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Culture · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — Nele Karajlić decided the city from Čaršija to Marijin Dvor would be 'our cosmos'

Nenad Janković (Nele Karajlić) told Erol Handžar in 2020: 'What was important for the first Nadrealisti, and for Zabranjeno Pušenje and New Primitivism in general, was the decision that Sarajevo would be our entire cosmos. From Čaršija to Marijin Dvor, that's the whole world. We put Sarajevo at the centre of the world, and by going through the local we reached the universal.' A creative thesis that produced 81 episodes of satire, eleven albums, and a subcultural movement.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Every editorial project needs a thesis. The Nadrealisti’s was stated plainly by Nenad Janković (Nele Karajlić) in a 2020 interview with Erol Handžar:

“What was important for the first Nadrealisti, and for Zabranjeno Pušenje and New Primitivism in general, was the decision that Sarajevo would be our entire cosmos. From Čaršija to Marijin Dvor, that’s the whole world. We put Sarajevo at the centre of the world, and by going through the local we reached the universal.”

(Handžar, 2020, p. 103, interview with Nenad Janković)

That sentence is the creative thesis of the New Primitivism movement. It produced 81 TV episodes, eleven Zabranjeno Pušenje albums, three Elvis J. Kurtović albums, and a subcultural wave that shaped how an entire generation understood Sarajevo. The thesis was simple: if you describe what happens between Baščaršija and Marijin Dvor with enough precision, you describe what happens everywhere.

What the cosmos looked like

The Nadrealisti’s Sarajevo was a walking city. Their sketches were filmed in apartments, on streets, in cafés, at tram stops. The first season (1984) was almost entirely neighbourhood material:

  • Sejo i Seada, a recurring series about the forbidden love between a FK Sarajevo fan and a FK Željezničar fan, played across the football rivalries of two Sarajevan clubs whose grounds are twenty minutes apart.
  • Baščaršijski trougao, “the Baščaršija triangle,” a riff on the Bermuda Triangle but set in the bazaar, where personal belongings disappeared.
  • Hodajući Udarač, a reporter presenting Sarajevo tourist attractions, including one scene where a tourism agency representative tells him about “baptism in the waters of Vratnik” (Handžar, 2020, p. 59).
  • Dnevnik Mitrije Crnica, a news-parody hosted by Nenad Janković, delivering Sarajevo’s domestic and political news in the deadpan register the show would become famous for.

Janković described how, in one of the later episodes, the Nadrealisti directly addressed their audience: “Every city in Yugoslavia has its own Breka and its own Ciglane”, naming two Sarajevo neighbourhoods but meaning: the problems we are showing you here are yours too, wherever you are (Handžar, 2020, p. 59).

The language decision

The decision to use Sarajevan street language (sarajevski govor, the local dialect with its Turkish-origin vocabulary, its compressed slang, its belaj and raja and čaršija) was part of the cosmos thesis. Handžar notes that “the people of this movement were the first to bring street language into their music, and later into radio and TV sketches, introducing Sarajevan localisms — which was a great move toward communicating with their audience (at least the ‘locals’ from Sarajevo)” (Handžar, 2020, p. 54).

Boro Kontić, the editor who launched them, went further. He told Handžar in a separate interview that the language was itself a cultural act: “the quasi-elite was not exactly favourable to the Nadrealisti. The speech we used for them was a symbol of primitivism, which we also used and named ourselves New Primitives” (Handžar, 2020, p. 103).

The Nadrealisti’s creative choice, to speak in Sarajevo čaršija language on national television, made the city’s elite uncomfortable. It also made the show legible to anyone in Yugoslavia who had ever heard a Sarajevan speak. The local became the universal not despite the dialect but because of it.

Why the thesis worked

Janković told Handžar that the Nadrealisti were “the first generation that recognised propaganda in partisan films and military parades. Maybe generations before us also knew how to recognise it, but they had neither the space nor the courage to say anything about it” (Handžar, 2020, p. 102).

He added: “The radio broadcast of the parade was my favourite sketch — we mocked that propaganda in a way that felt like ours” (Handžar, 2020, p. 102).

The thesis — Sarajevo as cosmos — meant the show never needed to leave the city to find its material. Every Yugoslav problem had a Sarajevan version. Nationalism? The Nacional Detektor. Housing inequality? The architect sketch. The arms race? The private weapons shop sketch from Season 3. Yugoslavia’s relationship with the West? The Blue Helmets billiards sketch. In every case the setting was Sarajevo, the language was Sarajevan, and the reach was Yugoslav.

Nenad Janković also noted something more candid about why Sarajevo worked as a universe: “Nothing from Sarajevo was anything that was not Yugoslavia’s. It was a guarantee of quality. The market needs to expand, and politics, lacking better words, out of fear has called it an imprecise region” (Handžar, 2020, p. 103).

The cosmos ran from Čaršija to Marijin Dvor. It still does.

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