The Bazaar was full of people. You had funny people here, who knew how to have fun and prank and talk. Today, I fear this, in the past two years, it has entered my mind that our children will forget how to speak. Always on their phones. If you leave them for 24 hours, you know they will forget how to speak.

People knew how to speak and invent stories. As a child, I remember when I went to buy cigarettes and later, when I grew older, we started going out. Then around ‘86, ‘87 when the cafés opened, I was a young man. Then in ‘88, ‘89, that was, what do I know, no one can describe it. It was beautiful, we had friends. We were friends with Albanians, we played football. Even today we socialize. 

Only men went to cafés? What about women?

Yeah, yeah, women too started going out. So in ‘88, ‘89, women started going out. It is there where we met, where we married, in the cafés.

We had that day we called Rifana. On the evening of that holiday, St. George’s, people gathered with friends at home. But also at Glama. They set up a tent, and there they start a fire, cook lamb, sheep whatever they want. There are drinks, singing. But you could also go and steal something, though that never became a habit to take something from someone. But food that people prepared, whoever could steal and eat it, and the deed was done. That was a tradition, a trick, you know to have a story to tell. But it was really… 

You did that every year?

Every year. The whole night we sang until morning, some would stay at home. Then we tied the swings to the roof, now we have gutters, so you cannot. But then you could tie it on roof beams, you placed a pillow and swung the entire night.

I remember the end of the ‘60s when the Cultural Center was built. We got a screening room and then that was, the idea was that now we can go and watch Dean Martin and some cowboy movies and the like. Then it got easier and it was sweeter. Every Sunday, we would gather at the Center. There was folk dance, dance, live music. Of course, we created and financed that music, and so on.

I remember the time when we did not have enough money to buy more guitars, drums, more instruments that would help and improve the quality of those dances. Then, so to say, we nagged these people in the neighborhood, demanding them to invest a bit in the youth. ‘Invest, we need more money for this and that.’ So whenever there were those moments, we would collect the money and I recall that is how we founded the brass orchestra.”

We played local slow romance songs, beautiful city songs. But also, Tom Jones’s music was present, also the Beatles. So, we played both. Unfortunately, very little… we didn’t know, or I don’t know why, but folk music was played less, we were more interested in the music that was modern at the time. Songs of, for example, Miša Kovač, Jevremović, also our old Prizren songs, and so on.

I’ll tell you this story from that time. Truck after truck went by, there, somewhere there near a strong community of Croatians who decided to stay. About two hundred meters from here all the way to the post office, they had been lined up and loaded into those trucks. It was a mass migration, it’s hard to forget for those from Janjevo. So now, an old lady comes for a check-up but has no real problems.

And I say to her, ‘Grandma, what are you complaining about, what hurts?’ She says, ‘The trucks hurt.’ I say, ‘They hurt all of us.’ So there was this diagnosis also, ‘The trucks hurt.’ What really hurt was that you’d be just sitting with them in the evening, having a drink and hanging out, and the next day they’d be gone because decisions were almost made overnight. First, they’d say, ‘We’re not going, we don’t need to.’ And then something happens overnight, probably a neighbor goes, then another. Then they say, ‘Why would I stay, I’ll go too.’ And so…