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.