Sarajevo Nadrealisti 1991 — the sketch that predicted Dayton by month
In 1991, Top Lista Nadrealista filmed a sketch about a wall dividing Sarajevo into east and west. The prop newspaper in the sketch was dated 12.11.1995. The Dayton Framework Agreement — which partitioned Bosnia — ran from 1 to 21 November 1995 and was signed on 14 December 1995. The wall in the sketch stood at the Catholic School Centre in Mejtraš. It was demolished in May 2019.
In the third and final season of Top Lista Nadrealista, filmed in 1991, months before the war, the Sarajevo sketch comedy team produced an episode that contained, among other sketches, one called “Sarajevski zid” (The Sarajevo Wall).
The sketch is, from today’s perspective, almost impossible to watch without the knowledge of what followed.
What the sketch shows
The sketch opens with a newspaper: a prop daily in the format the Nadrealisti had used since their PRIMUS radio days. The newspaper is dated 12.11.1995 (Handžar, 2020, p. 78).
The sketch then shows two cleaning crews from “Eastern Sarajevo” and “Western Sarajevo” meeting at a wall. The wall is at the Catholic School Centre in the Mejtraš neighbourhood of Sarajevo, a real wall, at a real location, that was demolished only in May 2019 (Handžar, 2020, p. 77).
The crews, led by characters called Rambo (Dado Džihan) from the western side and Hami (Ognjen Ostojić) from the eastern side, recognise each other as old friends. They invite each other for drinks. They cannot agree whether to go to “Triglav” on the western side or “Drina” on the eastern side. They start insulting each other. The cleaning crews join in, throwing rubbish over the wall. Police sirens are heard. Everyone runs.
At the end, Rambo is left alone on the wall. He looks around and says: “Run, run, exercise. Aah, look at the wall”, and begins sweeping from one side to the other (Handžar, 2020, p. 78).
The date
Play with the numbers. The newspaper in the sketch is dated 12.11.1995. Swap the day and month (as Handžar notes) and you get 21.11, which is November 1995. The Dayton Framework Agreement (the peace agreement that ended the Bosnian war and partitioned Bosnia and Herzegovina into the Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska) was negotiated between 1 and 21 November 1995 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. The agreement was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995 (Handžar, 2020, p. 78).
The sketch was filmed in 1991. The newspaper in the sketch carries a date that falls, when the digits are swapped, in the month and year of the agreement that would partition the country the sketch was made in.
Handžar calls the sketch “probably the most prophetic symbol of postwar Sarajevo” (Handžar, 2020, p. 78).
The wall
The wall itself (the one at the Catholic School Centre in Mejtraš) is worth knowing about. It stood for decades as a boundary wall between two properties. In the sketch, it served as a stand-in for the Berlin Wall, which had fallen two years earlier in November 1989. The Nadrealisti were making a Sarajevo version of the Berlin Wall joke: what if our city got a wall?
The joke landed differently after 1995. The Dayton Agreement drew the Inter-Entity Boundary Line through Sarajevo, the administrative border between the Federation of BiH and Republika Srpska that runs through Dobrinja and divides the city to this day. The “Sarajevo Wall” the Nadrealisti imagined as comedy became, in administrative terms, real.
The physical wall at Mejtraš was demolished in May 2019. The administrative boundary it accidentally predicted is still there.
What the cast said about it
Zenit Đozić, in his interview with Handžar, was direct about the sketches from the final season: “Honestly, we hoped it would never come to that. Our messages through the sketches were an attempt to stop something before a negative chain of events had begun” (Handžar, 2020, p. 115).
The thesis concludes that the Nadrealisti “in no way could have or wanted to predict the future; rather, in their sketches they expressed their darkest suspicions and fears — which, unfortunately, did come to pass” (Handžar, 2020, p. 106).
A 3-minute-39-second sketch from 1991, with a prop newspaper dated to 1995, at a wall that stood until 2019, in a city that is still divided.
Sources
- Erol Handžar, Top lista nadrealista kao medijski fenomen subkulturnog razvoja Sarajeva i njen utjecaj na recipijente (master thesis, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo, 2020), pp. 77-79, 106, 115.
- TopListaNadrealista (2011), Top lista nadrealista: Sarajevski zid — YouTube.
- Related on this site: Sarajevo Dobrinja — an invisible international border, Four Sarajevans invented Yugoslav absurdist TV comedy.
Sources & further reading
- Erol Handžar, 'Top lista nadrealista kao medijski fenomen subkulturnog razvoja Sarajeva i njen utjecaj na recipijente' (master thesis, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo, 2020), pp. 77-79
- TopListaNadrealista (2011), 'Top lista nadrealista: Sarajevski zid' — YouTube
- Related on this site: Sarajevo Dobrinja — an invisible international border
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