The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 1)

The following chronicles a trip I took to a music festival in Serbia in the summer of 2006.


Part 1

We were waiting for the bus that would take us to Guca. It was pouring in Belgrade and had been for the last two days. Underneath the awning of a café in front of the St. Marko cathedral, we watched the rain and contemplated spending the next four days at an outdoor music festival cold, wet, and muddy. Not what any of us originally had in mind when I had first announced to my friends that I was going to the heartland of Serbia this summer to the tiny town of Guca to attend the world’s largest balkan brass band festival.

Instead, we had entertained visions of sweet rakija-drenched Dionysian revelry, of banquets turned riots, dinars plastered to our sweaty foreheads as trumpets blasted themselves righteously out of tune right into our ears. Of course, our visions were by and large direct plagiarisms of the images in Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), a film (and soundtrack) we had all been trying for years to internalize into our daily existence. As a result, we had too much riding on this experience to be foiled by inclement weather. We were expecting bliss, heartache, insanity, and apotheosis—a condensed version of Serbian history in four days of music—rain or shine.

There was a time in my life when I would have wished for a deluge to wipe out all my outdoor brass band obligations. In fact, the words ‘brass band’ still made me a little queasy. They dredged up unpleasant high school memories of the three years I spent dressed like a Prussian dragoon armed with a trombone, glide-stepping into artful maneuvers across a football field while blasting out large ensemble arrangements of “Earth, Wind, and Fire” songs. It was miserable degrading business and it, along with the long captive hours in my father’s car listening to his Sousa tapes, soured me on the whole genus of brass instrument music forever more, so I thought.

In the interim, I had discovered the world of gypsy brass band music from the Balkans. An ensemble of two or three flugelhorns, a pair of euphoniums, a tuba, a snare drum, and occasionally a trombone create a sound so explosive, it feels like a volcano has erupted in your heart and frenetic dancing is the only way to cool the molten lava coursing through your limbs. Plaintive, manic, melancholic, and exuberant all at once, this music rouses whatever passions lay dormant beneath your civilized crust.

I got my first taste of this music in “Underground,” which features a frenzied brass band on the soundtrack and literally running through the scenes of the film--chasing cars, floating on banquet boats, getting shot at (watch the opening scene here). Shortly thereafter, I got my hands on an album (“Live in Belgrade”) by Boban Markovic, the universally hailed king of gypsy brass-- or cocek, as they call it in the Balkans-- the same man, it turned out, whose band was running through “Underground”. For months, “Live in Belgrade” was the only CD in my car. I would play it at deafening volumes so that I could feel the tuba bass line pulsing through my butt cheeks. Eventually Boban had to be rotated out of the car, not because I grew sick of him, but because he made me drive like a maniac. I felt urges to steer the car into buildings or off bridges to match the climax of a song. I decided to limit my fits of Dionysian ecstasy to the dance floor.

The cult of the trumpet in central and southern Serbia dates back to the early nineteenth century, when the legacy of the Ottoman imperial military brass band (the oldest known brass band in history) was appropriated by Roma musicians who integrated the brass band into social life by performing at weddings, funerals, baptisms, banquets. The brass band continues to be a fixture of such rituals in Serbia today.

My initial plan to go to Serbia and just loiter around graveyards and churches in hopes of catching a genuine gypsy band soon gave way to an even better plan. A few laborious minutes of internet research introduced me to the brass band festival in Guca, where, every year at the end of August, this otherwise unassuming village in the valley of the central Serbian hills is flooded for five days with non-stop music and celebration.

The Dragacevski Sabor, The Assembly of Horn Players in the Dragacevo region of central Serbia, began as an underground subversive meeting of musicians in 1961. In the former Yugoslavia, Tito repressed folk art, music, and any cultural expressions that stirred regional or national sentiments in the multinational union of South Slavs. Now, with nothing to keep the lid on great spectacles of ethnic expression (including chauvinism), the festival in Guca has grown continually in popularity, attracting over 300,000 visitors last summer.

If I wanted to catch Guca before it became a de rigeur stop on the Balkan itinerary of all American travelers, I had to act fast.

Jesse and I left the others with the bags and went inside to have a coffee. In the time it took him to go to the counter and order two cappuccinos, he managed to have the waitress fall madly in love with him. As I learned over the course of the next week, this was a routine part of life for Jesse.

