Meet the conservator who was awarded the Order of Saint Sava, second class, “for his wholehearted assistance in restoring the ancient religious and cultural heritage of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Dalmatia”

The Serbian acting great, who has played the most important figures of Serbian history and literature in his 40-year career, talks to P-portal about what draws him to the greats of national culture and history, many of whom are Serbs from Croatia

We need to become aware that our language and its practical, everyday use are influenced more by Google than by the Serbian or Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the most important universities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia or Serbia. I wish our regional literatures saw this topic as more socially relevant than many that seem socially conscious but have, in fact, become boring to algorithms and people, says Uroš Krčadinac

Modern man is constantly angry, he is unable to be harmless, he just babbles and rants. In addition to the ubiquitous fear of death or the latent fear of loneliness, it seems to me that he is most afraid of the possibility of appearing ridiculous. And being ridiculous can sometimes be healing.

The keeper of traditional songs and singer that performs at the most prestigious international festivals

Every eighth or ninth person you meet on the street in Serbia did not live there before 1991, says Vladimir Cucić, the Commissioner for Refugees and Migration of the Republic of Serbia, for P-portal

In the evil times of war, when people lose their material possessions, they don’t lose that which they carry inside, and that is memories and knowledge. If the houses were taken away, song was not. People sing the songs of their home wherever life takes them

In the past and today, individuals have been that important link in cultural diplomacy. Scientists, artists and writers communicate in a specific way and have been, consciously or not, actors of cultural diplomacy. I will mention Nikola Tesla and Milutin Milanković, whose “stars” still have their brilliance, perhaps even more important for questions of identity, culture and politics today than in the past.

“Politics in our Balkan backwaters is a flaccid endlessness without escape, and the patterns keep repeating. That creates problems and errors in the imagination of us writers, for I cannot possibly invent characters like those that appear as the leaders of our nonexistent countries”

The greatest music editor in the history of Yugoslav discography talks to P-portal: The power, the multiple layers of Odbrana i poslednji dani and the aura and epithet of “the best album,” conferred by critics and, finally, the audiences, were only realized with time and the patina it brings