This Was a Graffiti

This graffiti may or may not have existed; a documentary about it is quite real. An “Inspired by Yugoslavia” Fragment. With Valeriya Boyko.

The country of Yugoslavia may no longer appear on any physical maps, but it remains on many people’s mental maps and it inspires their creativity. The “Inspired by Yugoslavia” series features such people and their creations. 

Listen: “This Was a Graffiti” (Episode #98)

Bonus Extras: “This Was a Graffiti” (Episode #98)

Ad-free version of “This Was a Graffiti” (Episode #98).

Transcript: “This Was a Graffiti” (Episode #98)

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

PETER KORCHNAK: This Remembering Yugoslavia Fragment is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a global community and social network for all ex-Yugoslavs, post-Yugoslavs, yugodiasporans, yugophiles, and the yugocurious. It’s the new home of this podcast, it’s articles, translations, newsletters, events, and a shop—it’s all Yugoslavia, all the time. Visit Yugoblok.com to look around and join.

[SOUNDBITE]

[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is a Remembering Yugoslavia Fragment, a short version of the podcast exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. 

We’re coming up on one hundred episodes here at Remembering Yugoslavia so I’m looking at ways to freshen things up on the show. So many times I come across stories that would take forever to combine into a larger episode, or that don’t warrant a 45-minute piece, or that cross my desk and I don’t know what to do with them. So, like memory itself, Fragments are little snapshots of whatever’s relevant, all Yugoslavia, all the time, just shorter. And yes, you might hear the podcast more frequently. One way or another, I’m still your guide, Peter Korchnak.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: The country of Yugoslavia may no longer appear on any physical maps, but it remains on many people’s mental maps and it inspires their creativity. On today’s (the first) Remembering Yugoslavia Fragment, a story of a Ukrainian yugophile on a quest to find something that may or may not exist.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Valeriya Boyko is a novice documentary filmmaker from Donetsk, Ukraine.

VALERIYA BOYKO: To me, in many ways, it’s kind of connected to Sarajevo or Prishtina. In both of these places there is the beautiful-is-ugly-and-ugly-is-beautiful, and it’s also true for Donetsk.

PETER KORCHNAK: Boyko left Ukraine for university studies in Lithuania and eventually moved to Germany in 2016. Somewhere in there she made her way to the Balkans, and in a way never left.

VALERIYA BOYKO: I came to Serbia in 2013 for the first time, and it was a family trip, and I instantly loved it. We did a little bit of traveling with the little van around Serbia, and then Montenegro. It was beautiful, and the food was tasty, and I was a teenager.

And then, I think the year after, I really developed interest in post-conflict aspects of the space, and I started doing a lot of research. I was still in my university years, and every single time I had an option to write a paper about any topic. I would always write about something relating to post-Yugoslavia. And since then it took off and then and there was no stop ever since. 

It feels like home. I don’t need to do any self-editing to feel like I fit in and belong, and it’s my adopted, acquired home, especially Sarajevo.

PETER KORCHNAK: In the course of her work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Boyko heard the story of the graffiti on Sarajevo’s central post office.

VALERIYA BOYKO: Sarajevo is my big love. I go there very, very, very often, and somehow, I sometimes have these thoughts that any time spent not in Sarajevo is time not well spent. It’s not really true, but it’s true that time in Sarajevo is always time well spent. 

I’m a psychologist by training, and last year, I was doing research on how wars influence group relations. And I was doing that in Republika Srpska. And as I was working on that research project, a friend of mine told me a story about the post office. Sometime someone wrote, OVO JE SRBIJA over a Serbia. This is Serbia on the post office in in, in the center of of Sarajevo. And then soon after, someone replied, crossing out Serbia and writing, OVO JE POŠTA, BUDALO, This is post office, you stupid. 

And when I heard of that story, I got so excited, because I thought that it’s funny, first of all, and also so ridiculous and absurd, and that it was a perfect visualization for the things I was finding, and kind of my convictions for me working on that project. 

So I immediately went to look for a picture of it. And initially I actually thought that it’s something that happened a year ago, and I was trying to look through all of the news sites in Bosnia, and I found nothing.

PETER KORCHNAK: She did find a photograph of the graffiti but soon also learned that one, the original graffiti battle took place on the post office wall decades ago, and two, the photo she did find was of a re-creation of the graffiti featured at the Labyrinth of the 1990s exhibition in Belgrade in summer of 2023. Labyrinth of the 1990s was dedicated and aiming to establish a permanent museum of that fateful decade in post-Yugoslav history.

VALERIYA BOYKO: It was not clear who was the artist behind the recreation, so I just reached out to the team, asking for whether I could maybe get connected to the person that painted the graffiti. And they replied saying, “Valeria, we would be, of course, very happy to connect you with that person, if only we knew who it is. It was made in Sarajevo in the 90s, and you know, we don’t know, but it for sure existed. They also did not have a picture for me, for reference, or or anything. 

And my theory right now [is that] there was one protest in 2015 in Belgrade, connected to the anniversary of the Siege. And there were youth activists from Youth Initiative for Human Rights that have made a placard with the saying from the graffiti. So this is what I think has now spiraled this new wave of recreating the graffiti. And that was the first initial visual that we have. 

PETER KORCHNAK: So, without the photograph again, Boyko was back to Square One.

PETER KORCHNAK: Ovo je bio grafit / This Was a Graffiti is Boyko’s directorial debut. 

