Photo by Claire Macdonald
A Serbian dad carrying the flame for old Yugoslavia.
The breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia hit Serbia a little hard. Slovenia made off with the money (fuckin’ bitch), Bosnia got most of the heavy industry, Croatia and Montenegro took the seaside, and Kosovo got something or other that Serbs seem to find important. And like your former friend who broke into his ex’s apartment after being dumped and carved up her mattress with a kitchen knife, Serbia didn’t exactly handle it well. Keep in mind this is a country where the term weekend warrior refers to men in the 90s who punched the clock on Friday afternoon then hopped on a paramilitary APC bound for the freefire rape markets of Bosnia. They also started hitting the bottle.
I’ve been in Belgrade for less than a week. Already my skin’s turned a pale, cheese-ly shade of yellow, my gut’s grown an inch of diameter, and last night I pushed the back of my teeth with my tongue and one of them went creeeeeeeeeak forward. It is the unhealthiest I have felt in my entire life, and I’m just barely keeping up with the locals.
Serbia’s only 25th in Europe in terms of per capita alcohol consumption, but according to local researchers almost half the country drinks daily and one-sixth of the population are alcoholics (and this is by Serbian standards).
You don’t see the kind of hilarious fall-down drunks here that Poland and Russia provide for the internet, just men who’ve been slowly basting themselves in brandy for the past 15 years. Which is actually worse. I’d rather watch old guys laugh and slip in each other’s barf than hang out in a nightclub while men with faces a decade older than their bodies sit and sullenly do shots until seven in the morning.
“There’s two different kinds of martyr complexes you have to understand here,” our translator Iva Prolic told me while we looked at the uncleared ruins of the Serbian army headquarters blown apart in the NATO bombing 12 years ago. “Bosnians are into sorrow, like emotional sadness, whereas Serbs really relish the idea of being hurt and showing off their wounds.”
Serbia’s history has provided them plenty to be sore about, but the past two decades have been real pay dirt. Our working days here start around 10. Which means our drinking days start around 11 (per interview subjects’ request). Which means scabs are fully peeled by noon and we’re being buttonholed about how America forced the breakup of Yugoslavia to suppress Serbian workers’ rights and how the ’92-’95 Bosnian war was a proxy conflict between American and French intelligence services and how the NATO bombing was designed to make Serbia dependent on Western corporate interests. All of which sounds like classic paranoid drunk talk until you consider that most of the left-leaning journalists we’ve met are being paid by the National Endowment for Democracy (CIA) and our fixer won’t shut up about the apple pie he was once baked by his friend from the “Company” (also CIA).
Anyway, it’s fun to blame the country’s booze blues on international politics, but demographics is the real thinking man’s game, and right now Serbia’s shooting bricks. The birth rate has been plummeting since the 60s, and the death rate is a taint hair behind Russia’s. Worst of all, they’re low on ladies.
Belgrade’s ratio of guys to girls is comparable to a college bar with a bad door policy, but once you get out in the sticks it’s a full-on sausage party. The problem in most towns is that while all kids want to get the fuck out, only the girls are able to navigate Serbia’s horrendous economy (20 percent unemployment as of April) and make it to the cities, while the dudes are left watering the cows. I visited a farming village in southern Serbia (the historical seedbed of rabid Serbian nationalism and not the kind of place you want to drive a car with Albanian plates) where the shortage of unwed women is so dire there are charities who pay Albanian women 500 euros to drive up and marry one of the locals. It’s basically animal husbandry for people.
To get more depressed by Serbia watch The VICE Guide to the Balkans, starting in August on VBS.TV.