More stories

• Spanish Today: Verbs in Action, Part II
• Agency fills supply gaps for seniors, disabled
• Memories, like the wrappings of my Lenox, of the way we were
• Rolle's opposite is Burress
• $hopGirl: Bargain bliss
• Age overcomes embarrassment
• Dr. María Félix-Ortiz: Reader says too little money spent addressing mental health needs
• Spanish Today: El presente de los verbos en –ER. Verbos en acción, primera parte
• Totally Texas: State's wineries offering holiday cheer selections
• Wine Matters: Less costly options compare to pricier wines

Save and share

RSS | EMAIL | PRINT | SAVE

Recommend 0

UCA, Serbia — We pull up next to a short line of Serbs selling parking permits just outside what's usually the quiet central Serbian village of Guca. The first thing I see is a man a few yards away. He's sitting on the curb, his arms crossed over his knees, his head buried in his arms, completely passed out.

"Welcome to Guca," says the parking attendant.

I park the car in a dusty field, already crammed with cars from all over Europe, and we immediately hear the music. A cacophony of dueling brass bands is coming from the village. Another few bands are playing somewhere near the river. More trumpet music is echoing off the large hill to the left — or is it coming from up there? As we make our way through town to find a place to sleep, we find thousands and thousands of people marauding in traditional World War I Serbian sajkaca hats, clutching 2-liter bottles of beer and taking in the smells of drink and pork sandwiches from the stalls lining the village streets.

This is what happens when 400,000 people descend on what's usually a sleepy village in southern Serbia for the annual Sabor Trubaca (roughly translated as "parliament of trumpets") — ostensibly a cultural festival, with brass bands from all over Serbia competing for the coveted Golden Trumpet award. Now simply known as Guca, since 1961 the festival has grown from a four-band competition to a three-day, all-day and all-night street party.

But among all of the brass bands, belly dancers and beer, Guca is a real symbol of Serbia's divisions. On one hand, it's what Guca organizer Adam Tadic calls "a new brand for Serbia" — some half a million people flocking here for the good time and the best traditional music played by the best Roma, or Gypsy, bands in the country. On the other hand, the undercurrent of defiant nationalism here is a reflection of how badly Serbia needs a new brand, mired as it currently is in intractable problems, including fugitives from the U.N. war crimes tribunal and the likelihood that the south Serbian heartland of Kosovo will gain independence by the end of the year.

The driving force behind the new-brand Serbia, Guca-style, is the music. Gypsy bands are a big part of Serbian tradition, made famous in movies such as "Time of the Gypsies" (1990), "Underground" (1995) and "Black Cat, White Cat" (1998), all directed by Emir Kusturica. The bands play weddings, christenings and parties, and can make a decent living, especially if they win the Golden Trumpet competition here — the winning band will be working all year. Velibor Stankovic and his 10-piece Thunderbolts orchestra, in smart matching black suits, are taking a smoke break after blasting the ears off patrons in a Guca café.

"Last year we won the Golden Trumpet, but this year, hmm, we'll see. We hope so. We practice and practice and practice to prepare, but there's huge competition among the bands," Stankovic says, handing me a full-color business card with a picture of him perched on an antique chair, one ankle set jauntily on the opposite knee. They can ask up to 1,000 euros per wedding, but Stankovic tells me, "For you, we'll make a deal."

At the small café where I talked to Stankovic, two bands descend on the three outdoor tables, blasting trumpets inches from the guests' faces, as the patrons shower them with colorful Serbian dinar notes. Nearby, in the main square, another 10-piece band is playing as hordes of drunken young men clamber onto the square's 15-foot statue of a man tooting a trumpet, waving their hands in the air in the thumb-and two-fingers Serbian salute. Another half-dozen bands are in a nearby restaurant tent, blatting around a table on which a belly dancer is gyrating, surrounded by men taking pictures with their cell phones. One of the grill operators is serving punjena pljeskavica, ground pork patties stuffed with cheese and spicy bacon. She tells me, "We'll have to sell 1,000 kilos of meat to make this pay." That's 2,200 pounds over three days, the equivalent of 8,800 quarter-pounders, in just one of the dozens of grill stands and restaurants here. And the tourists — as long as they're not vegetarian — love it. As a band in the main square breaks into the song "Erdelezi," from Kusturica's "Time of the Gypsies," two young blonde hippies are whipping their dreadlocks around and dancing wildly.

"I like parties, and especially Balkan Gypsy music. I don't know why, it just attracts me somehow," says Paavo Saavola from Finland. "This music is really original and touches my heart."

But to young urban Serbs, Guca is a hick throwback. Unlike young urban Americans, who might slap on a cowboy hat and head to a rodeo for a laugh, their Serbian counterparts wouldn't dream of donning a sajkaca and going to Guca, not even for the irony value.