The waitress approached the table without the cappuccinos, but with her friend whom she had elected to do her bidding in English. “She want to take picture with you,” said the friend to Jesse. He politely obliged and put his arm around what had to be the homeliest girl in all of Serbia (a true rarity, considering Serbian women are generally gorgeous). She looked at the camera with her one non-lazy eye and her three-toothed grin and then ran away with a squeal of delight to fetch our drinks, which, according to her friend, she insisted on paying for, provided, of course, that Jesse would look her up when he returned to Belgrade. This romantic entanglement, in addition to saving us about sixty cents on coffee, also helped keep my mind off nagging fears about the arrival of the bus.

I had reserved seats on this bus through the festival’s official website, which offered transportation from Belgrade to Guca and back, as well as accommodation in Guca in a private home. This reservation had been a source of some anxiety for me, as the only way to reserve the ride and room was through a wire transfer of 200 euros to a Belgrade bank account belonging to a man named Vuk Brankovic. I was initially reluctant to send my money down the pipe to Serbia in hopes that two months later a guy in a van would simply roll up in front of a church in Belgrade and tell me to hop aboard. Was the private bus to brass band festival gimmick the Serbian version of the Nigerian millionaire scam? Somehow, I managed to swallow my skepticism and went ahead with the reservation.

Shortly thereafter I read in a book of Serbian history that Vuk Brankovic, the man who I had I just made several hundred euros richer, was the name of the most notorious arch-villain in Serbian history, a Kosovar Count who betrayed his fellow Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, helping to usher in a near half millennium of Ottoman domination. Granted, the Vuk Brankovic of 600 years later was not the same man, but why had his parents named him after the infamous betrayer of the Serbian nation? It would be like an American couple naming its son Benedict Arnold—actually, no one would really balk at a guy named Benedict Arnold, as most Americans, unlike Serbs, are either ignorant or indifferent to both their national history and history in general. Serbs, though their historical education is severely distorted by nationalist propaganda, remain avid students of their largely fictional past.

Upon this discovery, paranoid thoughts arose in my mind with renewed vigor. Had I just been betrayed by Vuk Brankovic, thereby unwittingly repeating the vicious cycle of Serbian history? Had the myths of the Balkan past ensared me, too? Was ‘Vuk Brankovic’ a rhetorical wink to fellow Serbians to warn them off this scam that was intended clearly for ignorant Americans, as revenge for our bombing of Belgrade in 1998? Or worse yet, if I was so stupid as to actually come to Serbia, would Vuk indeed show up in his van at the appointed time and place and then have his chetniks bound and gag me, abscond with me to a remote dungeon beneath Kalmegdan Fortress and then enjoin me to feast on my own entrails as they spilled from my freshly split gut?

Imagine my relief then, when amid a bustle of backpacked travelers, in walked Vuk Brankovic. He looked slightly unhinged as I had imagined, but in a benevolent way, maybe because he was wearing a Guca Festival tee-shirt that fit him like a night-shirt and gave him the appearance of a hairy toddler. As usual, my American media-poisoned nightmare fantasies proved illusory. Belgrade was a charming city, Serbians there were cosmopolitan and friendly, and Vuk Brankovic was not a fourteenth-century mountebank. My name was on his reservations clipboard marked paid and his grim torture van was just a shiny charter bus.

Vuk had a wild libertine twinkle in his eyes, accented by a red skin infection that had taken hold of his right eyelid, a scraggly blond beard, and yellow teeth that looked like they had been placed in his gums by someone with a tremulous hand. He swaggered over to our table and commanded us not to hurry. “Please, please. Bus will wait. What you must do is to relax and enjoy. Relax and enjoy, this is imperative!”

Not wanting to offend, I discretely spit my mouthful of coffee back into the cup, intent on relaxing and enjoying it at least three or four more times. Just as the coffee was beginning to taste more like me than it, my girlfriend Marissa came in and told us the bus was leaving. Jesse winked goodbye to his Belgrade sweetheart, we grabbed our bags, and ran out the door.

