the Muslim side of the city, so to speak. But at that time I don’t think I mean it was not that there was not that kind of importance in these matters. I think, for them it was not such a difficult thing to be together, or it was not such a special thing to be together.
I would have to do some more research on it but as far as I know, this house, I think, or maybe the land where the house was standing on was once, belonged once to the Serbian Orthodox Church. Either Baka Joka rented it from them or she bought it from them or something like that,, so that’s not really so clear, and I don’t know if it’s possible to find that out anymore.
PETER KORCHNAK: Mostar is stereotypically known as a divided city. Following the war, where Croats expelled Muslims from quote unquote their side and vice versa, the western side of the city, on the right bank of the river Neretva, is now predominantly Croatian. Some 50,000 Croats here comprise just under one half of Mostar’s population; Mostar has the largest population of Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosniaks in the Eastern part, on Neretva’s left bank, form about 44 percent of Mostar’s population. The boulevard called Bulevar forms the informal line of division. Serbs were decimated to about a quarter of the pre-war population.
Anyway, Govorčin’s parents—
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: They met, they married, they got my sister in ‘88 and then I was born in ‘91. They planned to live in the house.
But then it was quite obviously a difficult situation for everybody, and my father then at some point decided he does not want to shoot at anybody, does not want to shoot at any of his neighbors, probably any of his family. Because when you are in this situation, in this mixed marriage, in this moment it’s even more difficult to decide, probably, which side will you be standing on. And so he left, because there was no other option, and he left for Austria, because he had some friends who were already in Austria. And my mother, she decided to stay and was hoping that the situation would get better. But yeah, we know how the situation went, and then she also came to Austria with me and my sister.
PETER KORCHNAK: Though there weren’t as many mixed marriages in Yugoslavia as its leaders may have hoped, mixed marriages, that is, unions of individuals from different ethnic groups, were mostly prevalent in cities located in ethnically mixed areas. People in and especially those born from mixed marriages were the most likely to identify as Yugoslav on the national census.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: I know that they did identify as Yugoslavians themselves.
What I always just heard and knew from my parents, what I got from them was the how great it was, you know, how great of a country it was, how great of a time it was, how good their lives were.
And through, what I understood it even more is how terribly they suffered the loss of this, how much it hurt them throughout their lives that they did not have this anymore, the life that they had in Yugoslavia, and the way that they were living there.
PETER KORCHNAK: “My father…always taught us that love beats everything,” Govorčin wrote in that initial message.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: How would I identify? I’ve asked myself that a lot of times. I don’t know if it’s possible to identify as a Yugoslavian today. I have really not such a real clue about that.
But what I thought also was interesting was when I was here in Austria, obviously I was like this foreign foreigner, you know, foreign weird thing. What is that? And even with my name Vedrana, you know, it’s like even more obvious, so at some point when I was like 16, 17, I was so frustrated by that, that I even started telling people different names, you know, telling that I’m telling them some name, like I don’t know, Maria, Sofia, whatever, just that they wouldn’t ask me in the beginning of our encounter, “oh, where you’re from?” I think that’s what many people have in common.
But the funny thing is, also when I went to Mostar and started to have my own encounters there with people, not only family and with my parents, somehow I also got this,re ction of, but you’re not from here, you’re not, you know, you’re not from here, just, just, you know, this weird reaction that confused me completely, because I knew I was from there, and also in Austria, I knew I was from here.
PETER KORCHNAK: The classic case of being a stranger in both places, in the homeland and in the hostland, here not Austrian enough but also no longer, if ever, Bosnian. Belonging as a burden, a liminal existence.
But there’s something about Mostar.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: I knew that I belong also to Mostar, mainly, I would say. I don’t know how much I felt that I belonged to Yugoslavia. I think more mainly Mostar and I think I also got that from my parents, especially my father, when people like asked him, like, “But what are you? Who are you?” whatever, and he would say, “ja sam mostarac”, I’m from Mostar. For me, it was always clear my identity is connected to Mostar. I am from Mostar, and this is my also my home.
