Jasmina Tešanović: Carnival of Ruritania

Photos by Bruce Sterling

At dawn, I crossed the border between the bad
wild Serbs and the good little Croats in the center
of Europe. My Serbian passport was closely scanned
by Croatian police — especially the page with my
permanent US visa. The Serbian bus featured
American movies and apt professional smugglers hauling
big checkered plastic bags: "all purpose bags," they
call those.

Immediately after arrival I checked out the
bathrooms of modern Croatia: they were clean! They
had seats! The local pop music sounded sweet, like
Italian canzona. A Serbian bus station would
feature dirty squat toilets and a turbo folk version
of Bosnian rock.

The beautiful port city of Fiume/ Rijeka is
preparing for their yearly carnival, as in Venice. I
had my first taste of the sea in Rijeka, when it was
part of my own country and I was a Yugoslav red
princess. I had one of the best passports in the
world, a splendid passport free of Western-Eastern
cold wars, brick walls, and iron curtains, and for a
holiday jaunt in Rijeka I didn't need one at all.

In the 1970s no one in the world knew or cared what a
"Serbian" was — at a high-society party in Rome I
once claimed to be a "highly trained cosmonaut from
Serbia." Nobody doubted me. I might as well have come
from the Moon, or Ruritania.

(continued after the jump)

My late best friend lost her virginity in
Rijeka. Later, during the wars, she lost her family
house there, because she was a Serb.

Modern Rijeka is seething with wifi and bright
city lights, swarming with young hipsters kissing and
necking in the streets, as in any other western
European city. In Belgrade at this hour, their peers
are belly-dancing with three fingers up, saying: NO to
Europe.

The early-morning radio news in Croatia is
barking corny national rhetoric:

…."during the
barbarous Serbian aggression against glorious
Croatia…"

The next channel smoothly claims: we
Croats used to speak a half-German language, and we
gave the world the civilized custom of wearing a tie,
the 'cravat,' which originated in Croatia and
demonstrates our way of being civilized…

The wars are history. The tourist city of
Krk on the island Veglia is connected with a beautiful
bridge to the mainland. Nobody on Krk notices or
cares that I am Serbian, but my American friend is a
major attraction as he spews computers and gadgets all
over cafe tables and methodically samples the local
Croatian liqueurs.

In this Cravat politically-correct island,
the garbage is sorted ecologically. Wow, Croatia is
almost EU!

Meanwhile, in Serbia (which recently
joined NATO), a weird new national holiday combines
the army, the religion and the state in a single
public event, celebrated simultaneously by Orthodox
priests, military street parades and Serbo-NATO jet
bombers stunting overhead.

Belgrade's garbage is
publicly burned together with the plastic cans that
hold it, in huge torrents of stinking smog. Wow,
Serbia's almost USA!

This all used to be one big country, a
beautiful rambling region of seas, coasts, mountains,
lakes, rivers, diverse people of different
nationalities and religions, and the most expensive
stolen passport in the global black market.

Today
it's a dizzy jumble of tiny Ruritanias, inventing and
dis-inventing their borders and traditions.

Eurasia
is no longer at war with Eastasia, for it has always
been at war with Oceania…

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Jasmina Tešanović is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanović on BoingBoing:

– "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
– Faking Bombings
– Dispatch from Amsterdam
– Where are your Americans now?

– Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
– Slaughter in the Monastery

– Mermaid's Trail

– A Burial in Srebenica
– Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
– To Hague, to Hague