The bus was filled with mostly Germans and French, with a handful of Spaniards, Brits, and Americans. Any Serbians or people from the neighboring Balkan countries would either drive themselves to Guca or take the regular bus, which stopped in the nearby town of Cacak, just on the other side of the mountain from Guca. The ride, though rainy and winding, was pleasant enough. The most exciting aspect was the insane Serbian film shown on board. It was a vehicle for a leggy blond Serbian pop star who traveled with her thick-mustachioed band of buffoons through an endless cycle of comic embroilments and slow motion song-and-dance numbers. We speculated that the film had all the classic tropes of Serbian comedy—the guy who is repeatedly gang-raped by nymphs, the obese guy in the gym who puts weights down his pants, and the guy who hijacks buses. We couldn’t help but wonder whether bus hijacking was a common event in Serbia.

The rain subsided as we descended into the valley south of Cacak. Evening sunlight fell onto the plum tree-covered hills in the east. Soon, the faint gurgling of distant brass began to trickle through the open windows of the bus. We had arrived in Guca.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 2)

Part 2

Our group was an amalgamation of three distinct cells that had merged in Belgrade. There was Marissa and I, who had flown to Belgrade from Prague, after having spent the summer in Berlin. There we met my friends from New York, Aaron and Noam, and their friend Jesse who had spent the summer on a Rotary Club grant in Ismir, Turkey. They came by way of Bucharest, where they had picked up tales of gypsy cigarette-smuggling and extortion on the long train ride.

Aaron, Noam, and Jesse stayed in the home of a friend of a friend of a friend who happened to live in Guca, while Marissa and I lodged in a rented-out private home. The owner of the house, a pretty young Serbian woman named Jelena gave us the key, set down a decanter full of homemade rakija on the porch table (a plum brandy, also known as slivovic, that fuels the Slavic world), and bade us good night. Over the next four days, she would sneak back up to the house in the mornings to drop off breakfast (which ranged from delicious egg and potato tortes to rather hilarious and slightly grotesque hot-dog filled croissants) and refill the decanter.



After a few rounds of rakija with our new housemates, a middle-aged German couple from Stutgart and two British guys who came to Guca to make a documentary and do some field recordings for the BBC, we reunited with Aaron, Noam, and Jesse for dinner at the café run by their lodgers.

Right away at dinner we knew our time in Guca was going to be worth the trip. The beer came in 2 liter plastic bottles. The innkeepers were warm and doting, and eagerly recommended we try the pizza. Soon our table was covered with freshly baked ketchup and mayonnaise pizzas. In any other context, this most likely would have been revolting, but our 64 ounces of pivo washed it down wonderfully and when the innkeeper checked back to see if we liked her cooking, we expressed our satisfaction unequivocally and assured her we would bring her recipe back home.

As we feasted on our condiments, a roving band wandered up the street searching for patrons. We called them over. To announce yourself as a patron and signal that you want the music to continue, you slap a moistened dinar bill to your forehead. This activity is great fun on its own, not to mention the music it generates.

Immediately, our pleasant dinner turned into frenzy. Dancing erupted, horn bells blasted in faces, money was plastered onto foreheads, flagons of pivo were raised aloft, and passersby joined in the revelry (and no doubt ogled our pizzas). A trumpeter got down on his knees and started serenading Marissa’s ovaries. And when they didn’t obey the rhythm of his trumpet, he directed her hips with his hands. I tipped him an extra ketchup-stained dinar for his efforts.

From there, the night became one indistinct series of increasingly drunken table concerts at streetside cafes and in various tents. Long tables under giant white tents filled an entire town block. These tents are the heart of the festival and were often even wilder than the three main performance stages, as dozens of bands would roam from tent to tent playing for individual tables to the benefit of all. It was not uncommon to have up to three bands blasting away in one tent, creating a beautiful dissonance and ecstatic feeling of being blown apart.

At one of these tents, late into our first night, a table of giant stern-looking Serbs in double-breasted suits were paying for the music and looking rather indifferent to it all, when the leader of the group (of gangsters, we surmised) spotted Marissa on the dance floor and made an elaborate display of giving her a rose. Sure that in Serbian gangster culture that this act meant this man had just bought my girlfriend and demanded my rendering in a vat of acid, we slinked out of the tent scene, beating an erratic retreat in case we were followed.

