Yugoslavia is gone, renamed and redrawn, but its people live on within me | Olivia Sudjic
For a long time I didn’t know much about my father’s family history. Any details I had gleaned made it sound mercurial. Tempers flared the night before his grandfather’s wedding, for example, and two of the party were shot dead, but the nuptials still took place the next morning. I sensed it always moving, national identity was always shifting; the places they came from in Yugoslavia were constantly renamed and redrawn. I saw images on the news as a child and it seemed better to look away.
The first time I went there, we buried my grandfather Misa in Petrovac. It was 1997 and the Bosnian war had just ended. The supermarket shelves were thick with dust. A kind, elderly woman with no English, charged with looking after me while the adults arranged the funeral, made me spaghetti with a single streak of oil. I was befriended by a gang of children who’d learned English from films. I played with them beside the empty beach and on my last night one boy wrote me a love letter, making good use of a dictionary. It was delivered with a crystal from a glass chandelier, addressed “Dear Lydia”, begging me not to leave. “THIS IS YOUR HOME NOW,” he wrote in vaguely threatening bubble script.
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