Each year when the day marking the liberation of Belgrade from fascism arrives, especially when it’s a significant round-number anniversary, there is a sense of anxiety about how it will be officially commemorated. Then a person such as myself for example might feel somewhat uncomfortable even writing about it because they neither live in Belgrade nor are they a citizen […]

I graduated from primary and secondary general education school a decade and a half ago. There was no time to learn about our contemporary history in any of the final grades shortly before the end of the school year. That, combined with the fact that even back then I was already interested in and had the privilege to meet different […]

‘‘I was dreaming that they were after me and wanted to kill me…” – This could be a statement by someone who survived the horrors of a war, someone plagued by trauma that is never forgotten, someone whose experience is etched into the deepest part of their consciousness. My name is Mirela. I live and work in Srebrenica. Unfortunately, these […]

The Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) is not only the most important film festival in South East Europe, but also a symbol of unquestionable courage and unwavering spirit of a city that survived one of the most terrible periods in modern history. This festival, which was established in 1995, when the siege of Sarajevo was still part of a horrendous daily […]

The Croatian War of the 1990s, for Croatian political elites, is one of the historical periods often and gladly used to promote crude ethno-nationalism, exploit the suffering of victims, and ignore court-established facts. One event that marked the 1990s and still holds an important place in state commemorations is Operation ‘Pocket ’93’, better known publicly as the military-police operation Medak […]

Do you know letters of self-compassion? We are not talking about goodbye letters of authors parting with their identities and personalities they inherited nor about notes about the end of social and political systems that authors blindly believed into. We are also not talking about fragmented pseudo dramas in which the ego and superego are substitutes for awareness and morality. […]

Philosopher Emil Cioran gives a special status to music in our being-in-the-world. He, with a masterful lucidity, affirms that “we carry in us all the music that we have not heard in our life, which lies in the bottom part of the abyss of memory. All that is musical in us is memory. When we had no name, we must […]

We must immerse ourselves in the atmospheric experience of architecture, where it seems that there is a door hidden that can open us a wider horizon of dealing with the past. Atmospheric architecture (Böhme)[i] immerses us in the sensory aspect of space and, if we invert this approach, we can immerse ourselves in the spatial sense of the past. Consequently, […]

A person’s birthplace plays an important role in identity formation. I personally do not consider Stolac only my home, but also the place in which I became aware of the importance of an active participation in social changes. From the earliest days, I felt the need to fight against injustice and engage for values that I consider to be the […]

There’s nothing more horrifying in the recent history of the Balkans than July 1995 and Srebrenica. No matter how you personally choose to define “horrifying,” “recent history,” and the terms “we” and “us.” Almost everyone active in politics and media in the Balkans, among the creators of public opinion, is deeply aware of this fact. Therefore, every abuse of this […]