We found refuge in makeshift outdoor club playing Euro dance music. Apparently this scene was produced by the Serbian MB beer, purveyors of fine two-liter lager, given that many of the women were dressed as scantily clad cowgirls bearing the MB brand across their chest. Many of the men were shirtless, beefy, moronic types. “Looks like your typical American frat party,” I said.
“Yeah, except for that”, said Noam directing us to the speaker in the corner where a bare-chested man with a woman on his shoulders in a military cap was waving a giant Serbian flag.

This wasn’t the first display of Serbian nationalism we had seen. In fact, the flag-waving would have seemed innocuous if we hadn’t already noticed at the souvenir stands, where, amid toy trumpets and guca paraphanalia, hung tee-shirts with heroic pictures of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the infamous Serb leaders who commanded the genocidal campaigns of the Bosnian War. Beneath their pictures were slogans in Serbian that said things like, “We will never surrender them,” referring to the UN warrant for their arrest for war crimes, including the infamous Srebrenica massacre (where more thousands of muslim men and boys were marched out of town, executed, and buried in a mass grave).

And throughout the weekend, it seemed more and more people were sporting the Serbian sajkaca, a v-shaped military cap that has come to be a symbol of national identity with an especially nationalist political bent, given its association with the nationalist Serbian paramilitary group, the Chetniks. The Chetniks were originally created in WWII to fight the Axis powers and later fought with the Nazis against Tito’s partisans, the Allies, and all non-Serbs who stood in the way of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia within the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Along with their vision of an ethnically cleansed utopia, the Chetniks were revived during the wars of the nineties, and now serve as an image of mobilizing nostalgia for Serbian nationalists.

This overt nationalist element, seen in a context in which it did not appear controversial but banal, even kitsch, lent an eerie air to what was ostensibly a peaceful, albeit boisterous, music festival—an ethnic music festival no less, supposedly centered around music made largely by Roma musicians.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 3)

Part 3

We awoke on the second day to a brass band right outside our bathroom window. This would be our wake-up call every morning around nine, as our street apparently had been designated as the rehearsal area for bands before they performed on stage. I learned that the first time you awake hungover in Serbia to the sounds of ‘Ederlezi’ (a traditional favorite), the experience is novel and wonderful. All times thereafter, it is no longer novel and exponentially less wonderful. But what never lost its appeal was stepping out on the porch in the warm morning sunlight and finding a freshly deposited plastic sack full of homemade cheese pies and washing them down with the inaugural shots of slivovic.

Homemade Serbian slivovic, the plum brandy I've also been calling rakija, is one of the great pleasures of life in Serbia and one that I have found difficult to replicate here in the States. After having tried commercially made slivovic in Serbia, Croatia, Czech Republic, and a Hungarian brand imported to the U.S. and found them all wanting, I learned that most Serbs get their slivovic homemade, either from the plum trees on their own land or from a friend or family members. The only danger in this: you, too, might take to greeting the morning with a few shots.

The second day of the festival took us farther afield culinary-wise. Ketchup and mayonnaise packets laid to rest, we made for endless grilled meat stands, where dozens of lambs and suckling pigs were being slow-roasted on spits. There a little illusion in this manner of cooking as one sees exactly what one is eating. And while seeing an animal corpse impaled on an iron spike from mouth to anus slowly turning over a fire may not aesthetically please or appetize some, I found the sight admittedly seductive, especially given the taste of the meat, which came as chunks on platters, cevapcici (little torpedoes of ground meat) in pita, and burger patties on buns. To adorn the flesh, each stand had a buffet of grilled peppers and onions, fresh tomatoes, tapenades, and sauces.

Noam, Marissa, and I became devoted patrons of these stands over the weekend. Aaron and Jesse had it tougher. Eating vegetarian in Guca, Serbia is no easy feat. Theoretically, given the presence of bread and the vegetable buffet, it should have been easy. But the trick was in communicating to the man behind the grill in hand gestures what one wanted, which was to him unthinkable. With impeccable pointing and loudly spoken English, Aaron and Jesse engaged in hilarious, occasionally successful, attempts to order a meat sandwich without the meat. Jesse, in his willingness to play the fool, was more persistent and often convinced the man to throw a pepper on the grill, albeit with a disgusted look on his face.

