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Culture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — the Nadrealisti invented a piece of wood that could stop all wars, and the nationalists ignored it

In the 1991 final season of Top Lista Nadrealista, Zenit Đozić's character found a piece of wood near Sarajevo and named it 'hepek.' When placed between two quarrelling people, it calmed them instantly. In 2020, Đozić told Erol Handžar what it was really about: 'It was a message for our politicians and nationalists of the time, which they unfortunately ignored, and which sadly most of the public also went along with. Hepek today still remains a symbol of the fight against evil.'

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

In the third and final season of Top Lista Nadrealista, filmed in 1991, the last full year before the war, a recurring sketch introduced a prop that would become one of the more memorable pieces of Sarajevan satirical vocabulary: the hepek.

What the hepek was

The idea came from Zenit Đozić, whose character found an interesting piece of wood at a location in the countryside near Sarajevo and immediately named it hepek (Handžar, 2020, p. 70).

The hepek had one property: it created instant peace. When placed between two quarrelling people, or between two factions in a dispute, it calmed them immediately. In Đozić’s character’s words, the hepek worked “when a person’s nervous system is agitated — when you stick it on them with a hepek, the situation calms down for a while” (Handžar, 2020, p. 70).

The sketches used the hepek in escalating situations. Two friends from a village called Čeljigovići, Juka (Nenad Janković) and his friend Junuz (Zenit Đozić), quarrel because Junuz’s cow, Bjelka, has wandered into Juka’s meadow. The inventor of the hepek intervenes, calms them, and then notes that a Swabian, a Czech, and a Russian have also come to look at this miraculous device, a clear allusion to the countries whose borders, and whose political systems, were at that moment in the process of dissolving across Eastern Europe (Handžar, 2020, p. 70).

Junuz says to Juka: “Are you sick?… What happened, what’s stuck?… Are you me and I you — we’re going to stick hepek on each other, we’ve been living here a thousand years” (Handžar, 2020, p. 70). The line reads differently after 1992.

What Đozić said it was

In a 2020 interview with Erol Handžar for his University of Sarajevo master thesis, Đozić was direct:

“Hepek was our message, or rather an attempt for people to come to their senses and to avoid the approaching catastrophe of chaos and war by using reason. An instrument that instantly creates peace. When reason no longer works, let’s give alternative science a chance. We saw that our society did not have enough strength or culture to resolve conflicts peacefully. It was a message for our politicians and nationalists of the time, which they unfortunately ignored, and which sadly most of the public also went along with.”

And then the closing sentence:

“As it once was, hepek today still remains a symbol of the fight against evil, and as such it will outlive those against whom it acted.”

(Handžar, 2020, p. 100, interview with Zenit Đozić)

The context

The hepek appeared in the final season, the one where the Nadrealisti had, by Handžar’s analysis, “matured” and were producing their sharpest political material (Handžar, 2020, p. 60). The third season dealt openly with rising nationalism, the multiparty elections, the splitting of Yugoslavia, and the approaching war. Some of the sketches from that season (the Sarajevo Wall, the Nacional Detektor, the Popušlić family war) are now studied as examples of satire that documented the fault-lines of a country in the process of tearing itself apart.

The hepek was the idealist’s answer. If the Nacional Detektor diagnosed the disease (nationalism is everywhere, in every nation, including in the membership cards of sworn communists), the hepek was the imaginary cure. A stick from the Sarajevo countryside that could do what politics could not.

It could not.

What happened to Đozić

Zenit Đozić stayed in Sarajevo through the siege. He told Handžar: “I don’t know to what extent we succeeded in what we wanted or could. I think the great blow to our creation was that a part of ourselves also succumbed to the negativity we spoke about in our sketches. But we left a deep mark on the cultural scene and changed many things. I think we succeeded in turning the sympathy of the public in Yugoslavia toward Bosnia and Herzegovina” (Handžar, 2020, p. 116).

He is still in Sarajevo. The hepek, as a word, has entered the local vocabulary.

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