I think what happened here is also interesting, is that I myself was kind of not, I don’t know if allowing or not wanting to take this Austrian identity as mine. But only in the last few years I realized more and more that it is obviously what is also my identity, what is what is what I am, and where I’m from, and here’s all my friends, and my everything is here, my, like, my work, my— I grew up here, so obviously it’s so obvious that it is part of my identity, but somehow I maybe, because I grew up in Austria, I had this need to feel more connected to Mostar.
[SOUNDBITE]
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: My grandmother Zora, and my grandfather Vjeko, they lived in this house also during the war in the 90s. And after the war the house was inhabited also by other people, but my father got the house back.
And that’s how I got to inherit this house now when my father died in the beginning of March. So, yeah, now it’s my house, we could say, which feels kind of weird.
The house is now more or less in ruins. I mean it’s not really like a complete ruin, as many other houses are. The walls are standing and everything, but it’s quite damaged.
It has been destroyed during the war, like, not completely, but it has been damaged. After the war it has been rebuilt somewhat, but then nobody was living in it for quite a while, and now it’s just standing there between other houses that have been rebuilt.
Around the house, the all the other houses have been— mostly all of them have been rebuilt and renovated and renewed. And opposite of this old house, there has been new house has been built, with many new flats. I don’t know if people really live there.
PETER KORCHNAK: Renovating the house into a bnb or plopping an apartment building on the lot is not something Govorčin wants to do. She is an artist after all.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: The thing with this house is weird, I don’t understand it really, because it’s in ruins.
And my father, when he was still alive, he was always asking, like, what are we going to do with it. He was also thinking to do something with it, to renovate it. In the last five, six years, he was, he wanted to sell it, I think. He also had some offers, and, but he could not really let it let go of it, I think.
And also, I, at some point, Seven eight years ago, I think I first had an idea, like, had this kind of idea, about to do something with the house, something artistic, something cultural, something that would make this place come to life. Something held, or keeps holding me back, But it’s weird, it just doesn’t let me go, and my father was also always saying, well, he doesn’t really want to sell it, but what should happen with it?
Then last year I contacted people from the Mostar Street Art Festival that’s happening every year in the end of August, and they do these great murals and other other events that are happening in the public space with art, and, and, so I contacted them. I met with one person from the team, and she immediately told me, “No, no, you should not sell it. Yeah, we should do something with it, and she encouraged me to think about what could happen there. What could it become? What could it be?
PETER KORCHNAK: The Street Arts Festival Mostar is under way right now, until August 31st.
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: I don’t know if it’s going to happen this year, but we are in contact, we want to do something there.
PETER KORCHNAK: Listen up!
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: This is kind of an open call here for people who might be called to this, to do something there, some intervention. Also I think it will happen on the wall, on the outside wall, because that’s the only place that is really accessible for now.
But in the long run, I was thinking if there could be something possible, like a space, an artistic space of experimentation, something that is very low key, something that does not need too much of a first of all, a too big budget or something, but something that can happen in a very experimental level.
In the arts, I think it’s the only possibility to work is in an experimental, more poetic, maybe way. So, in this sense, I see the house as this kind of manifestation of this interwovenness of all of this, of all this history of this, of the current moment, and that’s why I think it feels, from it feels for me like a place of possibility. A place of possibility to maybe create something for for this space that is not really defined, I would say. It’s not really clear yet what is going to happen, but my artistic work is visual. I work a lot with drawings, I work a lot with translations into different media, sometimes with wood, sometimes with wax, whatever comes most urgently in the moment.
I don’t know if any of this is going to happen in the reality, but the house feels right now as a point of meeting for possible things to happen.
PETER KORCHNAK: What about Govorčin’s mother and sister, what do they think?
VEDRANA GOVORČIN: My mother does not really say if I should or should not do anything there. She wants that something happens, but she said she’ll leave it to us, to me and my sister, to decide. My sister lives in the UK, and she, I think, she does not have such a strong connection to the house as I do.
And I also, Honestly, don’t know why I do. Something is there that keeps me kind of like holding on to it, which is also something to reflect on.
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this eleventh Diaspora Voices episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening.
All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself.
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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!