We passed the day in various diversions with dueling brass bands providing the score. At one edge of town was a carnival run by gypsies, where we spent a good hour riding bumper cars, careening into children while trying to keep our 64 ounce pivos intact. And then, strangely, after leaving the carnival, Aaron, Marissa, and I came across a mechanical bull in the middle of a field. The only people around were two supermodel cowgirls from MB whom we had seen the first night at the club.

“You want ride bull, please?” they asked in coquettishly broken English, after their pitch in Serbian earned them blank stares.

I generally leap at the opportunity to make a fool of myself, and Marissa is always up for an athletic challenge. Aaron might have declined under different circumstances, but beautiful women rouse a deep servility in him not otherwise apparent. He would have straddled an elderly man if they had suggested it.

Despite hailing from Kansas, where mechanical bull-riding is a required course in most school districts, I was no match for Marissa, who showed an alarming prowess. But she was nowhere as good as Aaron was bad. Somehow, as soon as Aaron climbed in the saddle, the empty field filled with gypsy urchins, who must have sensed the impending spectacle of a portly man on a mechanical bull. But rather than throw him from the saddle, the bull, once enlivened, instantly dumped Aaron off its back onto the ground, as though that was it had been invented for—like a dump truck unloading potatoes when the lever is pulled. The urchins cheered, Marissa and I took pictures, and, lo and behold, the Serbian cowgirls were charmed.

We recovered at a sidewalk café where a gypsy children’s band played. Even the bandleader was no more than ten years old, but he exuded the air of a lounge lizard from Havana circa 1950. His hair was slicked back and perfectly parted on the side. He wore a double-breasted white suit jacket with oversized shoulder pads, pleated and heavily tapered gray-check pants, and white leather loafers. And, the trumpet, which was nearly half his size, he played with a passion that seemed almost as ridiculously beyond his years as his dress.

That night was the headline concert of the festival—the Boban Markovic concert. Boban Markovic is in many ways responsible for bringing Balkan brass band music to the world. A gypsy from southern Serbia, he has become an international celebrity and continual presence on the world music festival circuit and anthology album releases. Boban Markovic is so good, he doesn’t even compete anymore. Whereas the other twenty bands that are invited to perform on the stage at Guca are all vying for the prizes of Best Orchestra, Best Concert, and the most coveted, Golden Trumpet, for single best musician, Boban Markovic and his Orkestar have long since won all these prizes. In fact, Boban is the only musician at Guca ever to have received five perfect 10s from the judges. Now having passed a significant share of his band-leading and soloing duties off to his son Marko Markovic, Boban is just along for the ride.

The 11-piece Boban Markovic Orkestar took the stage dressed in angelic white vests. Looking like Gabriel’s heavenly entourage, they proceeded to unleash the passions and furor of hell. To say that everyone danced like crazy is misleading. Dancing is not the right word to describe the complete surrender of control and joyous dissolution that Boban’s trumpets induced in thousands of rakija-drenched brains huddled together in a common pursuit. Convulsion strikes me as more apt, reminiscent of those medieval outbreaks of St. John’s and St. Vitus Dance, where a whole village would suddenly fall into a fit of uncontrollable dancing for days at a time. The only effective cure for the epidemic seems to have been music—which raises an interesting question. What if dancing came first, as a sort of pathological seizure, and music developed as a way to alleviate the sickness of dancing?

Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trying to convey the Dionysian rapture induced in the audience of Greek tragedy, an art form he saw as essentially musical, also furnished the analogy of physical intoxication. He wagered that the Dionysian experience of total self-dissolution arose “either through the influence of those narcotic potions of which all primitive races speak in their hymns, or through the powerful approach of spring, which penetrates with joy the whole frame of nature. So stirred, the individual forgets himself completely.”

But for Nietzsche, who allegedly (if we are to believe his Turinese landlady) liked to cut the rug privately in the nude, dancing to music was a sickness to be embraced, akin to religious experience:

"Man now expresses himself through song and dance as the member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk, how to speak, and is on the brink of taking wing as he dances. Each of his gestures betokens enchantment; through him sounds a supernatural power, the same power which makes the animals speak and the earth render up milk and honey. He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dream. No longer the artist, he has himself become a work of art."

