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”