By Tanya Pikula

My mom, sister, and I always adored Djordje Balašević’s music. While my father found much of it “too melancholic,” us female folk embraced the spectrum of the songs’ moods and sentiments, turning up the volume to drown out dad’s requests for the next song.

At my cousin’s wedding we danced to with most abandon to “Devojka sa čardaš nogama” (Girl with Čardaš Legs). 

As I tried to process the loss and the inevitable turnover of generations when my beloved grandmother died, I kept playing “Jednom su sadili lipu” (They Once Planted a Linden Tree) and “Neki novi klinci” (Some New Kids). 

After every one of my break ups, I played “Priča o Vasi Ladačkom” (A Story About Vasa Ladački) until I grew sick of myself.

The singer, songwriter, writer, poet, and director was born in 1953 in Novi Sad. Born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, in 1978 he penned what many have described as the anthem of his generation, “Računajte na nas” (Count on Us), which expressed allegiance to the Yugoslav vision of South Slavic unity.

Many have called Balašević the Bob Dylan of the Balkans for his nuanced lyricism.

When Balašević died unexpectedly on February 19, 2021, at the age of 67, I immediately called my mom. Who else would I have called but the person who had taught me to love his songs? We were mostly silent on the line, too emotional to say much. His death felt surprisingly, viscerally personal.

I had misplaced my ability to have a proper cry sometime during my adolescence, but there I was on that winter afternoon, slumped in my chair halfway through the workday, with the floodgates open. I felt silly crying for someone I had never met, yet it was so honest and overwhelming that there seemed very little point in trying to rationalize my way out of it.

When I went online to see if others had heard the news, I discovered countless posts and articles mirroring my private moments of mourning. Well-known personages from the Balkans had died before, but I had never witnessed such spontaneous collective grief. It seemed that Balašević’s death revived that much-sung-about tajna veza (secret bond) among ex-Yugoslavs, for tens of thousands were joining together to say goodbye to the Pannonian Sailor.

(“Pannonian Sailor”)

Good art gives us a lexicon for our own feelings and experiences. It gives us back moments of our own life, expressed more poignantly. And no one was better at that than Balašević.

He was a keen observer of the Balkan mentality, our folly and passions, our sense of the comedic and the tragic. 

He seemed to know what we felt and said it in a way that allowed us to feel it more and remember it better: the pain of loving someone who isn’t right for you but loving them anyway, melodramatically and to your own detriment; the yearning for the simplicity and joy of childhood by an adult who is not quite ready for the next steps; or the intense but fickle feelings of a young person in lust during the hot European summer.

Rade Šerbedžija, the Croatian-born actor who, like many artists across the region, issued an emotional eulogy for Balašević, expressed it well: “That unique man who wrote the most beautiful love songs, the kindest verses about our childhoods, the saddest rhymes about our misfortunes and the funniest verses about our mentalities, should be celebrated.”

As the ground shifted beneath the feet of ex-Yugoslavs in the 1990s, Balašević’s songs were a constant that gave us something to connect with, a way to hold on to our sense of self and to each other. 

He was a staunch, unshakeable pacifist, who called upon people to value and practice humanity even in the worst of times. When so many things were suddenly meant to divide us, he kept singing about reaching across boundaries for a sense of kinship, to find things we have always shared: our warmth, our inat, our parochialisms, our hospitality, our hedonism, our tenacity, and our humor. 

(“As Long as There Is No War”)

One of the first Serbian artists to hold concerts in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina after the war, he continued to seek to unite the region spiritually even as he became disillusioned with Yugoslavia as a political entity.

At a 4-hour concert in Split, he made what is now a well-known statement: “Yugoslavia was no good, if it had been, it wouldn’t have broken up in such a bloody way… I miss those times, not the country itself.”

In a heartfelt article published days after Balašević’s passing, a Croatian fan of his, Tina Premec, described how she crossed the border into Slovenia in 1994 with a group of friends to attend a sold-out Balašević concert in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Knowing that attending the concert of a Serbian singer, however pacifist, would be frowned upon by many at that sensitive time, they viewed their trip as a form of a stance:

“I will never forget that feeling, none of us from the gang will. It wasn’t a question of yugonostalgia, but the fact that we were sick of war, hate, the ugly reality, the ruling dogma that said the most important thing was your ethnicity or where you are from rather than the kind of person you are.”

Death can, in some ways, be a crescendo. In his life, Balašević’s music kept us in each other’s minds. In his death, he created the most poignant coming together of ex-Yugos since the 1990s. 

The sad things is that that February day was perhaps the last time we were going to feel that sense of connection so intensely and on such a large scale. In some way, it was the last gasp of the old country, at least in that spiritual sense that Balašević always strove to appeal to.

That, for me at least, is the meaning of yugonostalgia. Not a desire to turn back time or ignore the pain and violence of the last war. Not a wish to bring the countries back together in any political sense. Not an admiration of a specific regime that held the region together for a few decades. 

Instead, it is a yearning for a sense of belonging, for our youth, for tolerance and for prioritizing human connection above all. And Balašević, more than anyone, gave us the tools to do that.

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Djordje Balašević photo CC-BY-SA GregorB