And, indeed, by the end of the concert, the sweat streaming down our divine canvases, we saw before us the true aesthetic masterpiece of 21st-century cosmopolitanism, a hybrid even headier than Nietzsche’s fusion of the Apollonian and Dionysian— a French hippie sporting a chetnik hat and waving a giant Serbian flag.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 4)

Part 4

By Friday, the weekend masses had arrived. The streets were packed, lines for roast pork grew, and the stone trumpeter fountain in the main plaza, the central meeting place, was inundated in several inches of empty pivo bottles. Not only had more people arrived. A certain breed of more people had arrived— the universal spring break dudes. A transnational phenomenon, immediately recognizable by their penchant for shirtlessness, macho bravado, and all-around douche-baggery, the universal spring break dudes of Serbia added a small touch of chauvinist flare to this ensemble of traits: plastic whistles.

During the stage competitions that afternoon, whenever a gypsy band would take the stage, a chorus of piercing whistles would attempt to drown them out. Of course, it was a futile attempt, since drowning out a brass band with anything short of a mortar explosion is bound to fail. But the ill will was apparent, especially given the contrast of their behavior when a Serb (non-gypsy) band took the stage. Then, instead of whistles, wild cheering would break out and spontaneous circles would form to dance the kolo to the rather tedious and phlegmatic polka-like tune.

We fled this idiocy to a late lunch at a café, in a concerted effort to introduce something other than pork and lamb into our diet. The night before Marissa and I had lain in bed crapulent and with twisted guts, forswearing roast meat sandwiches forever more.This only partially worked, since we spoke no Serbian, the waiter spoke no English, and there was no menu. We ordered our meal by way of the handful of German words our waiter seemed to know and repeat. He took my words literally, and brought the very items we had discussed, unadulterated by any preparation: a bowl full of whole potatoes, a bowl full of whole tomatoes, a cucumber, a loaf of bread, and, thrown in for good measure, a platter of lamb parts.

On the way back from lunch we ran into a group of four gypsy children. The oldest, who looked about 15, was pushing a stroller with a toddler back and forth, while the other two, a boy and a girl of about 7, played with sticks. We were trying to get across a creek to reach a hill with a fine view of the town and had turned off the road to find a place to cross. We pointed to the hill and asked how we might get there. They seemed to understand perfectly and eagerly led us through the brush until we arrived at a giant trash mound next to a ruinous shack. It soon became clear that we were supposed to ascend this trash mound. Aaron and I helped the girl lift the stroller and we all proceeded to climb onto the garbage, the four of us with astonished looks as we watched the two younger kids scurry barefoot and gleeful through the piles of filthy paper, broken glass, and rusty machine carcasses.

This little behind the scenes stroll through human waste with our gypsy guides was the perfect counterpart to the official festival parade we watched that same day, with neat little squadrons of children outfitted in traditional Serbian folk costume—the girls in red patterned skirts and black aprons with red and white floral designs with flowers in their hair, the boys in black vests and breeches with red sashes, all wearing dainty wooden clogs that slope up into a point at the end, as though cobbled by elves. They marched along to the beat of the tuba and snare drum, enchanting onlookers with the image of a fabled Serbian past, a sartorial golden age compared to the tank tops and fanny packs that lined the curbside of the present.

We had been playing scrabble and drinking Turkish coffee under a café awning as the parade filed past when a cherubic Serb came to our table and gave Jesse a hug. As noted, strangers’ affection for Jesse was not unusual, but apparently the two had met earlier. The man’s name was Jelko, a Serb who, like us, was from the Bay Area. Jelko had earthy Germanic peasant features, with bright red cheeks and nose, and wispy blond hair that recalled a character from a Breughel scene. He was a bike messenger-cum-DJ in San Francisco, hosted a weekly Balkan music radio show, and returned to Serbia every summer to attend the Guca festival.

A charming conversationalist, despite being clearly drunk, Jelko was eager to tell us about Serbian culture and history. “You should go to Nis. It is a very good city. A lot of history. You know, Constantine of the Roman Empire was born in Nis.”