VALERIYA BOYKO: I was looking for that picture for five months and I could not find it. And I was talking to a lot of people that I knew from Sarajevo, asking them if they’ve seen it, and if they have a picture, and I would consistently get a reply, oh yeah, I saw it. And some of them also told me, Oh yeah, I have a picture. It should be somewhere in my archives. And I would always ask to get the picture, but that has never happened. 

And then I met someone who was working on a documentary about Sarajevo some years ago, and I told him about the story, saying that I’m looking for that picture. And he laughed, because, as he was doing research for his documentary, he was also looking for that picture. He was looking for it for five years, and he was like, I never found it. And I knew that he was working with really, really good network of contacts in Sarajevo. So I thought, hmm, maybe I’ll find it, or maybe I don’t know. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Spoiler alert.

VALERIYA BOYKO: I never found the picture, still to this day.

PETER KORCHNAK: As far as the timeline, Boyko tracked the graffiti down to the fall of 1991, a few months before the Siege.

VALERIYA BOYKO: I was looking for the first written mention of this graffiti. And it only, it’s only mentioned for the first time, as far as I know, in 1995, and it is mentioned by a foreign journalist who was at the time reporting from Sarajevo, and he was not living there full time. I also got in touch with him, but he was told this story by another foreign journalist from Sarajevo. 

So at the end of the day, what I think it most probably was, it was just a joke that was made up and then was just shared around. 

Because also remember that the siege, very early in the siege, the post office was on fire, and there are pictures of the post office on fire and visibly, there is no graffiti then there, at least at that point. 

So I don’t know.

PETER KORCHNAK: In the film, Boyko speaks to a number of people who remember seeing the graffiti, albeit in different versions and also in different locations on the post office walls; she also spoke to some who insist the graffiti was made up.

VALERIYA BOYKO: So at the end of the day, right? We are left questioning if it ever existed.

It’s quite soon that I realized that there is a good potential that there is no picture because it never existed. But as soon as you’re talking with the generation that was there during the Siege and you bring up the story, everyone knows about it and everyone is so convinced that they have seen it.

And it’s very possible, right, that maybe, maybe it happened. Maybe it was true. It was just never documented. 

But it’s interesting also how their memories of it differ. What was really fascinating for me is that kind of the content stays the same. And I was looking at it in a little bit also of like metaphysical dimension that in a certain way, this to me serves as an example of of us possibly being able to shape the memory of collective past through this one event. And then it becomes true. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The Mandela Effect is a phenomenon whereby people collectively misremember facts, events, or other details in a consistent manner. Darth Vader doesn’t say “Luke, I am your father,” as so many people think, but “No, I am your father”; Nelson Mandela did not die in prison in the 1980s as so many people falsely recall. The causes of this mis-remembrance are hotly debated. 

VALERIYA BOYKO: And it doesn’t really matter if it happened or not, but that narrative of this tale, of that kind of attitude, that kind of response, a weapon against a nationalistic claim, becomes true and becomes part of the lore, and then also drives certain decisions in the future. 

These kinds of graffitis have been popping up there and there in Bosnia, and it’s really often that this graffiti is repeated now. So to me, that’s that’s very, very powerful. 

PETER KORCHNAK: If you’ve heard my deep dive into humor in the former Yugoslavia in Episode 65 “Jokers to the Right,” you’ll understand how deeply funny it is, This is Serbia vs This is a post office, you fool. And you’ll know how much it is of the place. As one of Boyko’s interlocutors said, this graffiti response could only be written by a Bosnian. 

VALERIYA BOYKO: To me, being from Ukraine right now, it’s almost impossible to imagine that to a graffiti like that, that something is Russia, that you would get a response that would be this humoristic. You would most definitely get a response that this is Ukraine. But I don’t think it’s realistic that anyone would reply, you know, highlighting how how strange this claim is. 

PETER KORCHNAK: This Was a Graffiti premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival this past August.

VALERIYA BOYKO: It was wonderful to hear laughter in the room, because I was really trying to make it a little bit funny, at least. 

And then, of course, the usual experience of people seeing this movie is that there is a lot of discussion among Sarajevans, at least, around I have seen it? No, it was a 93 not in 91 or not in 95… So that is always very, very fun to watch. But I have, I have not, I have not reached a conclusion yet. So still open maybe, maybe a follow up movie is happening on this one wonderful day when I’ll finally see the picture.

I’m still getting emails about that graffiti, and I’m always very happy to receive them, because I haven’t seen the picture yet. But ever since, ever since I was done with the editing, there would be these people again, that would be like, Oh, Valeria, we saw the picture of it yesterday, and then again, it just like, dissipates. It’s a phantom.

If any of the listeners have ever gotten their hands on a picture of that graffiti, I would be very happy to see it.

PETER KORCHNAK: But ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.

[SOUNDBITE]

VALERIYA BOYKO: At the end of the day, we are talking about it. We know about it. 

And to me, that’s really beautiful that it lives on in some shape and form, and that people remember about it, and to me, it tells the story that’s larger, that also is in some way connected to Sarajevo nature and character, but also beyond it. It shows you what stood behind the resistance of the Siege, and maybe what could be this connecting ground for the world at large. And to me, that’s inspiring.

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this Remembering Yugoslavia Fragment, 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. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/Podcasts. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić.

Additional music courtesy of Sticky Keys, check them out and inquire about commissions on Soundcloud.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!