"All of my friends said, 'Ew, what are you going to do there?'" says Nesa, 27, who's from the capital, Belgrade, and at Guca for the first time, covering it for his radio station. "I belong to the generation of people near their 30s. All my friends work in banks or in insurance, and it doesn't even cross their minds to come to a trumpet festival. I had a few prejudices about this, but now I see it's not all that terrible. I was really surprised to see the mix of the modern and traditional — for example you have stands of nongovernmental organizations promoting this or that pro-Western idea, and then next to them are stands with Ratko Mladic T-shirts."

Ratko Mladic, a former Bosnian Serb general, is wanted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal on genocide charges stemming from the 1992-1995 war in next-door Bosnia. He and his political counterpart, Radovan Karadzic, may have been fugitives for the past 11 years, but Mladic's broad face and Karadzic's bushy-eyebrowed visage are easy enough to see in Guca, peering as they do from black T-shirts on sale here that read, "Serbian heroes."

Such defiant nationalism has been a part of this region since even before the festival.

In World War II, troops loyal to the royal Yugoslav government-in-exile established their headquarters at nearby Ravna Gora in 1941. Called cetnici (Chetniks) after the Serbian word ceta (company), they fought against the Nazis in occupied Yugoslavia (the U.S. awarded Chetnik leader Draza Mihajlovic a Legion of Merit for saving the lives of 500 U.S. airmen), but also fought in the bloody civil war that engulfed Yugoslavia in the 1940s, ethnically cleansing villages and executing civilians.

Fifty years later, as Yugoslavia fell apart in four 1990s wars, Serbian paramilitary groups reclaimed the Chetniks, using the same skull-and-crossbones insignia and sporting the sajkacas and full beards associated with the WWII guerrillas.

Serbia is today still struggling with the legacy of the 1990s.

President-cum-dictator-cum-warmonger Slobodan Milosevic may have died in March while on trial on the U.N. tribunal, but his ghost still rattles his chains in the form of the still-ravaged economy and lingering sentiments that Serbia was the victim rather than the instigator of the Yugoslav wars. Hence the present government's foot-dragging over handing over war crimes fugitives.

The country also saw the last remaining republic that had stayed with Serbia in the 1990s — Montenegro — declare independence this year, and now faces the loss of the ethnic-Albanian dominated province of Kosovo.

Americans may not remember that the U.S. bombed Serbia over Kosovo in 1999, but everyone in Serbia sure does. Many Serbs still save their most colorful and vile Serbian curses for Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.

But the famed Serbian hospitality — another brand the Serbs haven't been able to cash in on for the past 15 years — extended to individual Americans is par excellence.

We stayed with two sisters who were also hosting their high school friends from all over the country. At one point eight people were sleeping on every available horizontal space in the 50-square-meter apartment. The girls, Olja and Jovana, gave us the best room in the apartment, made sure we were caffeinated every morning, and fed us gluttonous meals of grilled meat and svadbarski kupus, cabbage and meat slow-cooked in a large clay pot over a fire behind the apartment block. They regaled us with Guca legends and read our fortunes from the sludgy remains of our Turkish coffees.

"(Foreigners) have only have seen the war picture," says Aleksandar Beljan, from the town of Nis in southern Serbia. "I think they have to see people, their soul and how they look, how they talk, how they make fun — it's something special and they need to know us well, not just from some bad movies and bad news."

The foreigners who do come are having a ball. The next morning, I head to what's usually an enormous grassy lawn next to the village elementary school. It's a sea of tents and cars, pitched and parked everywhere as far as I can see through the trees. It's 10 a.m. The beer and rakija , or Serbian firewater, is already flowing for those who've managed to pull themselves to their makeshift campfires. It's rare to find someone without the tired red eyes that are the mark of overdoing it at Guca. Tomas, from the south of France, emerges from his hammock and makes his plans for the day. "I wake up, I don't know what time is it," he says. "OK, I'm hungry, so let's get a pljeskavica. Then after that, rakija, then beer, then woo! Let's dance, and it goes all the day and all the night."

Several campsites away, Greg Cohen-Freeman from Brooklyn, N.Y., is leaning against a French car. It's his first time at Guca, but he's known about the festival for years because he's a fan of New York's Zlatne Uste (Golden Lips) band.

"I love brass music," he says. "When my mother goes to sleep, when she wants to relax, she puts on the craziest brass music she can. I occasionally have moments (here) where I go, 'I may actually be getting to the point of being satisfied with the amount of brass music I've heard in the last x number of hours, and could almost use a break,' and that's amazing."

But Guca isn't just the music. It's the whole shebang — the smell of grilled meat and onions, the flowing beer, the sajkacas, the T-shirts. Like Serbia itself, you either love it or you hate it. As Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said at the festival, "If people can't love and understand Guca, they can't love and understand Serbia."

As we take off in my Yugo that afternoon to the strains of more bands dueling in the village, we're sharing the road with a car that's sprouting one young guy in a sajkaca from each of its three passenger windows. The trio is bellowing a song and hanging onto their case of beer balanced on the car roof, taking extra care not to lose the bottle of Jack Daniel's that's enthroned on top of the beer. The cops don't bat an eye. We wave at them through the rolled-up windows and drive out of the village.

San Antonio Express-News publish date Sept. 17, 2006