Jelko grew particularly excited when talking about the fall of Nis to the Turks at the end of the fourteenth century and the centuries-long battle against Turkish oppression that continued up through the nineteenth century. “The Turks, man, they were brutal. Absolutely brutal. They built a giant tower from heads of Serbs! Can you believe it?”

I remembered having read about the monument Jelko was talking about. After an unsuccessful Serbian uprising against the Ottoman Empire in Southern Serbia in 1809, the Turkish magistrate at Nis had a tower built out of the heads of the all the Serbian rebels to serve as a warning to all would be freedom fighters.

Jelko was somewhat less exuberant about his own history. He was struggling to get German citizenship, deterred by what he kept referring to as “some old trouble with the law.” “I got child support on my ass, you know. It’s a real bitch.”

But, when we returned to the topic of music, his eyes lit up again as he told us about his favorite brass bands. His excitement led us to a music stand where he instructed our purchases with a connoisseur’s authority.

I have since run into Jelko on occasion at Balkan brass shows in San Francisco. The first time, I saw him DJing and went up and shook his hand. At another show, I went into the bathroom and there was Jelko, joyfully peeing into the sink as he clinked beers with a man at the urinal. I forewent the shake that time.

That night in Guca, we cut the concert short. Aaron had developed a hearty case of the runs and the port-a-potties by the stage were guarded by burly gypsy men with feathered hats and thick mustaches who charged a handful of dinars per visit. These toilet guardians were turning a lucrative trade, and soon Aaron had used up all our coins. We retired to our porch, free toilet on hand, concert still audible, and resigned ourselves to the decanter of rakija.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 5)

Part 5

It was the day of the final competition and we had all had enough of Guca—the drinking, the brass bands, the crowds, the grilled pork. Everything that only a day ago we had touted as perfection now in the twilight of a three day binge appeared grotesque. Our spirit of mass revelry seemingly exhausted, we started to slip back into our natural more nebbish-y and misanthropic selves. Here, during the culmination of three days and over thirty bands vying for the Golden Trumpet prize (along with a year’s worth of wedding gigs throughout Serbia), Marissa, Noam, and Jesse lay in the grass reading. Aaron and I, having been driven to near blindness by rakija, contented ourselves with staring into the dark inside netting of our hats.

No one else in the stadium appeared to have spent themselves too soon. In fact, much to our dismay, everyone was drinking and dancing as though they had not been drinking and dancing to the same music for four days. The glee on their inebriated faces was authentic, as though they had not already heard the song “Ederlezy” fifty times that morning. Was our notable absence of energy raising suspicion? “Well”, said Noam, “at least we aren’t being harassed.”

At which point we were harassed. A red-faced Serb in a sajkaca and a 2 liter pivo in hand leaned over and yelled something accusingly at us. Alarmed, I turned to Marissa, Noam, and Jesse and, trying not to move my lips, told them to put their books away, certain that books, unless they were about trumpets, Serbian flags, or whistles, were not allowed in the stadium. The man’s eyes narrowed at our silence and he shouted at us again, spraying spittle on Marissa’s arm. This time his two companions, who looked infinitely more civil than him, turned toward us and one of them said in English, “He want to know where you come from.”

Now that we had an interpreter, our conversation took off. Well, sort of. Our interlocutor, whose name was Rasha Mikhailovic, was so drunk that he apparently spoke incoherently even in his native tongue; and our interpreter Victor, whose English was good, couldn’t translate half of what he said. When we told Rasha we were from America, he responded with initial excitement, since Americans are often still a novelty in Serbia. “Eh America!” And then an awkward pause. Followed by “Bill Clinton! You bomb us!”

It was strange hearing a European accusingly shout the name of a president other than George W. Bush. It was also difficult to decide how best to be an ambassador of a country that had recently bombed the nation whose hospitality we were enjoying. And indeed in Belgrade we had seen the still visible destruction of certain government buildings (as well as the Chinese embassy) from the 1999 NATO bombings during the Kosovo War. “Sorry about that,” we offered sheepishly.

