Life in the New: Mirjana Milenković

When Mirjana Milenković first moved to Novi Beograd, she felt like she didn’t belong. That was over 50 years ago.

“When I came to Belgrade, it was too big for me, you know? Everything was unfamiliar.” 

She offers wine and brings a coffee mug to her lips. The smell of homemade sarma, already eaten, lingers in the room. The fog embraces the rooftops in the gathering night outside, and the snow that fell in cascades the previous days has gradually turned into slush. In contrast to the world outside, Mirjana’s apartment is warm and welcoming.

“Now I’ve gotten used to Novi Beograd. I wouldn’t want to go anywhere else. I’m fine here”.

After finishing high school in her birthplace Mostar, Mirjana moved to Sarajevo and got her bachelor’s degree at the Faculty of Philosophy. By the time she completed her studies, she had married, given birth to a son, and divorced. Then she met her second husband, Predrag. Like her father, he was a pilot in the Yugoslav Air Force.

Predrag was a commander at the military airport. Seeing that Mirjana’s father died in a battle in the Second World War, she got invited to a commemoration for the fallen soldiers at the airport. She met Predrag, who flirtatiously asked if his mother had sent Mirjana in her place because of her beauty. Caught off guard and charmed by his bluntness, she replied that he could think something like that but not say it out loud. The sparks were flying, and there was something in those sparks.

“He left everything to his ex-wife, and I left everything to my ex-husband, and we started from scratch with only two aluminum spoons and forks.”

A job transfer had them move to Kraljevo in southwest Serbia, and in 1970, they relocated to Fontana in Novi Beograd. “I would walk down the streets of Novi Beograd and look around and see buildings. So many buildings, and in all those buildings were electric stoves, refrigerators, and so many people; I didn’t know anyone. I felt small and miserable”.

The population nearly doubled during Mirjana and Predrag’s first ten years in Novi Beograd. Despite having a population of about 150,000 people in the mid-seventies, the modernist blocks of Novi Beograd were sporadically spread across the spacious terrain and separated by large, unfinished, and unstructured landscapes, giving the city the impression of being incomplete.

“There wasn’t a single tree. There was water, and cars would barely pass through there,” Mirjana reminisces about Fontana. And describing her current location; “I have friends who lived here then, and they would fish in the swamps where my apartment is now.”

Thanks to Predrag’s rank as a colonel, they were assigned a bigger apartment by the government in 1983. They moved from Fontana to Blok 63. The area, constructed from 1973 through 1979, is commonly referred to as Bežanijski blokovi or Oficirski blokovi (the Officer’s Bloks) because of the vast proportion of military personnel and retired soldiers living there. By that time, Mirjana still hadn’t adjusted to the area.

“I didn’t know what I was doing here and where that staircase would lead,” she says, alluding to the apartment buildings resembling flights of stairs climbing toward the sky.

She gradually learned to make the map agree with the terrain. She discovered that everything familiar in other cities, such as Mostar and Kraljevo, translated to Novi Beograd; When the time for ajvar comes, everyone in the neighborhood is roasting peppers. When the time for pickling cabbage comes, everyone locates their glass jars. All the necessities of a regular city are within easy reach, such as post offices, schools, kindergartens, health centers, and stores, “big and small.”

“They used to call Novi Beograd a big sleeping room, but not anymore. People didn’t spend time here. They would only spend the night and then go to the other side to work and do other activities. Now people see it as a good place to live. Yes, we like it now. It’s our city”.

The General Plan of Belgrade from 1950 was the first post-war master plan of Belgrade. The country had just broken off ties with Stalin. In a revolutionary spirit, the government sought to distance Yugoslavia from the classical Eastern Bloc architecture and move forward with a vision of modernity and autonomous socialism. The plans were rational in form, striving to meet the standards of an egalitarian city.

The urban plan, heavily influenced by architect Le Corbusier’s functional city concepts as outlined in the Athens Charter, has maintained housing as a key expression of collective identity since the 1960s. Towards the mid-eighties, however, it slowly deteriorated. “It has been thirty years since my husband died. If he were to show up now, he wouldn’t know where he was because everything has been built up so much. It’s scary how much is being built in Novi Beograd. They find the smallest patch of land, a tiny field, and they erect a tall building on it,” Mirjana says. 

The 1985 urban plan for Novi Beograd deviated from the established form, placing new districts between existing residential areas. The tone-setting and elaborate planning merely became an echo of a bygone era as market forces later threw themselves at the development of Novi Beograd. Seemingly no stone was left unturned in search of vacant plots.

“Novi Beograd’s boulevards used to be so wide, and there wasn’t so much traffic. As a new building is built, new occupants arrive. One family no longer has just one car, but two, three, even, and everything is congested. There is nowhere to park, so those boulevards are not as wide as they used to be. I would forbid so much construction. It is a congested Novi Beograd now.”

She puts her cup down on the rococoesque table, matching the chairs, side tables, and the canapé. A painting of a military man hangs on the wall. It is a portrait of Predrag. Another portrait hangs on the adjacent wall, a large painting accompanied by photographs and smaller paintings. The centerpiece is a portrait of Mirjana. A younger version, with large, blue eyes, neck-length hair, lipstick, and a black dress, not far from Mirjana of today. It was Predrag who wanted them to have matching portraits hanging in the living room. Mirjana thought it odd but agreed to be portrayed anyway.

Her husband’s position in the army required him to be in perfect health. He couldn’t afford to risk a toothache when he was piloting, so he regularly went for checkups. When he was 63 years old, Mirjana lost him to a sudden aneurysm, and she was the one who found him in the elevator in their apartment building. She has lived alone as a widow for the last thirty years. 

“There is nothing worse in life than solitude,” she says, emphasizing that it was easier to live in solitude when she could still attend literature evenings and go to theater performances, concerts, and similar events. She gets most of her cultural input reading by herself in the apartment.

Solitude hasn’t stopped her from socializing. Every weekend, Predrag’s sister visits with her husband. Their tradition is to play the card game Preference (“You can tell a lot about a person based on how they play”) and eat Mirjana’s homemade potato pie. They’ve upheld this tradition every Saturday since Predrag passed away. She also maintains a sense of community with her neighbors.

“Every day at 11:00 AM, I drink coffee with two neighbors. One day it’s here, at my place. The next day, it’s at one of the other neighbors’, so we rotate. We always drink coffee and have a snack, a muffin, or something like that.”.

Prints from Life in the New

View the price list for prints from my ‘Life in the New’ book project here.