Tim & Emily's Great Adventure: The war that happened "elsewhere" and meatfingers

Today will be a bit of a grab-bag of things seen and heard in Belgrade and especially regarding Serbian nationalism.

First of all, what the heck language does this country speak? Well, today it is known as Serbian though under Yugoslavia the language was generally referred to as Serbo-Croatian. Today, people talk of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, but they are all the same language, with some dialectal variation.

So if Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Montenegrins speak the same language, why do they use different names for it? They consider themselves different peoples. It's as if the US and Canada declared that we speak different languages. After all, I'm American, not Canadian, and so my country naturally can't have the same language as Canada. We must speak American; they must speak Canadian. Similarly, Serbs think that because they are Serbs, they speak Serbian. But this merely pushes the question to: If not language, what makes a Serb a Serb and not a Croat?

As our tour guide at the Nikola Tesla Museum put it (very clearly): "He was from what is today Croatia, but he was Orthodox, so he was a Serb." So, anyone who spoke this language of Serbo-Croatian/Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin/BCS/BCSM who was Orthodox was a Serb. If they were Catholic, then they were a Croat. And if they were Muslim, then they were Bosniak. (According to our host in Macedonia, Eric, Montenegrins are also Orthodox except that they consider themselves distinct from Serbs.)

Even what script to write this language of Serbian in is in flux. Croatian and Bosnian are pretty much always written in Latin letters (though Bosniaks have also written their language in Arabic script in the past). In the past, Serbian was written exclusively in Cyrillic, but according to our walking tour guide from today, it has been written more and more in Latin letters since early in the 20th century and before.

Today, Serbia finds itself with two native, common writing systems existing side by side. Cyrillic letters are used in formal, religious, and nationalist situations. We have seen plenty of Cyrillic in churches, museums, art galleries, banks, government buildings, and schools. In contrast, Latin letters are used more for things considered modern, high tech, informal, hip, and European. We've seen Latin letters on a lot of ads, storefronts, posters, graffiti, and menus.

Here's the Cyrillic sign of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences:

Here are a set of store signs all in Latin letters. Note that Latin letters do not always mean English!

Another place we've seen Serbian nationalism is in relation to the politics. All the events of the past few decades seem to have left this place pretty charged. On a lovely walking tour of Belgrade today, our tour guide voiced strong criticism of NATO's bombing of Serbia in 1999, claiming that NATO was punishing Serbia for a war happening "elsewhere." In fact, the issue was alleged war crimes committed by the Milosevic government in Belgrade against Kosovars in Kosovo - hardly an "elsewhere" issue!

This nationalist sign reads: "Serbs from Kosovo... remain in Serbia." The author wants the Serbian minority of Kosovo, if not all of Kosovo, to remain under Serbia. (Kosovo has been basically independent from Serbia since 2008 but Serbia doesn't recognize it.)

This first word at top is blood, not sure what the second one is, but it's pretty clearly against NATO because of the 1999 bombings:

And now some lighter news. Emily and I have been joking ever since we left the US that the international language is Engrish, and here is an obligatory menu shot proving the point. We had an excellent lunch of Sarajevo-style kebab and sujuk (sausage) today, and kebab was on the menu as...

Serbia (like our previous three stops) is full of street dogs and cats, some sweet, some not so much, some mangy, some well-fed, some painfully skinny. One very friendly guy lives in the courtyard of our hostel's building, and I found him on his favorite chair three times in one day. This third time he came down to say hi, showing me just how those little prints get there!