Somehow, everyone laughed and Rasha went on inquiring further about our identities. He told me I looked German. “Schwabisch!” he yelled, poking his finger into my chest, using a colloquial term for German in Serbia, associated with the province of Schwabia in southwest Germany. “Nazi, nazi! Hitler!” he said pointing at me and laughing. Fortunately, Rasha was even more fascinated by Marissa’s physiognomy than mine. Her half-Thai features sparked a whole litany of Asian associations in his mind from Lucy Liu to Bruce Lee to Yao Ming. We concluded Serbians must not get a lot of exposure to Asian people if they thought a 5’4 half-Thai woman resembled Yao Ming. But he clearly like what he saw, as he kept trying to slip his wedding ring on to Marissa’s finger, much to my amusement, perhaps less so to his wife, sitting silently on the blanket beside him.

Rasha took a particular liking to Aaron and insisted on swapping watches with him. Aaron was happy to comply, considering he sported a cheap knock-off designer watch from the African street vendors in mid-town Manhattan. “Now we are brothers” Rasha said, passing round his warm 2-liter pivo to honor the occasion. Later that night, when Aaron took off Rasha’s watch, he noticed there was an inscription on the back. We later found out it read, “To Rasha. You are my brother. I will never forget you.”

But even more astounding was Rasha’s show of generosity toward Jesse. Throughout our drunken parley, he kept remarking on how handsome Jesse was and that he wanted him to take his daughter. We thought this was just a funny display of affection by a slightly unhinged drunk man until suddenly his daughter showed up, a cute blond girl in her twenties, along with her friend who looked like a runway model. Rasha informed his daughter that she was now betrothed to Jesse and insisted that they go dance the kolo together. She seemed unfazed, as though her father married her off to strangers wherever he went. She and her friend took Jesse and joined the circle dance.

While Rasha professed his eternal bond of brotherhood to Aaron and tried to convince him to become blood brothers, I spoke with Victor, Rasha’s brother-in-law. He was warm and intelligent, and seemed to regard Rasha with bemused resignation. “He is like this always. He likes to get drunk,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. Victor asked what I did in America. I told him I studied European history. He said he loved history, that he would have liked to study it, but went into computer business instead. I told him I thought Serbian history was fascinating and wanted to learn more. “Yes, but the history of Serbia is sad.” Victor told me I was lucky to live in America, that Serbia had bad leaders, no jobs, and was run entirely by private firms. I said that sounded a lot like America. “Tell me,” he said, lowering his and pausing to find the right words. “Were you afraid to come to Serbia?”

How could I explain to him my stupid paranoia about Vuk Brankovic and my nightmare fantasies of being swindled and kidnapped? But it wasn’t just me. Since the 1991-95 War, the nation of Serbia had been portrayed in the American media as precisely the arch-villain I had imagined. The stain of genocide and war crimes had marred Serbia’s international image seemingly irreparably, and as the aggressor state, they became more associated with the appalling violence that characterized the conduct of certain Croats, Bosnians, and Serbs alike, and victimized the majority of them alike. When I told people in the States I was going to Serbia, some of them looked at me like I was crazy. A few even recoiled in disgust, as though I had told them I was going to a Klan rally. One would think Americans, of all people in the twenty-first century, would be sensitive to the inadequacy and injustice of passing judgment on an entire nation and its people based on the conduct of its political leaders and military abroad.

Of course, that’s not to say Serbia does not have major problems with chauvinist nationalism, as the Karadzic and Mladic souvenirs attest, and that post-Tito Serbia, like most of the former Yugoslavia, still suffers from a culture of latency, from the wounds of the two World Wars that have not been given a chance to heal. But I was happy to be in Serbia. It was a safe and hospitable country and I felt reassured to find that there, as elsewhere, there reigns a heady mix of decency and idiocy, where the former must always strive to stem the ever rising tide of the latter. In short, I liked Victor and Serbia enough to lie to him.

The winning band, proud recipients of the Golden Trumpet, took the stage for a victory lap performance. We all got up and joined the giant circle in front of the stage for a final kolo. As we danced round and round, Rasha’s warm pivo sloshing in our bellies, our spirits returned. We spotted Jesse across the circle, surrounded by his new lady friends. Judging by his form fitting shorts, he was clearly enjoying himself. In these final moments of the festival, everyone had risen to the occasion.

That night back on the porch, we emptied our final decanter of rakija. The music had died out and a silence that had not been heard for four days now reigned. Holding our glasses aloft, we made a toast to Guca, the greatest music festival in the world, and vowed never to return.